Hi guys!
I am writting an article for one of subjects at my university and my topic is why drug testing in sports is (or isn’t) meaningless.
Many, many people claim that at some level you divide athletes into those who are/were on gear and got caught and those, who are and didn’t get caught.
Some substances are still legal (or can be legal if you have some disease to be cured, like asthma, what let’s be honest, isn’t hard to get documented if you have a doc amongst friends or family)
Some substances can be cleared out of body (this especially interests me) if you have enough time before the tests.
Some substances aren’t covered by the most popular tests.
Is there anyone insterested in sharing their knowledge with me? How exactly do guys at pro levels pass the tests? We are excluding things like having someone else’s urine/blood, because that’s given. I am rather looking for holes in the system.
Of course, it’s relevant, even though people cheat. The cheating remains at the margins, and while it has effect, it’s not the free-for-all it would be if all drugs were legal. It’s a bit like speed limits. Sure people still speed, but you don’t typically face a teenager going 120mph in a residential zone with regularity, which is what would happen if there was no law.
For a serious note, a young biological female who is under the delusion she is a male takes lots of steroids (legally) and is crushing her fellow biological females in wrestling:
Well, to be honest the tittle was edited by Chris and orignally it wasn’t suggesting it isn’t.
Now on your speed argument - yes, not every teenager goes 120 in a res zone. But we all tend to go 10-20 over the limit. All the time. And this is the analogy I’d rather go for here. Sure not every athlete has bunch of holes from injections in their bodies. But there are substances that are easy to take and not be detected or maybe even they are not even tested for or straight up legal. And if you have an opportunity to perform better using them, probably you do take them.
As I said, I am not really interested in those who are juicers simply hoping not to get caught. I am looking for people, who find holes in testing system or on the list of forbidden substances and abuse them (the very common example is that many ski runners from Norway apparently have asthma, so they have to take drugs to cure it that, just accidentally, happen to boost their performance).
At low level sport and testing 3 is very significant, and to an extent 2.
In a lot of sports they might test for a list of steroids, but things like Serms, GH and peptides wont be tested for. This is obviously easy to abuse.
Sports that don’t test out of competition will obviously suffer, because you could be using PEDs for months or years while you train, and you essentially only have to compete without them.
Its plausible that you could get pretty flagrant and heavy use in these circumstances.
If they take it to the next level and do test out of season then the next loophole is when test dates are known within a certain period of time. i.e if you get 2 weeks notice before testing then you know you need to chose your PEDs by what you can clear within that timeframe, using very short esther testosterone, GH and other PEDs that have very short halflives.
At the highest level, say the olympics, it gets harder. Random short notice out of season testing and very comprehensive test panels that test for as many exotic substances as possible would be harder to beat and would probably require some level of internal collusion.
While the competition testing will be administered and tested independantly, I believe each countries own athletic commission will be responsible for administering the off season testing. If they were willing they would have the incentive and ability to help athletes cheat, a la the Russian scandal.
Very difficult topic to dive into, good luck. Drug-testing with true NAN “No-advance notice” testing complicates things immensely with Olympic athletes. You have to be available for testing with minimal/no notice, you have to report where you live/train/travel etc. so they can track you.
My friend was on the Olympic team and they showed up at the gym one day. There was no phone call, they just showed up.
He explained it was pretty tricky… you’d have to use compounds with very short half-life (Test Suspension… maybe Prop… there are others, and you’d have to research this). Even these can get you popped easily with NAN, but often they’d kind of “know” in advance of when to expect testing…or they have inside information.
Tough subject to cover as there is a fair amount of corruption depending on the athlete, or country for that matter (not all NAN programs are the same, lol). It’s tough enough extracting ‘supplement’ programs from non-tested athletes… I’m guessing the really high-level tested ones are very secretive, and likely rely on a guru to help them pass.
Real testing, no-advance notice, etc… assuming there is no fraud (i.e. favored athletes begin told when to expect the test, or manipulating the results)… is certainly relevant. It really does put a significant limit on drug usage.
To be honest, your original title was the extremely vague, “Why drug tests are irrelevant?”, which, A - isn’t actually a question, B - doesn’t mention sports at all, and C - introduced the word ‘irrelevant’ in the first place.
John Romano is a PED expert and has written several articles about the subject, not necessarily laying out “how to” (because, duh), but discussing the topic.
TRT exemptions are the first thing that come to mind. Chael Sonnen has, unsurprisingly, been pretty outspoken about the subject.
Do you think NFL steroid use is just “at the margins”? And comparing the legality of easily-acquired drugs to speed limits that are enforced with cameras and police officers is strange. What you would compare steroid use to is, say, marijuana. I couldn’t get alcohol until I was 21 without hey-mister’ing someone outside the local 7-11, but when I was 12, Anton was slingin dimes behind the school, and I could call up Jay, Jay, or Jay (seriously, I knew 3 pot dealers named Jay) and get marijuana 24/7/365. Going through a store vendor that required a state-issued ID would have made it HARDER to get weed. So the fact that there’s a law doesn’t have to change anything. Steroid use is rampant in sports, especially any sport requiring strength and explosiveness, and the fact that it’s illegal doesn’t stop a pro athletes from popping ALL THE TIME, from MMA and boxing, to baseball and football, to competitive cycling, if you think the guys getting caught are the only ones doing it, you’re wrong.
The 2013 report into Australia ped use in Pro sports, the Russian ommition from the 2016 games and Bradley Wiggins medical exemption use of an inhaler just before a race all pushed me to the same conclusion.
Pro athletes take PEDs. Either roids, medical exemptions or off label sides.
I will show you photo of my work, once I finish writting. However it will be in my native language, so you will have to believe me the wall of text I would have produced will in its entirety be on this topic.
Assuming I will just copy paste my work, not just take a photo of one page on the paper. It will be still my work, you know. Don’t want someone to simply translate it just to use for their own. It’s Internet, if I just post the text, I wouldn’t even be surprised if I then found it on someone’s blog or something like that. So I’m just going to take a photo of the paper, at which point you’d need to either rewrite it to put in the translator or use one of theese text recognizing program. Still doable, but takes some effort.
