My boss assumes all atheletics winners are cheats

[nuffsaid]

Kind of agree with him tbh. It's a bit like the tour de France.

I have very little interest in people running in a line or people cycling. It doesn't appeal to me in the slightest, so I don't waste my breath arguing about it.

In short, I think athletics is shit.

So do the commentators, who have recently been going craazee over Bolt, think this in the back of their heads as well (that there's a lot of drug cheating going on we'll never know about), do you think, and are just getting in a tiz just for entertainment sake. They must know that a lot of people think like this.

This seems very sad to me. Although I was never very into Atheletics I did quite like the thrill of the 100m when I was a kid, but now this seems hollow.

It feels like when I realised Santa wasn't real....

(Sorry if that's burst anyone's bubble).

 

[internetstalker]

Another example of drug cheating that never got found out is the east germans in the 80's

there was a tv program about one of their shot putters who is now a man coz of all the hormones she took while an athlete.

another one is Marita Koch her 400m record still stands 23 years after it was set, no one gets close to it even now

 

[Relahni]

So do the commentators, who have recently been going craazee over Bolt, think this in the back of their heads as well (that there's a lot of drug cheating going on we'll never know about), do you think, and are just getting in a tiz just for entertainment sake. They must know that a lot of people think like this.

This seems very sad to me. Although I was never very into Atheletics I did quite like the thrill of the 100m when I was a kid, but now this seems hollow.

It feels like when I realised Santa wasn't real....

(Sorry if that's burst anyone's bubble).

What goes on in the mind of Steve Cram? Not much I suspect, but I really don't care. They love athletics and see Bolt as a good thing for the sport. He is, but the sport is more or less dead. The World Championship and the stadium is not even quarter full! Do they think he's a drug cheat? Definately not. It's a bit like a Michael Jackson fan accepting he's a nonce.

 

[Silva]

Doping will only take one so far before their own technical limitations come into play, particularly on the field. People like Bubka, Sedykh, Zelezny or Sotomayor might even have been doped to hell, but at their peak, their technique was flawless.

You can say the same of Bolt. He's technically so much different from any other previous runners that rule him out as a dope just because of his results is nonsense. Looking at his stride, you can see that he takes one less step at every seven or so than all others. Combine that with great muscle power and agility, and you have a quite novel approach to sprint event athletes. I wouldn't be surprised if US colleges are now drafting taller athletes in order to train them as sprinters, attempting to replace the paradigm of the shorter man who runs like a traction engine with the taller athlete that runs like a Ferrari.

If they can lure them away from the megabucks in the NBA or the NFL, that is.

 

[internetstalker]

Doping will only take one so far before their own technical limitations come into play, particularly on the field. People like Bubka, Sedykh, Zelezny or Sotomayor might even have been doped to hell, but at their peak, their technique was flawless.

You can say the same of Bolt. He's technically so much different from any other previous runners that rule him out as a dope just because of his results is nonsense. Looking at his stride, you can see that he takes one less step at every seven or so than all others. Combine that with great muscle power and agility, and you have a quite novel approach to sprint event athletes. I wouldn't be surprised if US colleges are now drafting taller athletes in order to train them as sprinters, attempting to replace the paradigm of the shorter man who runs like a traction engine with the taller athlete that runs like a Ferrari.

If they can lure them away from the megabucks in the NBA or the NFL, that is.

Thats what i think

 

[Nigel Irritable]

I make no comment about Bolt or about any other individual athlete who hasn't been caught committing a doping offense.

However, athletics, like every other sport where power, speed, endurance or recovery time matters and where there are significant rewards for winning is riddled with performance enhancing drugs. The chief difference between major sports is the amount of effort they put into catching their cheats and on that score it's noticeable that the really big money team sports put in practically no effort at all. The main thing sports administrators learned from cycling is that actually catching a large portion of your cheats is very bad for business.

The dopers are well ahead of the doping testers across sport unfortunately.

 

[Sigmund Fraud]

He cites the example of Marion Chambers of whom it was never able to be proven had a banned substance in her blood, but forensic analysis of her accounting showed she sent money to a company that made a sport enhancing drug Erythropoietin, for which there was no known test for until an insider exposed it.

There has been a test for Erythropoitin (EPO) since the early 90s. The difficulty with this drug is that its undetectable after 3 days but its effects peak after 15 - big window for the out of season testers to miss. You can also use it to train like a bastard and endure thresholds of exertion that couldn't normally be tolerated and then stop and compete 'cleanly' a month later with a body thats better prepared than humanly possible.

People who think athletics and cycling are the worst offending druggie sports are naive fools - they're just the most rigourously tested. Football is in the dark ages for dope testing, Gordon Taylor was sticking up for players not having out of competition testing as he deemed it an infringement of human rights! Fucking Hilarious. FIFA are always the last to sign up to WADA standards and theres just too much money involved in football for there not to be drugs involved.

 

[baldrick]

all sports where endurance/recovery is an issue will have problems with drugs - i.e. 90% of them.

athletics and cycling are the ones where they bother to try and catch them.

 

[Nigel Irritable]

all sports where endurance/recovery is an issue will have problems with drugs - i.e. 90% of them.

athletics and cycling are the ones where they bother to try and catch them.

Yep.

If you brought cycling's testing regime into a sport like football, American football or rugby without giving the teams and players adequate warning the results would be complete and total carnage. Players at every level of the sport and probably entire team doping programmes would be uncovered. That's whey there is absolutely no chance of big money team sports doing any such thing.

The cycling testers still don't catch most of their cheats, mind you, but their cheats do actually have to put a lot of thought and effort into not getting caught. And they do run a real risk of being caught. You'd have to be fabulously unlucky or fabulously stupid to be caught in most sports.