Really? Every professional athlete? Are you really that jaded?
Yes, I am. We have kind of this shared delusion that the use of performance enhancers are not widespread so that can adhere to our belief of fair play and all that. Realistically, though, with the stakes as high as they are in professional sports, people literally wouldn't be able to compete in today's atmosphere without performance enhancers of some kind.[DOUBLEPOST=1358020668][/DOUBLEPOST]Quite frankly, anabolic steroids and blood doping aren't nearly as detrimental to your health as the propaganda to the contrary would have you believe. I honestly don't see what the big deal is about their widespread usage.
FTFY.
Yeah! A little meth doesn't hurt, just make sure to moderate!
That's a false equivalency. The effects of Meth are actually immediately harmful and addictive. If we're constantly selling these extreme scare tactics, it actually detracts from the actual harm that can be done and also dulls people to the real dangers of more extreme drugs.
Who cares about the damage it does, this is about how he cheated to affect his performance.
You have to follow the entire flow of the conversation, not just select one post. The point originally is that if everyone is cheating, is one person being caught for cheating really cheating.
When the narrative to this point was that he did it "clean", and it was all just sour grapes from a vengeful French press, then yeah. It's cheating.
Yes.
I think because there's many good reasons why a professional athlete wouldn't want to do those (health concerns) and if it becomes an ok thing, it then becomes mandatory for anyone to keep up.
And that's what I assumed you meant by blood doping. Donate a pint or two of blood, put them in the fridge, wait a month, then put them back in before your competition. No foreign substances, no drugs, just increased red blood cell count and nothing to show for it except for an injection site.
Prior to the discovery of EPO similar effects were achieved without training by increasing the blood cell density using transfusion techniques. This is still cheating. Using EPO is still cheating.
I can only imagine that it is disheartening to folks who are just entering a sport, all fired up and rarin' to go, only to get soundly beaten by the veterans. Stung, they train hard, eat right, sweat the details, and really become something, only to continue getting the sand kicked in their faces by people who "juice." Their spirits crushed, their wills broken, they then realize the only way to make it to the highest echelons of their sport is to stoop to the dopers' level, to cheat, to compromise their integrity, and, in their minds, to "sell out" to the lure of questionable methods bringing better results.
