The Doping Fairytale

1. The Doping Fairytale Let’s drop the charade. The “clean sport” fairytale is helping no one. Nearly all Olympic and professional athletes have used anabolic steroids and/or other banned performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs) at some point during their athletic careers (gasp for effect). If they hadn’t, they’d be less healthy, they’d constantly get injured, and sports just wouldn’t be as entertaining to watch. You’d be seeing guys like me on the Olympic stage, snatching 160kg and clean and jerking 190kg. It’s good I suppose, but it’s certainly not what we want to see at top-level competitions. PEDs have always been a part of sports, and they always will be. The moral objection to PEDs is based in tradition, not on logic that applies to today’s circumstances. Forget about the taboo around anabolic steroids and other PEDs for just a few minutes. Let’s move the conversation past: “How do we get PEDs out of sports?” to “How do we prevent PED abuse?” The higher level the athlete, the greater the chance that they’ve used banned PEDs. Athletes work their bodies to the limit during every training session. To become nationally competitive in most sports, athletes train at least five times a week, every week, for years on end. To get to Pan-American, European or Asian Championships, they’ll usually increase training to 8+ sessions per week. When they get to the highest level of sportsmanship (Olympic or professional sports), their training will go up to 12-21 sessions per week. For perspective, this essentially translates to the average Olympic weightlifter in the 105kg weight class lifting 120-315 TONS over their heads on a weekly basis. The sheer volume of work required to compete on the international level is monstrously unhealthy. The human body is not built to naturally recover from this amount of wear and tear. To deal with this, nearly all world class athletes, across most sports, rely on PEDs to increase their rate of recovery to avoid injuries and to be able to continue their athletic development.

2. “But Yasha, athletes get drug tested! How do they avoid being caught?” If there’s a slight chance of being tested during training, many athletes will use small amounts of PEDs which won’t stay in their system for long, train in remote training centers or use designer drugs. Within weeks or months of competition, they’ll stop taking PEDs altogether so that they don’t get detected in their blood or urine. Before heading to a competition, many athletes get their blood and urine samples tested “unofficially” to ensure that their samples don’t have traces of PEDs during the “official” testing. Some countries have private labs that charge as little as $120 to test samples for PEDs. In other countries, Sports Federations provide their athletes with free (and usually mandatory), pre- competition testing at unofficial labs. They do this to make sure that the athletes they send to represent their country don’t get popped publicly, which is costly and would be an embarrassment to the country. If an “unofficial laboratory” doesn’t find traces of PEDs in a sample, an athlete will know that the official, World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) probably won’t find any either. If an athlete fails the unofficial testing –they’ll skip the competition to avoid the risk of exposure. For these testing laboratories to have any value, they must be at least as sensitive as the WADA testing labs. Some countries have unofficial testing labs that are very-well funded and have a significantly better technology and testing methods than used by WADA. Athletes who have access to these better labs rarely get busted at competitions. The athletes that are from countries that have underfunded laboratories end up getting popped the most. For more information about remote weightlifting team you can also visit at our website today. Source URL: https://bit.ly/2llcx5t