That boiled my blood as well. I couldn’t care less about the lying and cheating, but that made me despise the guy.
You never saw Rickey. Rickey was the GOAT.
I don’t believe Armstrong was accused of taking steroids; the suspicion was something like EPO (Procrit) or blood-doping. The latter involves transfusions of your own blood that had been taken after high altitude training, and this is exactly what the tests can’t detect. (Blood-doping is now a general term for any blood enhancement.)
Blood-doping via transfusions has been around at least since before the early 1970’s and many suspect that this form is what the Eastern European countries used before anabolic steroids were developed. I suspect Lasse Virren’s distance records were most likely due to this type of enhancements. However, a cheater is still a cheater no matter how he/she does it.
And BB is such an a-hole. (He’s got miles on Armstrong on the a-hole factor and being rude to sportswriters who question his physical transformation over ONE off-season.)
Note to Jason: Yeah, I wouldn’t hold your breath on the whole hall of fame thing. I predict the sportswriters will have a long memory. he went from being a singles and doubles hitter to becoming a HR hitter over ONE off-season, so I’d say whatever he took, it was definitely performance enhancing.
The reason steroids are frowned upon more than a healthy diet or ginseng supplements or LSD is that unlike them, anabolic steroids have negative side effects on one’s physical health. A sport demanding that participants lift weights or eat a lot of protein or abstain from smoking in order to be professionally competitive isn’t doing anything bad to the athletes who subject themselves to those practices, but if the unofficial reality of the sport demands that they take something likely to give them shrunken testicles and roid rage, well, that’s not a dilemma it’s ethical to throw anyone on the horns of.
Sure, there’s boxing and MMA and football, where participants are almost guaranteed serious injury, but that’s pretty much an inherent aspect of those sports that everyone risks more or less equally simply by taking part in the first place.
I’m not making the case that a healthy diet or ginseng should be considered cheating… or even frowned upon.
I don’t disagree that looking out for the athletes well-being is an important concern in the regulation of PEDs (especially in contact sports) but surely the central goal is to eliminate cheating.
All other concerns, physical, mental, financial… statistical, grow out from the imbalance in the field of play caused by PEDs.
Also, I’m not so sure you can separate the mental/skill-based achievements of a cheater from the physical components of their accomplishments. It’s not a fair method of conducting an assessment of their contribution to the sport.
Who knows how much that extra confidence in their physical capabilities contributed to their mental state? Maybe Barry Bonds would have lost confidence in his home-run-hitting ability as his physical prowess waned. Just having to actually deal with the physical degradation that comes with playing a sport and more importantly, having to deal with the physical degradation of ageing might have seriously impacted his mental game. We’ll never know how how much of his greatness came from him and how much came out of a test tube.
Whilst I agree that the physical health and well being of the athletes is of great importance, it’s the cheating itself which is the central cause of damage to ‘the game’ and all of its components, including the athletes.
Of course, the question of how much different forms of imbalance effect the fairness of a sport isn’t in question. The physical imbalance is most central. However I do think that consideration of cheating in the mental realm isn’t such a wild, speculative concern.
For sure a designer drug which gave the user significantly increased mental qualities like memory recall or speed of thought would be regulated out of sports.
Hope such thing would be easy to obtain, inexpensive, and optionally (to make the market bigger) difficult to detect,
Because I, for one, would love some for myself.
Try ye some psychedelics. DMT is endogenous son!
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PEDs are only “cheating” because they’re against the sanctioning bodies’ regulations, and they’re only against regulations because they’re unhealthy and dangerous. I don’t think any otherwise legal and harmless brain-enhancer would be banned.
(If it’s just the act of cheating itself that’s so upsetting, then Gaylord Perry ought to have an asterisk too, along with anyone else who ever threw a spitball or hid an emery board. But that kind of in-game cheating seems to be considered “acceptable if you can get away with it,” it’s just part of the lore or something.)
Amongst other more modern PEDs, TRT is unhealthy and dangerous? The people I’ve seen using it look and move 10 years younger.
I have little doubt that ‘appropriately healthy’ programs of drugs could be determined and regulated for but Performance Enhancing Drugs are outright banned when discovered.
PEDs are for sure not ‘only’ banned because of their negative health effects. They’re banned because they unfairly enhance physical performance.
You are correct. There never was a “clean” time in baseball. It was either cheating & game-fixing scandals in the early 1900’s, racial non integration skewing the game, then drugs and steroids, and now, I dare say: stats. The game has been money balled down to the nub with the war of numbers. I hate numbers, all this scoring crap. I mean, just get out there and play ball, guys. Wait. Guys? They don’t allow women to play yet? WTH?
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The Tour is pretty much the only annual sporting event that I watch every year. It’s annoying though, some of the more exciting parts like a breakaway on the mountains will always be suspect, and for good reason. I think 2007 has to be the point when I stopped believing that we were going to see clean riders after the bad years. (It was unfair to ban Rasmussen! He missed a few tests, but he repeatedly tested negative and surely he could have been clean? (No, apparently not). What about Contador? Probably not) In spite of myself though, I really want riders like Wiggins and Froome to be clean and have just had to resign myself to the disappointments when they come. In theory, the fact that big names are getting banned while they are dominating is a good sign, but it takes a lot of the excitement out when you aren’t sure if a particular performance means anything.
Oh, come on. Give me a break. Hitting a home run is a combination of hand/eye coordination, timing and power. He helped himself on the power part. And you use the word “absolutely” far too much, by the way.
If we’re going to compare Bonds to Armstrong then I’d say “being rude to people for writing truthful things” is WAY less of an asshole move than “suing people and trying to destroy their professional careers for writing truthful things.”
What’s unfair about that? If vitamin supplements enhance physical performance, and maybe not everyone wants to take vitamins, are those unfair? What’s the difference?
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True. I have a lot of those little disappointments, too, narratives that have now been altered. Like when
Tyler Hamilton broke a collarbone in the first stage of the TDF in '03, attacked Armstrong on Alpe d’Huez, won a stage after a 142 km solo breakaway, and placed fourth overall…aaaand, nope! Multiple failed tests between '04 and '09, eight-year ban, done. Ugh.
At the time, though…damn, there were so many great moments. It helps if I adjust my memory’s perspective, and become a witness to a contest of technologically-enhanced biological androids on wheels. Doesn’t help the present, though.
Then again: early Tour de France riders rode with wine in their water bottles and stopped at the tops of climbs for a cigarette. Tom Simpson died on Mont Ventoux in the '67 TDF after mixing his amphetamines with brandy. So the notion of a “clean tour” is murky at best.
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C’mon, performance enhancement technologies, both “allowed” and “not allowed”, are the only interesting part of professional sports.
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It doesn’t look like the projected image of a clean race was that different either:
At the end of the day, even when riders dope it doesn’t take everything away from what they did, in my opinion. Destroying other people’s lives to preserve the façade is one thing, but whatever any of them are using it’s an amazing feat to compete at that level.
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Is that a rhetorical question or are you really serious? Why would you ask me when you can easily find out for yourself? What a weird qualification for you to want me to make…
How does that support what you are arguing?
What in the hell is your point? PEDs don’t unfairly enhance performance?
You seem to be making a circular argument: They’re against the rules because they’re unfair because they’re against the rules (and thus available only to players willing to break those rules.)
But “fair” means no one is hobbled by restrictions that don’t apply to others. If PEDs were allowed, they’d be allowed to all competitors, thus giving no one an unfair advantage. There’s nothing inherently unfair about them.
Dude. They are drugs which enhance performance. Not nutritional supplements which enhance performance. Which one would imagine can be found in foods (that don’t bear drug compounds).
Seriously can’t believe I’m posting a link to the wiki
Turns out nootropics are, in fact, banned.
