All this talk about doping makes me wonder about how these former elite athletes are faring(sp?)healthwise after their drug use. Is this an old topic? It's new for me. Anyone with documented evidence or admission(s) by the athletes themselves?
I am sure it would benefit those young athletes considering illegal performance enhancing drugs.
Here's one:
Florence Griffith Joyner:
Poster child for "accused but never found guilty of doping". Reasons for this:
* in 1988 set times in 100/200 that show no signs of ever being beaten by any clean athlete
* had never run any times close those WR's before, though she had been competing for years
* her body had clearly changed and she had become much more muscular
* at the absolute pinnacle of her career, when it appeared she could continue competing for years without anyone touching her, she retired
* Other athletes had come forward to suggest that they had either give her drugs or knew her to have used drugs
Current health status:
dead
Ben Johnson is a convicted drug cheat (2 times?). Anyone know how his health is doing? I have heard nothing about him for awhile. Any Canadians know how he is doing these days?
( but I do know ONE thing: before he got busted, there was a picture of him on T&F News and his eyes were friggin' YELLOW. That boy was doped to the gills, and I am amazed his liver did not explode).
I also believe that several East German "women" that now admit to have used drugs (or been forced to use drugs, some unwittingly) have some serious health issues.
Decent article here should put a few people off. But judging by the number of deaths, not everyone has been put off enough.....
(From the IHT, author below)
Doping in sport
BATH, England By August 1914, when it was suspended for the duration of World War I, the Tour de France had been run 12 times and won by 10 different riders. One had already died tragically - René Pottier hanged himself months after winning the 1906 race - and by the time of the Armistice in 1918, three more Tour winners were dead amid the carnage of the Western Front.
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To lose four of the first 10 winners to violent deaths before the great race was 15 years old was an impressive rate of mortality - and it set a somber pattern. The latest casualty is Marco Pantani, winner of the 1998 Tour, who was found dead in Rimini last Saturday. He was 34.
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Many sports now make fierce demands on their competitors, and cycling more than most. Death and disablement can come from a variety of causes - among Tour winners since the race was interrupted for World War II, Hugo Koblet was killed in a car crash, and Luis Ocaña was a second suicide. But increasingly it is doping that is scything through sports like an epidemic.
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Since the ancient Greeks, sportsmen have always used stimulants. In the early days of the Tour, cyclists consumed large quantities of good old-fashioned alcohol. Between the wars, cocaine was the fashion. Then, in the 1950s and 1960s, came amphetamines, "la bomba" to Italians cyclists. Doping was in theory condemned and in practice winked at.
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Over the past 30 years more drugs emerged, but with benevolent origins. Steroids have medical properties, and erythropoietin, or EPO, is no more than a synthetic form of a natural metabolic product. Used carefully, it is a brilliant drug for the treatment of cardiac conditions.
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Used carelessly, alas, these drugs have side effects ranging from the merely unsightly - teenage athletes covered in thicker than usual acne are most likely on steroids - to the horrific. A generation of East German athletes had their lives ruined, and sometimes their sexes changed, by the unscrupulous use of steroids, in some cases without the young athletes' knowledge.
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But even when they know the consequences, sportsmen are too often prepared to take a chance with drugs that now combine extreme temptation with extreme danger. Although alcohol may make you feel better, it doesn't in truth "enhance performance" for cyclists any more than for journalists. While cocaine and amphetamines can keep fatigue at bay, they, too, have never made anyone ride faster, jump higher or hit a ball further.
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With the advent of steroids and EPO, there were for the first time drugs that did just that - but with calamitous side effects. The complications from steroids were bad enough, but EPO, by thickening the blood, makes that blood harder for the heart to circulate, and sometimes the heart gives up.
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In hindsight we can date the clandestine arrival of EPO with grim accuracy. Orienteering is a mixture of cross-country running and walking, popular in Scandinavia. Between 1989 and 1992, seven young Swedish orienteering enthusiasts died mysteriously. They may well have learned about the magic potion from cyclists. Between 1987 and 1990, no fewer than 20 Belgian and Dutch cyclists died from otherwise inexplicable nocturnal heart attacks. You don't need to be Sherlock, with or without his syringe, to guess what was going on.
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By a kind of bitter irony, Pantani almost certainly did not die from the same cause. He had been slung out of the 1999 Giro d'Italia - when he had almost won it - on suspicion of EPO, but he hadn't ridden competitively since late last spring, and although he was being treated for depression he had no reason to be taking performance-enhancing drugs.
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And yet Pantini was the eighth cyclist under 35 to die suddenly since the beginning of last year. The seventh death was two days earlier, when the Belgian cyclist Johan Sermon, 21, died of a heart attack in his sleep.
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Not only have American sporting authorities been tardy in addressing this problem, there are Americans - athletes, administrators, journalists - who have adopted a robustly disdainful attitude. Why shouldn't guys be allowed to take what they damn well please?
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Well, for one thing, doping is cheating, and it destroys the objective basis of athletic competition. Baseball fans cherish statistics, but those are now meaningless. The records for home runs have been effortlessly broken in recent years by batters whose physiques have been transformed beyond anything they could possibly have achieved through weight training.
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More important, doping is now a true plague: widespread and deadly. We love sport because of its epic, gladiatorial quality. And yet the casualties of professional sports more and more seem like the original gladiators, in Byron's bleak line, "butchered to make a Roman holiday." Is that what we really want?
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Geoffrey Wheatcroft writes a weekly sports column for The Financial Times and is author of "Le Tour: A History of the Tour de France 1903-2003."
Pantini was an admitted cocaine addict!! Pretty sure thats what killed him.
Agree totally with that. he bit of the article that's the most relevant is the sheer number of deaths that occured when EPO usage was in its infancy. Dropped like flies....
Since he's from the same area where I grew up, I sometimes wonder what happened to Dennis Mitchell. That "6-pack and LOTS of sex" rationale for a positive test was inspired, as was the time he blew off an idiodic question from Chris Collingsworth. God, that was funny.
Florence Griffith Joyner died from asphyxiation resulting from an epileptic seizure. Whether she did drugs or not, whatever side effects that steroids and EPO have, I don't believe that Epilepsy is one of them.
Average_Joe wrote:
Florence Griffith Joyner died from asphyxiation resulting from an epileptic seizure. Whether she did drugs or not, whatever side effects that steroids and EPO have, I don't believe that Epilepsy is one of them.
You don't think overindulging on steroids and/or hGH can alter brain function or, as with Lyle Alzado, gross brain structure? That would be news, as steroids are notoriously tumorogenic if abused. Not all seizures can be traced to classic epilepsy - drug withdrawal and a slew of other things can serve as culprits.
Also, there's no knowing just how many different PEDs she was on. Doubt she was on EPO, though, since she quit in 1988.
Sir Lance-alot wrote:
Ben Johnson is a convicted drug cheat (2 times?). Anyone know how his health is doing? I have heard nothing about him for awhile. Any Canadians know how he is doing these days?
( but I do know ONE thing: before he got busted, there was a picture of him on T&F News and his eyes were friggin' YELLOW. That boy was doped to the gills, and I am amazed his liver did not explode).
Actually he was caught 3 times (the last being a test set up by his manager).
He's recently launched a clothing line ironically titled 'Catch me':
http://www.boston.com/sports/articles/2005/04/28/johnson_has_been_slow_to_admit_wrongdoing?pg=3Average_Joe wrote:
Florence Griffith Joyner died from asphyxiation resulting from an epileptic seizure. Whether she did drugs or not, whatever side effects that steroids and EPO have, I don't believe that Epilepsy is one of them.
The autopsy that was reported publically, was performed and reported by a private examiner hired by FloJo's husband and family. The report then went through their lawyer before being released. Do you think there was any chance in hell it would come back as anything remotely steroid related? I obviously have no idea, but that scenario certainly makes one think twice about the validity.
Mac Wilkins was an admitted steroid abuser. When he graduated from high school he was 6-2 180. As a Duck and a pro he was 100 pounds heavier. Now he looks AIDS skinny again.
bart r wrote:
The autopsy that was reported publically, was performed and reported by a private examiner hired by FloJo's husband and family.
Not true. The autopsy was performed by the Orange County Coroners office, not by any "private examiner" hired by the family.
Pantani committed suicide.
Average_Joe wrote:
bart r wrote:The autopsy that was reported publically, was performed and reported by a private examiner hired by FloJo's husband and family.
Not true. The autopsy was performed by the Orange County Coroners office, not by any "private examiner" hired by the family.
And it showed that she had enlarged an enlarged heart. HgH anyone?
http://www.newsweek.org/id/5278740/Question wrote:
And it showed that she had enlarged an enlarged heart. HgH anyone?
http://www.newsweek.org/id/5278740/
an athlete with an enlarged heart? what are the odds!?
The odds for an enlarged heart that would kill you are pretty slim! In fact, part of the reason we all work out is to avoid heart problems. FloJo's enlarged heart was not a "normal" athletic heart, it was enlarged enough to kill her. Why are people in such denial about her using HGH?
When she died I hoped that the truth would come out and that people would say what really happened. Her family being brave enough to admit the truth could have saved others from making the same tragic mistake. Lyle Alzado was brave to speak the truth. More people need to do the same in order for change to occur. Suspension from your sport is obviously not a big enough detterent, people only try and beat the test. BUT DEATH at an early age might scare some more people out of using.
Enlarged Heart wrote:
The odds for an enlarged heart that would kill you are pretty slim! In fact, part of the reason we all work out is to avoid heart problems. FloJo's enlarged heart was not a "normal" athletic heart, it was enlarged enough to kill her. Why are people in such denial about her using HGH?
For the record (again), her enlarged heart did not kill her. An epileptic seizure did.
how about the death penalty if you are caught doping ? That would sort out the problem real quick.
Enlarged Heart wrote:
BUT DEATH at an early age might scare some more people out of using.
Not really.
In Rome many of the gladiators were free men. The prospect of death did not deter them from seeking adulation, fame and glory.
Drugs carry much lesser risk then the glads ever faced.
Enlarged Heart wrote:
BUT DEATH at an early age might scare some more people out of using.
When was the survey of olympic athletes, in which they were asked what they would do if they were offered a drug that would guarantee them an olympic gold but which would kill them in five years.
Was it 75% that said they would take it.