What percentage of professional athletes do EPO or dope?

I believe that most of them do. It's just a matter of who hides it better.

Tinman's group is probably clean

Most IMO.

What percentage of professional lawyers, doctors, etc do caffeine or aspirin?

Worldwide among championship athletes in the past decade:

Blood doping 15 - 20%, according to 2 - 3 studies.

Total 44%, according to 1 study.

Looking at the list of banned dopers, it appears reasonable that the blood dopers are in the minority, i.e. these studies confirm each other qualitatively.

I dot know if it is epo or something else but among world champ top 10 I would say at least 90% are doping

Among all professionals I would say 33-50%

casual obsever wrote:

Worldwide among championship athletes in the past decade:

Blood doping 15 - 20%, according to 2 - 3 studies.

Total 44%, according to 1 study.

Looking at the list of banned dopers, it appears reasonable that the blood dopers are in the minority, i.e. these studies confirm each other qualitatively.

I think when you factor in things like SARMs, testosterone gels, GHRP (growth hormone releasing peptides), etc., it's a high percentage. These substances are harder to test for and the ones that get careless or recieve bad doping advice usually get caught (or a drug ring is broken up).

Most athletes are looking for an edge...nothing new there since the dawn of professional sports. Winning pays the bills. Most who use PEDs will never get caught and ride off into the sunset at the end of thier careers with no blemishes on their record. And some of those that did get caught got out of it using a myriad of defenses at hearings claiming they were a victim of poor anti-doping measures.

An athlete can even microdose T in-competion and not get caught:

But people want to "believe" it's mostly clean. That's fine - and probably what they don't know won't hurt them if they're a diehard fan.

casual obsever wrote:

Worldwide among championship athletes in the past decade:

Blood doping 15 - 20%, according to 2 - 3 studies.

Total 44%, according to 1 study.

Looking at the list of banned dopers, it appears reasonable that the blood dopers are in the minority, i.e. these studies confirm each other qualitatively.

This. And these studies are of ALL athletes in attendance at championship events (including those with no chance of making it past the heats). Given the performance advantages that doping gives, the percentage of dopers will certainly be much higher among the top performers.

If you ain’t cheatin’, you ain’t tryin’.

What is the harm in PEDs? They aren’t harming the person taking them. In fact, they are making them healthier and better at their sport.

I’ve met dopers. They are healthy. They regret nothing and they shouldn’t. If you missed out on an Olympic team or a medal because you didn’t want to take PEDs, you’re a fool.

LoneStarXC wrote:

...

This. And these studies are of ALL athletes in attendance at championship events (including those with no chance of making it past the heats). Given the performance advantages that doping gives, the percentage of dopers will certainly be much higher among the top performers.

That's a little naive I think. We know for a fact that anti-doping cannot catch all doping. So it doesn't matter if everyone in a competition tests negative. You'd have to be a raging idiot to fail a drug test during a running event. The doping was done before the race or championship in question.

Cycling is always the best way to look at doping in any sort of endurance sport. There are a couple of reasons:

First, is that Grand Tours specifically are so tough, that riders will have to risk doping during the three week event to make sure they can remain competitive to the end.

Second, a number of high profile raids have busted many riders (Operation Puerto is still the biggest one)

Third, the ASO (French cycling authority), is particularly tough on doping, resulting in even more busts specifically during the tour. (Vinokourov, Landis to name two high profile ones).

Fourth, many cyclists from time gone by have eventually confessed.

Check this out...

1996 Tour winner Riis, admits to doping like 20 years later.

1997 Tour winner Ulrich, initially suspected with Operation Puerto, then confesses about 20 years later.

1998 winner Pantanti, busted for doping in 1999 Giro

1999-2005, Armstrong

2006 winner Landis busted right after he wins.

2008? - Michael Rasmussen who was leading the race and removed by his team towards the end when it was suspected he was doping...he later confessed.

2010+ Move on to Team Sky and the suspicion around Wiggans and Froome, including suspect drug deliveries, positive test for Salbutamol, and other abnormalities. That includes another 5 post 2010 tours.

Then go examine the top 10s of those races at the number of people busted or since confessed.

What it shows is that elite athletes dope, even when people are getting busted.

It's like asking how many of the ultra top enders are smoking/vaping/eating dope and shrooming. You go try to keep food down for 20-30 hours while on the move and tell me how it goes without a little green magic.

The studies Casual was talking about (I’m struggling to find them at the moment, but they have been posted on letsrun before) weren’t referring to positive tests. The blood doping paper (that gave the ~20% number) was based off of blood value abnormalities. Obviously, not all of those suspicious athletes were busted, because only ~1% of athletes actually get busted. The paper also stated that it was “unlikely to have overestimated” the prevalence of doping, so it’s a lower-bound estimate.

The ~45% number came from anonymous survey data (I believe from the Pan Arab Games in 2011), when they asked athletes if they had used PEDs in the last year. This number is also going to be underreported because people will lie on surveys, even if they’re anonymous.

My main point was just meant to be that, among the top athletes, the percent on PEDs is going to be higher than the percent of all competitors overall.

dope god wrote:

What percentage of professional athletes do EPO or dope?

Depends on the sport. Endurance sports like running 95% or more of the top ten in the world. NFL over 90%. NBA I would guess under 25%.

I think it was at the Olympics in one of the past couple cycles there was an anonymous survey and 40% of respondents admitted to doping. Across all sports. Forgive me if that's not 100% accurate but I believe it was around that figure.

probably about 95% of all top middle and long distance runners,and most cross country skiers,triathletes and speed skaters as well.some sprinters would use epo,but they normally prefer steroids and hgh.

I wonder how many top ultra runners are doping? Surely there's less in the way of testing...

To add, the last blood doping study was based on in-competition doping, so yes, the real number of blood dopers is likely indeed higher than these 15-18% found at the 2011 and 2013 worlds.

As for the survey, it was 44% at Worlds 2011 and 57% at Pan Arab 2011, and yes, the real number is likely somewhat higher. In brief, Prof. Pielke Jr. summarized that article in a 2018 paper in Sports Med as follows:

^This. That's why it's so strange to see many fans convinced that their favorite top stars are clean, especially the ones from the past with even less useful testing. The stats show how unlikely that is to be true.

The LRC general consensus is that approximately 110% of athletes dope. The overshooting 10% are hobbyjoggers who think they are athletes and therefore dope for little to no reason.

Probably 20% - skewed by nations such as Kenya, Russia, Morrocco etc.

What percentage of LetsRun competitive runners dope? More like 50 to 60%

The 2018 paper "casual obsever" references is here:

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40279-017-0792-1