Much has been made of Lance Armstrong and doping. What people seem to be leaving out is the man
did take testosterone. I don't hold this against him, and really nobody else should either. Testosterone is a great weapon against wasting caused by e.g., chemotherapy. And the man did have cancer. There's also no question that he had transfusions of his own (well, presumably, but who cares?) blood. This leads to the suggestion that maybe when he wasn't getting transfusions he was taking EPO (epogen or epoetin) – effects of which I won't go into here.
Okay, now what? I happen to think I inhabit a curious position as an athlete (and I'm not quite comfortable calling myself that): I train both strongman and crossfit. Crossfit is tested at the elite level; strongman (both NAS and WSM) are not. Lots of people turn up their noses at this point and say "well those guys are not true athletes then because they're on drugs."
Are they not then? I find this sort of quick retort to be reprehensible. I've been kind of defending Lance Armstrong lately by saying "guys, I could take a gram of testosterone a week for years and never be the cyclist he is." The other thing that comes to mind is the adage (from the body building community, actually) "80% diet, 15% training, 5% gear." For the uninitiated, in this case, "gear" means performance-enhancing drugs. Like testosterone. And epogen. More on this in a minute.
Derek Poundstone
So for a moment, let's digress and illustrate the differences between two athletes who are
definitely taking PED's, and large quantities of them: bodybuilders and strongman competitors. One of the strange paradoxes of bodybuilding is that while these dudes attain incredible hypertrophy and are by most definitions of the word quite "fit," they actually possess little
functional strength. If you were to take even a dude as incredibly ripped as Arnold Schwarzenegger in his prime, and ask him to do an atlas stone run, I'm fairly certain he wouldn't be able to move that 200kg stone. And the difference is not in the amount of testosterone he's been using.
The difference is in the CNS and in training (well, among other things). Muscle recruitment is super important. Let us think for a moment about a guy with incredible glutes, hams, quads, and traps, but who is uncoordinated or otherwise unable to actually
recruit these muscles in the action of rowing. These giant muscles mean nothing if he doesn't have the technique or the CNS conditioning to actually
use that strength. I could go on and list other sport-specific examples (muscleups, atlas stones, free diving, the list goes on), but I would hope if you're reading this you understand.
But if we address these specific points in the body, these sort of "soft skills," what about what actually
constitutes doping? We in the developed world are blessed with incredible medicine and manufacturing capabilities. I'm able to get in 1,000 calories and 100g of protein in about 350ml of liquid I can yack down in minutes. In other nations, people are not so lucky. They have to "eat the old-fashioned way." Is this doping? Why not?
What about geography? Much has been made of training at high altitude. What of a country without high-altitude training centers? Should we restrict all elite athletes to training at sea level?
Professor Xavier
Lastly, people always want to talk about performance enhancing
drugs. Those nasty things that somebody is selling to you in a dark alley with bent and rusty needles that you jab into your jugular and turn into the hulk and ... yeah, that stuff. What are these drugs?
Well, the simple answer is testosterone. There are tons of ways to get testosterone from injectable esters to patches to various oral prohormones (that is, a substance that you digest that metabolizes to testosterone). There are also anti-estrogens that are apparently quite good at androgenizing people and up-regulating testosterone production – but which are not specifically testosterone in and of themselves.
But there are more complex answers for what a performance-enhancing drug is. Bodybuilders in particular use insulin to shock the body into hypertrophy. Stimulants such as clenbuterol and ephedrine – even pseudoephedrine, "sudafed" – are used (caffeine is good-to-go). And then there are the strange ones like
AAV1-FS, which is a virus that's been genetically modified to "deactivate myostatin." That is, it's effectively gene-doping (which is still not illegal, yet). There's also a sort of bumper crop of peptides available to the public such as
ipamorelin, which regulates (favorably) human growth hormone, but which is itself not HGH at all. Does this sound familiar?
To me, this sounds a lot like Alexander Shulgin being chased by the DEA during his
tryptamine and
phenylethylamine experiments. The basic gist is thus: the human body is such a complex machine and is so very variable that it is (near-)impossible to enumerate each and every substance that can improve performance in an arbitrary task (from playing the flute to pulling a truck). Because of this, it is impossible to ban all such substances, and without a comprehensive, no-exceptions ban policy, there will always be "cheating." But more to the point, there will always be better and worse coaches, there will always be higher or lower altitude, or better genes, and so on. You cannot isolate individuals from their environments, whether that environment contains trenbolone or not.
So what do we do then? Saturday Night Live famously joked about a "doping olympics" in which contestants were free to use whatever PEDs they wanted. Just for a second, imagine the
spectacle that would produce? Are we not viewers (and participants!) of sport for that spectacle?
Let's back up though, for a moment. At 6'5" (that's near enough to 2m for the rest of the world) and 250-260lbs (depending on how much I've had to eat in a given day), I'm a large dude by most standards. So what we do in sport to even the field is we put me in a class with guys my own size. But what happens in a sport (such as NAS or WSM) where we aren't tested? My mass has
something to do with the amount of performance-enhancing drugs in me, but I'm also constrained by diet and genetics. There's a point at which I'm just not able to get any bigger (practically).
Since we can test for the presence of the major, effective PED's, why not allow athletes to compete in mass-PED rationed classes? That is, you can test up to a certain level of testosterone or metabolites and we use that as a multiple of your height/weight whatever (even age, right?), and call
that a "class." That brings all this out into the open (because people will
always, always look for a way to cheat), and it lets people who don't want to make that choice, to "juice," or to exceed what their body is genetically capable of, to remain in a class where they can feel reasonably confident they'll be competitive. But why ban people from the sport at all if they
want to look like Derek Poundstone? We're all adults. Let's act that way.
And people will ask me, I am sure: have you ever used steroids or other PEDs? Well, as of today, no. Unless you count genes that make me a big guy, or protein supplements, or creatine. I'm not sure where you draw the line here, but I've never taken testosterone supplements, or anti-estrogens. I've had cortisone shots, and I've had corticosteroids for immune system issues. But enough about me. The simple answer is "No." But by now you should realize there's no simple answer.
Lastly, for those of you paying attention, yeah, this is a super "libertarian" point of view on sport. That's me. I've got some sense in my head, but I tend to lean towards liberty and away from authority.
