gooner said:Good interview with The Secret Footballer. He's asked about PED use.
You write about players using creatine, which is obviously legal to use, but do you think there’s an issue in football with illegal (or indeed, legal) performance-enhancing drugs. Did you ever come across it in your experience of playing the game and do you believe it’s naive to assume football doesn’t have the kind of problems that other sports, most notably cycling and athletics, have suffered from in recent times?
I think that recreational drugs in the summer are rife. Cocaine is rife in the summer. Ecstasy is common too. But in season, recreational drugs are pretty much — although there are one or two rare exceptions — non-existent.
It just isn’t worth the risk, there is so much to lose and everybody knows the rules and the implications. And I don’t think many players miss recreational drugs, because they never took them in the years before they became footballers.
The vast majority of us, while not being a fully fledged professional until we’ve signed that first contract, have acted as professionals since we were 10 years old. So recreational drugs don’t often cross our paths. It’s the exposure to recreational drugs at an early age that is dangerous, but footballers tend to sidestep those pitfalls.
The concern is if so-called doping doctors infiltrate our game. There is already a ban in this country on blood spinning to increase white-blood cell count and speed up injury healing, but it’s legal in Germany. So we all travel to Germany and come back again.
Morally, you may argue that that is wrong, but then you would be biased towards the fact that we consider it illegal rather than contemplating the fact that it is legal elsewhere, and not in the back of beyond, but in a first world footballing hotbed.
http://www.the42.ie/secret-footballer-interview-2-3194751-Jan2017/?utm_source=twitter_self
Sounds like a massive deflection to me, on the level of lances (never tested positive)
Q. Do you guys use peds
A. No.
Oh wait, but "no" on it's own will look like a pathetic answer from a blog that pretends to give a behind the scenes look, so let's change the subject to something completely irrelevant and non related to appear honest, and answer that we take recreational drugs. But actually it's only during the summer ,(which in European football is a period that lasts around 10 days) and we never do so during the other 350 days of the year.
Then let's add the classic 2010's omerta line about "grey area" and the "potential" that one or two people might go to extreme lengths to get a tiny benefit while still following the rules, and totally ignore the mountains of evidence that football players are free to dope to pantani levels and that many have been doing so for several decades already.