Posted In: Blog Discussion
As doping revelations continue to come out in sports like cycling, baseball, and now golf, track has had a relatively dope-free summer so far. Albiet, the World Championships is still a month away but so far there haven't been any major players in the sport of track caught and just as important there haven't been any rumors or allegations (which always seem to have at least a hint of truth
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Which sport is the dirtiest?
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bodybuilding anyone?
Is that a sport?
On a related note, I just added weightlifting to the options.
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Dirtiest? Mudwrestling or Cheerleading
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Yeah i know OL's that do that as well…the weightlifters def are the dirtiest…who can clean and jerk 3 times their body weight clean !
cycling is evil…painkillers, hormones, stimulants, blood boosters…what doesn't an elite cyclist take?
Cycling seems to be one of the sports that has the most pervasive doping problem from top to bottom. It also seems to have the most openly acknowledged team sponsored doping protocols.
I think in track that the large majority of competitors at the elite level are clean. This isn't necessarily the case with the finalists / medalists but I think it could be said for the overall field at the elite level.
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i think that while lifting is really dirty no sport has widespread cheating like you find in cycling, from top to bottom you find that it comes close to a majority of the cyclists are doing some form of doping. many attribute this to the modern day courses being impossible to complete without "help" but i think its almost impossible to say that cycling isnt the dirtiest sport in terms of people cheating and getting caught regularly
Is that any different than saying its impossible to compete in track with being dirty? You may not medal if you run a 9.8x time, but you are supposed to be able to compete clean? That would have been a WR not long ago and now it won't get you a medal, but sure, you can compete LIFETIME clean.
Cycling as a sport actually has some testing protocols, which is why you probably find people. The NFL does in-house testing, as does baseball, basketball, etc. If you think they are going to let the star qb/rb test positive for painkillers or some crap like that you're crazy. If you catch a couple, you can make it look like you are actually trying to clean up the sport.
Cycling is very dirty because the athletes can reap huge benefits from a very wide range of drugs. Speed-power athletes can benefit from drugs like EPO and insulin but I think it's less than what cyclists benefit from testosterone and other anabolic agents.
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many of professional cyclings testing protocols are joke to the athletes in any other sport ie track you would be suspended for skipping tests but this regularly happens in cycling and the difference between cycling and other sports is that the cheating is only more of a benefit as the distances rise as a normal body would begin to break down way more quickly than one with the help of steroid hormones xtra red blood cells ect.
gdelia are you serious? Any other sport? How many sports are WADA tested, randomly, throughout the entire year and have national organizations like USADA around as well? Not football, baseball, or powerlifting, that's for sure. Where is the info on missing tests for cycling more common than in track?
Maybe you should check out USADA's site where you can see how many times certain athletes have been tested. Kind of funny how some world record holders and world/olympic champs are only tested 3x-4x (including meets like nationals and randoms) in an entire season, while guys new to the scene, no titles or anything, are tested 8-9x throughout a season. But that is just a coincidence right? And it makes a lot of sense?
Undoubtedly the dirtiest sports are the ones with most to benefit (both financially and performance wise) and the least to regulate doping. To me, this leaves football and baseball as prime candidates for mega doping problems.
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Do you really think that baseball and football are worse than cycling? It seems like all of the big names in cycling over the last year have been cast aside b/c of doping. i can see baseball having a similar problem because they do haeve quite a few players getting banned and the whole barry bonds thing, but football I really cant think of anyone besides Merriman(b/c i read it in a mag today) that has been caught.
Do you really think that baseball and football are worse than cycling? It seems like all of the big names in cycling over the last year have been cast aside b/c of doping. i can see baseball having a similar problem because they do haeve quite a few players getting banned and the whole barry bonds thing, but football I really cant think of anyone besides Merriman(b/c i read it in a mag today) that has been caught.
read:
https://www.t-nation.com/readTopic.do;jsessionid=0E920705B77FE755E521D3C73F394B7F.hydra?id=473640
I meant to also add to my previous post that athletes need to have the means to be able to do it. PEDs aren't cheap so those with the most expendable income (such as pro ball players) or those associated with a sponsored team (with a team / sponsor supported protocol) may have greater resources to get their PEDs.
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Davan the fact of the matter is cycling has consistently seen their top riders get caught for doping to put this in a football perspective think of tom Brady being accused of cheating all the time (lance armstrong) Peyton manning caught (Ivan basso) young and upcoming carson palmer getting suspended (Tyler Hamilton) fan favorite drew Brees getting caught and suspended (Jan Ulrich) and right when you think that the worst has passed Phillip rivers and his entire chargers team forfeits after getting caught with another persons blood (Alexandre Vinikourov *i know i spelt that wrong) and a number of the top players being suspended for cheating. in my opinion doping while not tested for as often in football and baseball as it is in cycling would have a very hard being so rampant through out its top performers
also after reading the Tnation article i am still skeptical because i know steroid users who all justify their use as everyone else is doing it so i have to just to keep up so for this player to say 75% of the NFL are using i think is irresponsible and a gross exaggeration
Davan the fact of the matter is cycling has consistently seen their top riders get caught for doping to put this in a football perspective think of tom Brady being accused of cheating all the time (lance armstrong) Peyton manning caught (Ivan basso) young and upcoming carson palmer getting suspended (Tyler Hamilton) fan favorite drew Brees getting caught and suspended (Jan Ulrich) and right when you think that the worst has passed Phillip rivers and his entire chargers team forfeits after getting caught with another persons blood (Alexandre Vinikourov *i know i spelt that wrong) and a number of the top players being suspended for cheating. in my opinion doping while not tested for as often in football and baseball as it is in cycling would have a very hard being so rampant through out its top performers
also after reading the Tnation article i am still skeptical because i know steroid users who all justify their use as everyone else is doing it so i have to just to keep up so for this player to say 75% of the NFL are using i think is irresponsible and a gross exaggeration
Good job picking one of the only positions (and particularly the players) that benefits the least from PEDs, other than painkillers at least. How about the top LBs, RBs, etc.? Do you really believe a guy breaks his leg and comes back in less than 8 weeks to play full speed on it… without drugs?
I think your position shows your lack of knowledge. Even at the higher level high schools pain killers, corticosteroids, and the like are most certainly abused by athletes and their families.
And of course in a PERFORMANCE sport there will be doping among all of the best, because if you truly believe PEDs work as well as they do, it is the only rational outcome (because those that don't use will be sorted out by not hitting the performance levels). In football, doping takes a different angle. Certain positions certainly benefit more from increased size and strength, while others simple need to be able to wake up the next morning without pain. You cannot compare how they are doping (because that will obviously vary), just if they are or are not. This is like with golf. I doubt any golfer is going to use AAS to win big–there simply isn't that kind of benefit from AAS in the sport–but is getting laser eye surgery any different?
thats just an estimation we dont KNOW how many use in football. However, we dont KNOW how many use in baseball either. I'm sure there is a lot of use in both leagues but as far publicity: cycling and baseball > football.
We don't KNOW how many use in cycling or track either. I mean, Lance, Greene, Asafa, and Gay could all be clean ;).
You simply cannot compare in-house testing to the style of testing both cycling and track face. It simply is not comparable.
You simply cannot compare in-house testing to the style of testing both cycling and track face. It simply is not comparable.
As Dr. Frank Conners would say…"I concur."
ELITETRACK Founder
truth is the biggest drug users are non-athletes.
A fancy program of all the latest stuff might be expensive, but you can always geta bottle of something for ~$40.
Anyone who is competing in any sport has their life together in at least a basic sense. They are following a training program, nutrition program etc. They compete and are possibly tested. Any systematic program will involve less drugs than what gym rats are doing.
Gyms are full of bouncers, biker wanna-bes, and other random losers who take tons of stuff whenever it is available.
They don't really care what or when they take it.
[quote author="Winnesota" date="1185689446"]
thats just an estimation we dont KNOW how many use in football. However, we dont KNOW how many use in baseball either. I'm sure there is a lot of use in both leagues but as far publicity: cycling and baseball > football.
We don't KNOW how many use in cycling or track either. I mean, Lance, Greene, Asafa, and Gay could all be clean ;).
You simply cannot compare in-house testing to the style of testing both cycling and track face. It simply is not comparable.
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your absolutely right, but we do KNOW more about who uses in cycling and track compared to football.
truth is the biggest drug users are non-athletes.
A fancy program of all the latest stuff might be expensive, but you can always geta bottle of something for ~$40.
Yeah but we're not talking about the gym rat, meat heads….we're talking about sports. Which sport is the dirtiest? My guess is that the PED user % of the NFL and MLB are higher than any gym in the U.S. outside of perhaps some really hardcore powerlifting only gyms.
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Not really a sport but relevant nonetheless:
Hogan: I thank God I'm alive
And he has demanded an end to the decades-long cover-up of steroid abuse in the sport.
Hogan, 54, took the muscle-enhancing drugs almost daily for 16 years during his career and says he can spot a user a mile off.
With more than 100 grapplers dying before the age of 50 in the last decade, he is begging others to face up to the crisis.
The Sun has been leading an anti-steroid abuse campaign since wrestler Chris Benoit murdered his wife and seven-year-old son before committing suicide in June.
A handful of former stars have already spoken out and prompted US politicians to start investigating the industry.
But many in the WWE, the world's biggest fight franchise, deny there is a problem and have blasted their ex-colleagues as bitter failures who haven't wrestled in years.
They cannot same the same about Hogan, wrestling's equivalent of Pele or Muhammad Ali who was fighting for them just 12 months ago.
In an exclusive Sun interview, he said: "Are steroids a problem in wrestling? Oh God yeah. They have always been a part of the business. It's prevalent.
"But there's not some big mystery to it. Just open your eyes and it's there. You can look at a wrestler and pretty much tell.
"They will be above their weight range, with these big veins. My body weight is around 285lb, depending on how much junk I eat. Even if I was 25 and clean, I could probably only carry 300lb.
"Yet when I was wrestling I weighed anywhere between 320 and 340lb, because my body was full of water weight.
"My face was puffy, my arms were so bulky I couldn't touch my shoulders. You could take one look at me and know I was on something.
"Steroids have been around for ever in other sports too, but if we have to pick on somebody now then let's pick on wrestling.
"I'm glad the business is in the spotlight because they're probably the only ones smart enough, after being able to dodge it for so long, to know how to fix it."
The Hulkster added: "I remember up until the early 1990s any wrestler could walk into a doctor and they'd write you a prescription for steroids.
"Then there was a huge trial where WWE boss Vince McMahon was unfairly accused and rightly acquitted of distributing the drugs to his workers.
"This ushered in the era of wrestlers playing 'hide and seek'.
"If they can get away with things then they will. But now I think we're at the 11th hour.
"We can't have hide and seek being played any more.
"The WWE say they are drug testing, but if they are then it's not good enough. Because these guys have to stop dying."
Despite going on TV at the time to deny it, Hogan has since confessed he regularly used steroids between 1975 and 1991.
In that period he helped turn the WWE, then known as the WWF, from a New York-based wrestling group into a global entertainment brand.
In 1984 he won their world heavyweight championship, holding it on and off for the best part of the next seven years and starring in the main event at six of their first seven WrestleMania extravaganzas.
But behind his superhero mystique lay a dirty secret.
In his 2003 autobiography Hogan admitted: "I would tell kids to train, say their prayers and take their vitamins. But it wasn't just vitamins I was taking.
"But at that time every wrestler I knew was on steroids. They were part of my generation. I'm not making excuses but they were everywhere. And a lot of that had to do with what we knew about them, which obviously wasn't enough.
"The most commonly prescribed were testosterone, Deca-Durabolin and Dianabol. I never had a question about whether I would take them.
"It was part of my daily regimen. Did you take a shower? Yeah. Did you brush your teeth? Yeah. Did you take your steroids? Yeah.
"That was the deal. It was how I lived."
Alongside steroids, experts also blame painkillers and recreational drug abuse for the high number of deaths among young wrestlers.
Again it is something Hogan witnessed and he is pleased to say the industry has made progress on the latter.
He said: "There's definitely much less of a party scene and cocaine use today.
"When I went back to the WWE, I'd go down to the Marriott bar after the show – and all you would see is Ric Flair there with a Jack Daniels and Hulk Hogan drinking a beer.
"In the old days EVERY wrestler would be in the bar and then they'd go out and stay out all night.
"But now they are all upstairs on their computers.
"Maybe they're not playing games up there, but it certainly seems a lot better.
"As for painkillers, like steroids, they have always been around. I was naïve when I first entered wrestling and didn't even know what they were.
"But there was a point later on where I got hurt and found out??? pretty quickly!
"I used them but not to the point of abusing and to the levels of the horror stories I've heard.
"I always knew my limitations and had regular blood tests and physicals.
"During the years when I would hear of these massive doses of pills some guys would take, I remember thinking they would laugh at me if they knew what I was involved in. I would be a big joke."
Hogan is currently in talks to start his own promotion, in which the focus will be firmly taken off those with superhuman physiques.
He said: "I don't know what the other federations can do, but I do know what I can do and it's all part of my plan for a new wrestling idea.
"It came from another person and when they told it to me it was the smartest thing I'd ever heard.
"I have been speaking to people from the American television networks and other important people in LA. In the first two weeks they raised $40million (£20million). I need about $80-100million to start it up.
"If me and my partners pull it off then the wrestlers will have a more natural look and an easier schedule – all of the things people are saying the business needs.
"And then Vince McMahon and everyone else in the business will have to follow suit."
Hogan is fully aware that his stance opens him up to charges of hypocrisy.
Critics argue he was the "poster boy" for steroids throughout much of his career and other wrestlers emulated him to get the same "main event" physique.
So isn't Hulk Hogan's plea to get steroids out of wrestling like George Bush calling for troops to leave Iraq?
The Hulkster replies: "I'm not trying to repent but I am being honest about my failings. I want youngsters to be educated.
"If I was 25 right now, coming into this business, I don't know what I'd be like in that locker room.
"But I know one thing. Wrestling needs to make sure everything is above board.
"So is it hypocritical of me? Yes.
"But is it hypocritical of me now in 2007? No. I think it's more like poetic justice.
"I've learned from being around, surviving and watching the many mistakes I and others made.
"I thank God I'm still alive!"
ELITETRACK Founder
Even cycling is ahead of baseball[/b]
Gwen Knapp
Tabloid headline writers got a few yucks after Barry Bonds took Hank Aaron's home run crown last week. The Boston Herald's back page blared: "King Con," and the New York Post spelled the magic number, 756, in syringes, just as it had done a year earlier when Bonds tied Babe Ruth for second place with No. 714.
But as a steroid-themed joke, Major League Baseball is still a long way from its punch line. Professional cycling, a farce of Monty Python-in-South Park proportions, is much closer.
It was ridiculously easy to take shots at the Tour de France this year, as contender after contender peeled off in doping disgrace. Wes Craven movies leave more major characters standing.
The apparent low points came when two riders, Patrik Sinkewitz and Cristian Moreni, flunked A-sample tests for synthetic testosterone and said, in effect: "Don't bother screening the B sample. I did it, and I'm outta here."
Their candor added to the abject comedy of the Tour, but it also represented a huge leap forward from the "it must have been a tainted supplement, or those nasty French hosts or, whatever O.J.'s using as his latest alibi" blather routinely doled out by dopers.
For years, many athletes saw drug testing as a veneer, creating the appearance of clean competition while stopping only the occasional, spectacularly careless cheat. They assumed that the suits who run the Olympics and other international events would look the other way, risking whiplash if necessary, when evidence of doping surfaced.
The Olympics have become more credibly vigilant, and crackdowns at the last two Tours suggest that cycling means business, rather than business as usual. Baseball's turn hasn't come yet. When it does, ballplayers will be dragged off the field at their peak, not allowed – a la Rafael Palmeiro – to rack up their 3,000th hit before a positive test is revealed.
The commissioner, instead of boasting about the game's testing policy, will be truly humbled by the enormous and complicated task of eradicating doping. He will sound more like Tour de France director Christian Prudhomme, who said: "I started this job believing that we could change this system, but it's not enough. There has to be a revolution."
Two weeks after the finish of the Tour, the cycling joke is still running. The eventual champion, Alberto Contador, was quickly banned from another race, the Hamburg Cyclassics, because of his connection to the Spanish blood-doping investigation known as Operation Puerto. On Friday, Contador (King Con II?) became unemployed when the Discovery Channel team suspended operations, succumbing to financial backlash from the doping scandals.
Discovery Channel was the Murderers' Row of cycling, sponsoring Contador and Lance Armstrong as they won eight of the last nine Tours. Imagine the BALCO investigation bringing the Yankees to their knees, or even the A's, who have housed three superstars now strongly linked to doping – Jason Giambi, Mark McGwire and Jose Canseco.
The players' union takes a lot of well-deserved heat for keeping testing at bay until 2004, but the owners never swung for the fences to keep doping out of the sport. In 1994, six years after Boston fans chanted "steroids" at a preening Canseco, the owners shut down the game over their own inability to control player salaries. They would never have done the same thing to get strict testing and penalties, and if they had tried, the union would have caved.
The owners didn't insist on testing until Ken Caminiti's confession pressed them to come up with a glossy response. They didn't put teeth into the policy until the BALCO investigation and Congress forced the issue.
Commissioner Bud Selig waited a long time before he hired former Sen. George Mitchell to lead an MLB-sponsored investigation. It happened almost a year and a half after the substantive information about Bonds and Giambi had appeared in print, when The Chronicle published their grand-jury testimony. Giambi halfway 'fessed up two months after that, and Congress went into high gear. MLB shuffled along.
Then the book "Game of Shadows" appeared, first as a cover-story excerpt in Sports Illustrated, then in its entirety as a best-seller. Finally, the commissioner acted, undercutting the theory that lightning never strikes twice in the same place. At least three thunderbolts hit Selig before he noticed.
The Mitchell investigation might strip whatever veneer is left on MLB's reputation, but don't bet on it. Cycling had to go through two very separate collisions with law enforcement – the Festina arrests in 1998 and Operation Puerto this time – before it really found religion.
Baseball is only in the first stage, denial. Then there is the NFL, where Pacman Jones is warming up the audience. Suspended by Commissioner Roger Goodell for bad behavior, Jones saw an easy transition from pro football to pro wrestling, as if he were switching departments in the same company. His ambitions were legally challenged because of the risk of injury to the Titans' investment, but it's too late to erase the winking message Jones has sent about football's kinship with juicers in the ring. If the NFL isn't humiliated, it's not paying attention.
Are sportswriters paying attention now that they have decamped from the Tour de Barry? By itself, a headline tainting Bonds is a cheap shot. If the media make him the fall guy and move on, the joke is on them.
E-mail Gwen Knapp at gknapp@sfchronicle.com
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