Do drugs improve sporting performance?

Cuddles said:It's a results based business, and unless I've missed something he is our best sprinter still?

I think it would be a real shame if they didn't pick him.

Mikey, I too enjoy Michael Johnson's commentary. Always thought that was a great signing for the BBC.

DavidW said:
Though MJ being all righteous about drug takers is a fcking joke.

martinb said:
Doesn't piss me off anywhere near as much as Kelly Holmes, I can't stand her getting on her high horse

Cuddles said:

WOW.

You must really think he's some sort of Superman then.

Seriously, wow.

martinb said:
Doesn't piss me off anywhere near as much as Kelly Holmes, I can't stand her getting on her high horse

Ben_F said:
I always thought it curious that she always seemd to be hindered by injuries and was always a little of the pace at the big events... but returned looking more muscular, more resilient to injury and ultimately faster... fair play if she did it without PEDs - I'd be keen to know the changes she made to her training and nutrition (I presume she has an autobiography - is it in there?).

Ben_F said:
"It annoys me that the recent UK track cycling success has been dismissed by many as down to PEDS. I couldnt say if it was or not, but it seems a pretty ill thought out assumption"
Bit confused by this... are you impplying that Armstrong's success was down to PEDs but its annoying if someone does the same with the British team? Or am I missing something (as I did skim some of the latter pages of the thread).

drew said:The technology improvements of cycling has been mentioned a few times now. What exactly has developed? Lighter bikes? Slippier outfits?

Steve said:Are drugs as beneficial in sports like cycling or sprinting where maximum strength is not as critical? Bolt certainly doesn't look like the strongest sprinter and the weights we see the cyclists lifting certainly don't appear unreasonable for a drug free lifter.

Cuddles said:
Well firstly we are comparing two different sports (track vs road cycling).
Amrstrong is an interesting one as as far as I know he has never failed a drugs test. However, numerous members of his own teams have sworn under oath that they have watched and helped him use PEDS and that it was endemic in his US Postal team. Armstrong rode in the 'EPO Era', ie it was the drug of choice. At first, there was no decent test. Subsequent to them creating one pretty much every single one of his main competition has subsequently failed tests. Pretty much everyone of that era has failed tests.
However Lance didnt race for most of the year (unlike his competitors who argued that he belittled cycling by only chosing to really do 2 races a year), instead he spent the time 'training' or as cyclists called it 'preperation'. This was in a time where out of competition testing didn't exist. As long as you didnt race, you were safe. Lance didnt race.
Lance routinely beat many of the best ever, who were also pretty much all drugged to the eyeballs and not with test, but EPO, a drug that has an enourmous effect for endurance athletes (think permanent altitude training). He didnt just beat them, he dessimated them. His times are dramatically faster than those being set today, despite significant improvements in technology and cycling team professionalism
Can you imagine the standard in any other fully professional sport actually coming down? and dramatically so?
When you add it all up there are only two conclusions I can consider, Lance is either the best athlete of all time in any discipline and by a country mile, or he cheated.
Now, wrt Britains track cycling team. They are not doing anything miraculous, they are quite simply winning. They are subject to the same testing procedures as everyone else, ie out of compeition testing. They are widely acknowledged by other sporting nations to have stolen a march on the competition wrt technology. They started taking the technology much more seriously faster than most other teams. (They hired Chris Boardman in 2000 I think as Head of R&). To put it simply, we chucked a lot of money at a sport and got better at it, and more specifically, a sport that had received little funding and attention before hand and therefore had achieved little. Now, if we had come from nowhere and started tearing the track apart then I would be more suspicious but we arent. We are simply picking up a lot of medals in what is still a minority sport. There are only a couple of countries wo have real track programmes. Funnily enough, those countries win a fair few medals too.....
Am I saying that those track boys aren't taking drugs? No, of course not, I haven't got a clue! but there are plenty other reasons that make just as much sense. After all, UK Sport doesn't exactly have a soft stance on the issue....