rekrunner wrote:
I didn't say they believe doping is widespread. If that's what you understood, I can understand your response, but think it is based on poor comprehension on your part.
Athletes/managers/coaches dope the athletes with hope based on a promise, because someone thinks it is necessary.
They use many substances, regardless of proven effect -- hence the size of your "black market", as well as legal supplement markets.
You keep appealing to "all sports" because you have too little real data on distance running.
I would say it is rather naive to ignore doping prevalence among masters runners, and the temptation to slow the decline.
But I don't exclude athletes in their prime, and tried to make "non-exclusivity" clear.
Some doping is more "proven" than others, such as cycling and female sprinting.
Johnson?
I seek to put things in perspective, by separating knowledge from the fog, the myth, and the hype.
High doping prevalence is a problem in and of itself.
Armstronglivs wrote:
Prevalence is widespread because the practice is widespread, not because there is a "belief" that doping is widespread. Its effects on users are also established and not merely notional. It is in all sports and we can gauge its depth by the fact that the black market for doping is in billions of Euros. We also know that only a fraction of users are being caught and this is reinforced by information reported by Aljazeera from anti-doping sources that there are over a hundred undetectable products currently available.
It is further a specious claim to suggest that athletes mainly dope to recover their past glory. Most dopers caught - such as Armstrong, Johnson, Jones et al - were at their peak. It is without foundation in fact to suggest that athletes will be principled in their prime yet prepared to cheat when past it. This is the casuistry of an apologist who seeks to minimise the problem.
So doping is more a "hope than a promise"? There is blindness. And then there is wilful blindness.
Coffee is a stimulant - but not banned - and so are asthma inhalers, for which a prescription is required (and many athletes now claim to be asthmatic). If it is that easy to produce or acquire stimulants of even such a modest nature, how can you or anyone believe that it is difficult for the vastness of the pharmaceutical industry to routinely produce stimulants of a much more powerful variety?
We have known for twenty years that many drugs can be masked. The chemists are not producing undetectable drugs because they are mere placebos; they render them invisible to anti-doping laboratories because they contain banned ingredients that are known to be performance enhancing.
That you raise the subject of masters doping - which reports say is also affected by the practice - simply shows how pervasive doping is in every area of sport. No sport is quarantined from its influence and so it also goes for athletics and running, which documataries such as those shown recently on Aljazeera include it as being at the forefront of sports involved.
This information is generally available from anti-doping officials, athletes, whistleblowers and investigative journalists. But doping is a dark continent, and to depend on academics to explain it is like seeking the opinions explorers who have travelled little further than their libraries.