How I became a drug cheat athlete to test the system

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-32983932

by sjcsjc • 11 years ago

83 75 11 years ago

SebKba2• 11 years ago

Wow! I've competed in rowing at fairly high level and reading this is article is shocking. I did not expect such a huge performance boost and THEN to turn up clean is insane.

So far I've always given people the benefit of the doubt but this really makes me wonder...

SovietDissident• 11 years ago

Rowing would be a perfect sport to do this in. I've heard rumors that there are rowers who do it, but I think the reason why it isn't that widespread is because there's no money in the sport. Although testing is lax, so maybe it is widespread at the top levels and we just don't know about it?

SebKba2• 11 years ago

I rowed just below international level and several of my former team mates have world and olympic medals. Also, I know that my pure power output was better than some of the international rowers and I didn't even take Creatine. My house mate is in a national team squad right now and he gets surprise tested every few months. He actually has to keep a calendar of where he sleeps every single night so they can find you in the morning... I doubt there is much cheating going on in rowing, like you said, it's just not worth it financially.

nl3• 11 years ago

Related, much earlier (2003) article: http://www.outsideonline.com/1924306/drug-test

He didn't try to avoid any tests though.

That micro-dosing is effective for passing the biological passport hasn't been news since Tyler Hamilton detailed how it was done in his book[1]. Michele Ferrari (who invented it, and systemised a lot of doping methodology) is bad person.

If you are interested in any endurance sport outside of cycling (which suffered the worst for a long time) then your sport has some challenges.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyler_Hamilton#Autobiography

rwmj• 11 years ago

I really would like to see sports where performance-enhancing drugs (except life-threatening ones) are permitted.

johnchristopher• 11 years ago

That'd be tricky to set up because drugs are discriminatingly life-threatening depending on dosage and individuals.

dylanjermiah11• 11 years ago

Water is life threatening at a high dosage. In fact, a dramatically higher number of people die from water each year than from PED's. Point is, people know the risks when they swim in a pool, people are capable of making decisions for themselves.

bodyfour• 11 years ago

The problem is that they're probably nearly all life-threatening (or at a minimum longevity-threatening) in high enough doses.

Fully permitted-doping would escalate into a bloodsport where athletes would be competing to show how many drugs they could take before keeling over.

vishnugupta• 11 years ago

Fully permitted-doping would escalate into a bloodsport where athletes would be competing to show how many drugs they could take before keeling over.

Highly recommended reading : https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/08/money-in-the-bank/

It's already happening albeit in a different sport (or entertainment industry).

gnur• 11 years ago

> The problem is that they're probably nearly all life-threatening (or at a minimum longevity-threatening) in high enough doses.

Everything is lethal in high enough doses.

tim333• 11 years ago

They seem tolerated in some body building competitions. If you can call that a sport.

dylanjermiah11• 11 years ago

Bodybuilding is more akin to a beauty pageant.

metamet• 11 years ago

I'd say almost all body building competitions.

teddyuk• 11 years ago

Do the military use them?

coob2• 11 years ago

Yes: http://www.newrepublic.com/article/112269

cactusface• 11 years ago

Beer drinking competitions, debatably.

mitchell_h• 11 years ago

It is a known that Pride FC did not test athletes and even had statements in the contracts that they would not test. That might be the closest you'll ever come to what you're asking for.

Also, MMA in general right now is going through a huge revolution in PED testing. For a long time it's been a simple matter of testing on fight night, with some athletes being give a therapeutic TRT pass. That is all changing as of this week. All UFC contract athletes will not be given random Olympic style testing year round.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pride_Fighting_Championships

http://espn.go.com/mma/story/_/id/13014746/ufc-announces-ext...

chollida1• 11 years ago

That is all changing as of this week. All UFC contract athletes will not be given random Olympic style testing year round.

I think you made a pretty epic typo:)

Thriptic• 11 years ago

In many powerlifting federations they are allowed. There are both drug tested and non-drug tested federations to compete in.

majani• 11 years ago

Currently the world's most famous athlete, Lionel Messi, is legally permitted to take HGH, one of the most potent steroids ever made, due to an earlier growth deficiency. Johann Cruyff, also considered one of the football greats, went through the same legal HGH treatments.

Their acceleration and injury tolerance is mind blowing. See how Messi blew past 6 players in a cup final last week after playing 50+ games:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOX2QpfMkq4

And also here's Johann Cruyff blowing past players with ease:

https://youtu.be/YU-k-Ots3iY?t=1m31s

The popularity of these two players would indicate that athletes legally permitted to use steroids would be very popular among sports fans

TillE• 11 years ago

Lionel Messi is not generally considered a great athlete, with exceptional strength or stamina or anything like that which would be affected by PEDs. His ability is pure skill and intelligence. Cruijff was similar.

dylanjermiah11• 11 years ago

Not to be pedantic but HGH isn't a steroid, it's a peptide.

On topic, a lot of athletes get legal prescription for TRT (testosterone replacement therapy), and in several sports the legal application is perfectly fine.

dragandj• 11 years ago

I did not know about his license to take steroids - if this is true, it moves him from my "admire" category to "fu*cking bastards" category.

TheCondor• 11 years ago

To what end? It's just a little more freak show and a little less sport, that's all. Plus the NFL, MLB track and field and cycling have pretty much done just that to varying degrees over the years.

jusben13693• 11 years ago

I always think this is the exasperated "it's just too hard" response. We want the best athlete with the superior tactical mind to succeed. Not the best scientist.

bmj2• 11 years ago

Except, as we're seeing in cycling with teams like Sky, money will poured into legal ways to produce "marginal gains." See the kerfuffle during the recent Giro d'Italia when Sky provided their leader Richie Porte with his own motor home to provide more rest. The team also used a helicopter to whisk Porte off one mountain top finish, again in the name of recovery.

Professional athletics will always be a money-fueled arms race, whether the means are legal or not. Personally, I like to see "old school" athletes succeed (I'm thinking of cyclist like Oscar Freire, who eschewed most "modern" training devices, and simply rode based on how he felt). Of course, plenty of those athletes doped, so maybe I am living in a dream world.

aaronharnly• 11 years ago

Performance-enhancing drugs were endemic in Eastern-bloc Olympic competition for decades. From the Outside Magazine piece linked elsewhere in the comment thread[1]:

East Germany's state-supported system of doping, which often began before puberty, left a legacy of Olympic medals—along with deformed offspring, heart attacks, facial disfigurement, and lifelong sexual dysfunction.

If you permit the drugs, they'll be used not just in the elite competitors, but in the entire funnel of hopeful competitors starting from high school. These are serious drugs with serious consequences. I for one don't think entertainment is worth that.

[1] http://www.outsideonline.com/1924306/drug-test

smcl• 11 years ago

Is that more as a side effect of the fact that this sort of doping is very hush-hush, and if it was more open and permitted safer more effective enhancements would be developed?

cafard• 11 years ago

The late Hal Connolly, an American hammer thrower, told a sports reporter that from about 1960 on everybody in the field events was using steroids. The East Germans were extreme in their devotion to this, but they were far from alone.

[Edit: remembered from an article that ran in the NY Times shortly after Connolly's death.]

dylanjermiah11• 11 years ago

Wouldn't call it a 'sport' per se, but in bodybuilding there's two divisions, 'natural' (which is supposed to be drug free), and ''(no formal name).

randlet• 11 years ago

It's generally referred to as 'untested' I think.

x0x0• 11 years ago

powerlifting, ifbb (if not on paper, at least tacitly), strongman

frankly, I think the majority of this is hysteria driven by whiny baby boomers pissed their sport's records are being surpassed. Of course, tommy john surgery and greenies are cherished traditions. But Barry Bonds is evil because he's black and doesn't tongue bathe interviewers. Or consider the cherished tradition of cheating in the tour de france which was kosher until an american started winning.

echaozh• 11 years ago

If you allow car racing, why not drug racing?

ghshephard2• 11 years ago

In case one has ever wondered why the huge preponderance of drug use (particularly EPO) in endurance sports:

Pre: EPO microdosing:

I managed about 10-and-a-half minutes and a power output of 350 watts. ... score a 58 on the test, which compares favourably to the average person's 35 but rather pathetically against an elite athlete's 70+.

Post EPO microdosing:

I flew past my previous mark and hung on for more than 12 minutes and 375 watts. This gave me a score of 63, a 7% increase in seven weeks.

How on earth could clean athletes ever expect to compete, particularly given that the chances of getting caught are so slim.

utefan001• 11 years ago

In cycling one key is drafting. We have a few guys where I live that do well in big national races. When they show up on the Saturday group ride, weaker riders can keep up thanks to the advantage of drafting. A rider has to be about 30% stronger than me to pull away when I am drafting him.

nl3• 11 years ago

Which is why Grand Tours are really a test of climbing and time trialing ability.

jusben13693• 11 years ago

But the EPO user gets to draft too. So this is not an answer to the question about how can a clean cyclist compete against a doping one.

coob2• 11 years ago

I think it's honestly getting to the point where some signed/trusted biologically embedded blood analyser/spectrometer is going to be the only thing that catches cheats.

mipapage• 11 years ago

Here's the discussion over at Cyclingnews' 'doping' sub-forum: http://forum.cyclingnews.com/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=29527

Interesting to read what insiders have to say/think about it.

S_A_P• 11 years ago

The whole guilt narrative seems odd to me. Wasn't he testing micro dosing and the passports efficacy? It seems disingenuous to add that whole aspect to me.

ghshephard2• 11 years ago

I think it was pretty clear why he did that - now that people know he can MicroDose to very significantly enhance performance, who is going to believe in his performance being "natural" if he does extraordinarily well? Particularly as he demonstrated that even the more stringent systems didn't catch him.

He was trying to make it super, super clear that he know that it is cheating, that it is wrong, and that if he EVER did this outside of this trial, that he would be guilty as sin.

yodsanklai• 11 years ago

It's interesting, but not a scientific experiment. Can we draw any conclusion with "1 datapoint"? The 7% increase may be explained by familiarity with the effort test the second time, 7 weeks additional training, better confidence and morale and so on...

nl3• 11 years ago

No. VO2 tests are pretty well understood, and just don't vary like that (unless someone is sick).

jusben13693• 11 years ago

I think the biggest failure here is not tracking the 4 months prior. Each week, given he undertook dedicated training under the guidance of a professional, he would have seen an improvement in his results. I'm sure his measurements and ride data would have looked meaningfully different between week 2 and week 12 of his 4 month run up period. Now some of that would taper but he'd still see performance improvements after 4 months with regular dedicated training in place. So it would be key to have that context. Perhaps the increase due to doping is 3-5% vs the 7%. Still substantial either way.

gus_massa• 11 years ago

I almost agree. Probably the 7% is too much for only getting use to the setup and training, but to be sure I think this experiment would be much better if he compare again the performance after he stopped taking the drug. Something like a A-B-A test.

Article about A-B-A: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-subject_research

Much more information and other variations: https://onlinecourses.science.psu.edu/stat509/book/export/ht...

andy_ppp2• 11 years ago

It's interesting that we just accept genetic advantage and even prize it, but man made advantage is called cheating.

Athletes should have handicaps like in horse racing ;-)

andy_ppp2• 11 years ago

I'm not really sure why this was downvoted, apart from because you didn't enjoy my point of view. I personally think it added to the discussion.

You are, of course, welcome to downvote this comment that definitely doesn't add to the discussion.

dylanjermiah11• 11 years ago

Offtopic-ish, I do not think taking PED's is cheating. I'd really love to see what we're capable of without the shackles of the illegality and false perception that most have of PED's. Allowing for proper research and acceptance.

michael_h• 11 years ago

"The All-Drug Olympics"

EDIT: The Reference: https://screen.yahoo.com/weekend-drug-olympics-000000571.htm...

dylanjermiah11• 11 years ago

"The Olympics"

But where athletes don't have to risk their health and can safely do what they're going to do anyway. Also they're better.

gamerdonkey• 11 years ago

I think we can get a fair idea of what would happen by looking at the two unrestricted auto racing divisions: Group B and Can-Am.

Group B was a basically unrestricted class in the World Rally Championship. This series was initially very well received by fans, and the manufacturers produced cars that are still legendary to this day. However, in only 4 years, costs of remaining competitive ballooned, and the teams with the deepest pockets were the teams that could dominate. Sadly, the entire class of cars was banned after a series of accidents caused many competitor and spectator casualties. I don't believe this would be the result of unrestricted Olympians, as few events pose a direct risk of grave injury to athletes or fans.

Can-Am, on the other hand, lasted some 8 years in its unrestricted form. Unlike rally, it was run on closed race courses, so safety was easier to keep in check than on the winding rural roads of rally. Like Group B, it started out popular with racing fans, and the unrestricted nature allowed manufacturers and teams to innovate faster and faster. The only restriction was funding. Again, the teams with the deepest pockets began to dominate, and competition suffered because of it. Teams pulled out, and public interest dwindled. The last scheduled race wasn't even run.

bennofs• 11 years ago

It would be interesting to compare this with the improvement that he would have got if he did altitude training.

j1e• 11 years ago

There is a lot of interesting info and history in the movie "Bigger Stronger Faster":

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1151309/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1

hobbyjogger3• 11 years ago

I'm skeptical of the author's claim about V02max that "even half a percentage point can make the difference in elite sport, that is a huge bump."

________

RUNNING PREDICTS RUNNING BETTER THAN PHYSIOLOGY (a duh? moment here)

Noakes, T. D., Myburgh, K. H., & Schall, R. (1990). Peak treadmill running velocity during VO2max test predicts running performance. Journal of Sports Sciences, 8, 35-45.

The best laboratory predictors were: (a) peak treadmill running velocity (r = -.89 to -.94); (b) running velocity at lactate turnpoint (r = -.91 to -.93); and (c) fractional use of VO2max at 16 km/h (r = .86 to .90). The predictive value of the lactate turnpoint measure increased as the distance increased.

The poorest predictors were: VO2max (r = -.55 to -.81) and VO2 at 16 km/h (r = .40 to .45).

Retric• 11 years ago

Running and cycling are significantly different sports. A runner’s stride is very important, but cycling is almost pure power output by comparison.

However, if you’re tracing a single athlete over time then skill tends to stay fairly constant and overall heath becomes the main focus of training.

hobbyjogger3• 11 years ago

You'd be surprised. Here's a pdf of the VO2max study(1) that established the relationship between efficiency and VO2max in elite cyclists is very similar to that shown in elite runners.

Of the 11 world class cyclists tested, the best two riders were in the bottom 4 (<70 ml/kg/min) in pure VO2max. Interestingly, that means those two riders were closer to the amateur reporter in this story, even before the doping, than they were to the pros with the highest VO2max.

(1) https://d3epuodzu3wuis.cloudfront.net/R063.pdf

Someone• 11 years ago

At lower levels, technique can handily beat raw power, and vice versa. At elite level, those lacking either technique or raw power will be filtered out, or forced to work hard on their weak points (example: Federer had to work on his weight training when the likes of Nadal and Djokovic hit the scene)

In sports where competition is strong (1) that, at best, leaves those with good technique and exceptional power or exceptional technique and good power, but likely, top players are exceptional in both areas. In that group, getting more power or endurance can certainly be a decisive factor.

And as another reply said, cycling (like cross-country skiing, and rowing) is a bit different in the sense that raw power (per kg) is a really good indicator of performance.

(1) in weaker competitions, you can still see strong players with weak technique or vice versa. That happens in smaller countries, for example, and, historically in about every sport.

hobbyjogger3• 11 years ago

Like I said to the other reply, you are making logical points but the data shows that they are flat out wrong. "Raw power" whatever that means (likely you're using it as a rough proxy for VO2max) is a solid predictor if you're trying to distinguish elites from untrained people but a terrible predictor if you're trying to distinguish among elites.

See this study(1) showing that the best two cyclists out of 11 world class professionals tested had a VO2max that was closer to this amateur reporter (before doping) than to the elite cyclists with the highest VO2max. (1) https://d3epuodzu3wuis.cloudfront.net/R063.pdf

gadders• 11 years ago

There was an interesting series of articles on T-Nation relatively recently on how easy it is to beat the Cross Fit (and by extension other organisaion's) drug tests:

https://www.t-nation.com/steroids/beating-the-crossfit-drug-...

SCAQTony• 11 years ago

The 7% increase in performance is astonishing but with the gain comes potential pain:

Least harmful side effects: Cold symptoms such as stuffy nose, sneezing, cough, sore throat, joint pain, bone pain, muscle pain, muscle spasm; dizziness, depression, mild headache, weight loss, sleep problems (insomnia), nausea, vomiting, trouble swallowing; or pain or tenderness where you injected the medication.

Most severe side effects include: Seizure, uneven heartbeat, dangerously high blood pressure and more.

http://www.rxlist.com/epogen-side-effects-drug-center.htm

How I became a drug cheat athlete to test the system

Related Stories