I hear ya.

In the end I was pretty frustrated with the process (or lack of) that happened early on with this Armstrong business. My issue was always with how it went down as I think most folks suspected that the truth may be that he cheated, but the lack of real evidence was always frustrating and it felt like a witch hunt.

I am just sad that someone that I looked to as a hard worker and an inspiration to those who fight cancer every day, is looking to be a fraud, and one that so vehemently denied being so for so long.

I also used to watch the Tour every single year, even before Lance came along, and loved what he brought to the sport. I have sort of had any desire to even follow it any more crushed out of me since one of the pinnacle athletes in the sport, as well as SOOOOO many others, have proven to be cheaters. I know not everyone is a cheater but at this point I can no longer distinguish truth from fiction any more.

However, in the meantime cancer exists and there are millions of people working together to kick the crap out of it if they can and that will never change.

The problem with that argument is the assumption that everyone who is blood doping is taking it to superhuman levels. If I only do it a little bit, is that okay? And how do we define superhuman when we know that the difference between everyone's red blood cell concentration and testosterone levels are highly variable?

Did you know that what they test for with regard to things like testosterone is for a large difference from your baseline level of testosterone rather than there being a straight up maximum allowable testosterone and that these tests allow for a little bit of doping just not a lot? Is any of that fair? I don't know.

What I do know is that if you are arguing that surgery to repair a torn ligament being legal because it removes a deficiency then I don't see a difference between someone blood doping a little just so that their testosterone levels can match that of their competitors. And if you disagree then I think you are making the God's body argument to which I would say that if God gave you weak ACLs then you shouldn't be able to get a new one from a cadaver.

The other argument I would make is whether or not it's okay to use PEDs in recovering from an injury. If what's allowable is whatever helps you get back to regular strength then I'd say PEDs should be allowed during recovery because all you are doing is helping to recoup from your deficiency.

If I'm allowed to have someone else's ligament implanted in my body to recover from a torn knee then I should also be allowed to inject my own red blood cells back into myself to if it helps with my rehab. The goal either way is to get me back into playing shape. If they both get me to 100% faster then what's the issue?

A third argument for something like injecting one's own red blood cells into his body would be how is this any different than high altitude training? If the end result is simply to manipulate your body into having above average levels of red blood cells then why does it really matter how you get there? Don't we encourage athletes to push themselves to the limits of what they can be to perform? So if we allow high altitude training why wouldn't we also allow blood doping which can be done in an even more controlled manner that can also be done such that the timing occurs where the athlete can perform at his peak level.

What about using that sort of blood doping to remove home field advantages in high altitude locations like Denver? I don't know what the right answer there is, I'm just putting it out there.

One thing that concerns me is that because there is a lot less acceptance of performance enhance in the mainstream it becomes a lot more dangerous for people who do want to use it but don't necessarily know how. The dangers with a lot of performance enhancers only come in when there is abuse. So it seems to me the whole anti-steroids movement is really a foolish one, kind of like abstinence only sex education. I'd rather see us move into a world where we discuss performance enhancers as an option but not one that's for everyone but if you do want to do it, here's how to do it safely. Because the fact is, we've reached the point where steroids are out there, and they are never going away. Proper education is going to be a lot better of a deterrent than simply saying steroids are bad/illegal.

Ultimately there are a lot of different methods out there that you can use, which are safe if done properly. So as far as the safety argument goes, if there are safe ways out there then what's there to argue.

As far as fair play goes, I feel like I've touched on that earlier. Either way, the choice to use performance enhancers is really no different than many of the other choices athletes must make on the road to becoming elite and if you aren't willing to do whatever it takes to make it then maybe you just don't have what it takes.

What's really interesting to me is the contrast between performance enhancement between more complex team sports like basketball, hockey etc. and performance enhancement in very specific sports like cycling, track and field, etc. I can definitely see how in specific sports like that you'd have a lot more incentive for performance enhancement because there are only a few certain skills that need to be refined so the performance enhancement can be tailored specifically to your sport's needs, whereas with a game like hockey, you need to have endurance, hand-eye, raw strength, raw power, and any number of other skills. There's no one combination of performance enhancers that will make you better and ultimately hockey is also a sport where refining technique may take precedence over anything else so you can spend hours working on technique and not be over-training. In sports like track and field and cycling there's only so much technique to work on so the only other stuff to train is either raw power/endurance and these are aspects that can be over-trained, leading to injuries.

The reason that this fascinates me so is because with the idea of the traditional multi-sport Olympian completely getting tossed out the window with the exception of the deca/heptathletes, I wonder how much anyone really truly cares about performance enhancement in these sports. I mean, the 100 meters is already kind of a freakshow in a way that it's just about seeing how far we can push the human body. It just feels a lot like the space race in terms of just pushing the limits of what we can do. From that perspective I really just think, why not allow steroids?

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Majority of ppl who have ACL surgery use their own hamstrings tendon. And fixing your ACL doesn't make you suddenly an All-Star, it allows you to run without blowing out your knee and getting premature arthritis. Furthermore, it's not like people don't tear their ACLs thru contact sports. A person's ACL isn't necessarily weaker than anyone elses because they tear it (except women vs men).

Its like people who tear their achilles tendon. We don't fix it so your performance is enhanced, we fix it so you can walk normally and return to "regular" level of life/performance.

There is an inherent difference in training in altitude, and removing your own blood and re-infusing it. Heck, hospitals don't even allow it anymore for blood transfusions prior to surgery.

this may be true about proper education and safety. i am frightened if there are cops/soldiers using horse steroids and going on ragers.

the things is these people use steroids that are different than the corticosteroids a person takes for asthma or rheumatoid arthritis.

PEDS means whoever has the most money will have advantage - maybe true in reality anyways with Yankees, Lakers, etc.

The thing is people can get hurts in sports (hockey, football, boxing) with concussions, fractures, etc. It's not like its unknown steroids cause roid rage, and players may do a cheapshot they normally wouldn't do.

I personally am amazed at the difference in reaction about steroids in baseball and olympics versus in the NFL.

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I find curious the notion that the NFL's substance abuse policy is reliable and effective as evidenced by the number of suspended players. People always ignore denominators for some reason.

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No but Tommy John surgery has been shown to have pitchers throwing harder than ever before afterwards and regardless I'm not talking about taking stuff that turns Joe Shmo into an All-Star, I'm talking about elite athletes who are already better than most, and training harder and longer than most, making up small gaps they may have in their own god given bodies between them and other athletes. Some elite athletes have bone structure that makes them more likely to blow out a knee or an elbow, other elite athletes produce less testosterone than others. They are both deficiencies.


I'm really interested, could you please elaborate on this?


I kept the rest of this together because I'm not just talking about steroids, I'm talking about all different types of performance enhancement. I know there are ways to go about using steroids and other types of performance enhancement without seeing negative side effects. I think proper education would mitigate a lot of that.

You make an excellent point about PEDs giving advantages to the people with money. I'd argue that if we made this stuff more mainstream that the costs would be lessened to the point where money would be less of a factor. I'd also suggest that since I am talking about steroid use of elite athletes that these guys would already have to get to a certain point and be making a certain amount of money that they could afford high costs of PEDs anyhow.

But that gets me thinking about a real strong negative to PED use and that's in youth sports. As a youth coach I have players asking me all the time about simply helping them with training to become better and what sorts of weightlifting and such they can do to help improve. I have enough issues with simple weightlifting for kids the age that I coach 14/15 that I don't really know how much information to give them. In general, I always say that because their bodies are still growing that they shouldn't be messing around in the weightroom too much.

Now to think about these same kids using PEDs, well that frightens me. They already have their hormones going all over the place. Even the smartest course of PED could likely screw up their physical development. This is an area where I think we really need to step up both research and education.

I'm fine with adults making adult decisions to push themselves as far as they need to go but I'm definitely not fine with kids trying to make those same decisions. Especially not when you consider how much bad advice kids can get from adults who pretend to have their best interests at heart.

I view NFL players as very similar to Olympic athletes. If you think about the sport in general and how it doesn't so much demand endurance as it does the ability to give it your all for but a few seconds then it's got more in common with sprinting than it does basketball. Also if you think about all the niche skills players can have such as linemen, receiver, etc. These are positions where you might really only need to work on your pure strength or explosiveness, which again gives them more in common with track athletes than basketball players.

Now obviously you need to have a different mentality in football than in track but you can train in very much a similar way, so it wouldn't shock me at all to find out that many professional football players use PEDs in much the same way that track athletes do.

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I've assisted in some Tommy John surgeries, and it's a little surprising they throw faster. Guess it might be just due to pre-existing damage to the UCL while throwing since youth. "The torque generated during pitching exceeds the ultimate tensile strength of cadaver UCL specimens."

People who have upcoming surgery always ask if they can donate their blood to use later. Medical studies have shown that ppl are more at risk for needing blood transfusions if they donate before, and there are practical things like where to store it, it only lasts so long, what if ppl have surgery canceled for whatever reason.

Yah children are at risk for overtraining. In youth baseball, pitchers will get structural changes to their shoulder joint/elbow joint that other kids won't. There are also medical recommendations on pitch limits and rest after pitching for kids at different ages. Also recommended to avoid breaking pitches until skeletal maturity.

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Is there a timeline on how long your risk for needing blood transfusion after donating? Like is it just the amount of time it takes you to recoup your blood cell count and plasma or is this longer term "damage" we are talking?

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I think it has to do with the fact that the patient's are more anemic prior to the surgery, so hence more likely to need blood. I don't think this is long term damage because ppl donate blood all the time.

To be honest I am not an expert on this, but here is something I copy and pasted about PABD.

"Pre-operative autologous blood donation (PABD) aims to provide a supply of safe blood for patients undergoing surgery who might need a blood transfusion while at the same time increasing the patient's total red blood cell (RBC) mass due to the PABD-induced stimulation of erythropoiesis before scheduled elective surgery.

Meta-analyses on PABD have shown that this practice: (i) reduces the use of allogeneic blood transfusion by 63%, (ii) increases overall RBC transfusions (i.e. allogeneic and autologous RBC units) by 30%, and (iii) causes a decline of patients' haemoglobin (Hb) concentration by more than 1 g/dL from before commencing PABD to immediately prior to surgery

The wastage of unneeded PABD units varied from 18% to above 50%"

And from UpToDate - a medical wikipedia doctors use "We believe that PAD programs currently have marginal value and cost effectiveness"

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Okay, I was curious as a frequent blood donor but someone who also has major issues with Canadian Blood Services as an organization. I'd really love nothing more than to have something to give them a hard time about.

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Interesting to go back to this thread now that Armstrong is going to admit to the whole thing.

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