What's happening now is a competition in taking the most drugs while avoiding getting caught. The possibility of getting caught limits what you can do. Isn't the idea here to remove this limitation, to open up for experimenting with more things? This is certainly a good way to find out how to manipulate human bodies with drugs, but it does seem to be at the (cynical) expense of the guinea pigs.
From the athletes perspective the "drugs" aspect is totally incidental. There are plenty of sports where people and up pushing there bodies to extreme and dangerous limits without drugs. The athletes always have to end up finding a balance in risk, and the need to find this balance wouldn't be abandoned with the introduction of a "drugs OK" domain, as far as I can tell.
What I'm saying is that the possibility of getting caught is very remote to what you can already do nowadays. There's much more effort and investment done at improving the drugs and hiding them than efforts to detect and prevent the abuses. And the subjects are willingly taking drugs anyway, so we are all just being a bunch of hypocrites when we celebrate "clean" sports because everyone involved know that 99% of athletes are taking drugs heavily.
It's like pro wrestling: it's all fake, but everyone pretends otherwise.
Having some rules and regulations doesn't mean no one dopes, but it does curb how much goes on, which likely is beneficial to everyone's health: not even the dopers can take all they would were there no rules.
Look at Pride Fighting Championships(basically japanese UFC) which was around for 10 years without any doping tests. Where were all the problems we're supposed to be afraid of? Or hell, look at pro wrestling. The fear mongering over PEDs is absurd.
Like anything in life, there are some bad apples, some honest people, and some in the middle. The rules help keep the honest people honest and give them a fighting chance.
So yeah, to some degree what they are saying is BS, which is kind of what you'd expect from cheaters.
At some periods in time in some sports, it's probably less BS, because many of them were doing it.
It's a long and complex discussion, without, clearly, much chance of getting accurate data.
But there are guys out there competing clean.
There's a non negligible chance they are telling the truth, too. What's the point of saying that everyone does it instead of continuing to pretend the said sport is clean? This is rather a behavior indicating they realized something was wrong.
And I'm not really convinced that, in cycling, for example, it's realistic to have cyclists run through hundreds of kilometers of mountains day after day and still being as fresh as ever. But hey, believe what you want.
> And I'm not really convinced that, in cycling, for example, it's realistic to have cyclists run through hundreds of kilometers of mountains day after day and still being as fresh as ever. But hey, believe what you want.
Ah, "it's tough, so it can't be true!". Those guys are the best at the world at what they do, and the ones they show on TV, are of course in the lead, so by default the ones in good shape. If you go see a bicycle race in person, you also get to see the ones lagging behind, some of whom are suffering a great deal. Truth be told, so are the ones in the lead, they're just going faster.
It's really hard to know exactly what's going on, but my whole point is that there are at least a few guys who compete clean. Saying they are all doping is extremely demeaning to those who do compete clean.
It's like the speed limit. Just about everyone goes 10 - 15 mph over the posted limit as a matter of course. One reason some people don't go faster is the threat of getting caught, and the resulting consequences. (And one reason some others don't go faster is they don't feel safe at faster speeds.) But if we removed the posted speed limits, it's likely people would go even faster.
And for the record, I don't think the possibility of getting caught is remote. In professional MMA, fighters are getting caught every month.