Do drugs improve sporting performance?

Cuddles said:Mike, stop being a dick, or do it in threads where people arent having proper conversations.

I don't mind the abuse myself, but it's all getting a bit childish.

Steve said:
It would be interesting to know whether all the drugs Lance Armstrong had to take when he was ill had a beneficial effect on his performance. He certainly talks about how they changed his body shape causing him to loose significant upper body size Although given the fact that at forty he has returned to professional triathlon, maybe he just is the most gifted endurance athlete ever.

sexymikehowarth said:
Well what technological advances do you mean then?
You quote a lot of laws, research and examples with no actual reference points ever
For those of us that have a different opinion that can be equally irritating when you express your view and provide no information to back up your argument
Or alternatively maybe it's just me that sees/thinks that... But I do think Ben has a very good point

sexymikehowarth said:Good point re discussion...

I was too busy looking for answers but now I think about it many of the subjects on here wouldn't need discussing if their was a single conclusion to be drawn

Apologies

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....

MrSmall said:Interesting statistic I heard - Japan and South Korea are the only countries in the world that have never failed a drugs test in weightlifting.
South Korea has a pretty strong presense in the weightlifting world.

Cuddles said:Also, which books have you read?

Have you read Kimmage's? That man has the epitomy of a chip on his shoulder.

bryce said:Anyone read this one? Bought it for 18p off amazon

http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Death-Marco-Pantani-Biography/dp/0...

Good read, but if you are an avid cycling cycling fan, it makes pretty depressing reading as it wears on. A decent amount of 'quasi' scientific analysis of a few aspects of Pantani's career, especially his fluctuating haematocrit levels after he crashed in Milan-Torino.

DavidW said:
I heard that testerone does not skew the T:Epi ratio as much in Orientals? If you're using test suspension then clearance is only a couple of days anyway.