Doping Locally - Success on the Small Scale?

[Moose McKnuckles]

I would like all of you to know that all my Top 30 finishes have been clean. Both of 'em.

 

[Boeing]

Take a forty-five year old, have him religiously follow a good 15 - 20 hour a week training program along with a good diet, and in a year he'll be as hard a nails. You will not be able to tell the difference between him and another bozo who using a half-assed training program while slapping testosterone gel on his chest.

so ideological

give us a test worthy of a sample survey at least

I have said it before on previous threads. I know for a fact dudes request and receive what I might call non symptomatic testosterone. allegedly symptomatic for the aging male reasons we don't need to joke about. there are a number of doctors who will just write a script for this stuff with out a test for reasons I can only speculate. Dudes go in, say they are having trouble in the sack, say they have bad reactions to V or the others, don't want a 4 hour 911 call and boom a script.


Now in response to the original thread: I can't think for the life of me why dudes do it just to beat chest at the end of what really is a nothing more than a tempo training tide more often than not. (see my general complaint post)

but they are killing it so wtf right?

 

[MacRoadie]

Holy Crap, Ralph Elliott is juicing?

Ralph is high on life baby! That and a steady soundtrack of '70's and '80's tunes...

 

[Boeing]

I would like all of you to know that all my Top 30 finishes have been clean. Both of 'em.

I didn't fall off the back last week and led a little tempo up front for the first time in years: Clean man.

 

[rhubroma]

PED's are like anything else that's illegal or extra-legal. If you're not looking for them you're not going to know how to get them.

Also, keep in mind that many racers don't care to let their friends/peers know what they're doing because...


1) They want to perpetuate the myth that aging yuppies like themselves can experience athletic performance peaks that rival or out-do anything they could have possibly done in their late teens to early twenties through sheer hard work (American Puritanical self-delusion that dictates anything is possible if you just work hard enough) and...

2) Users don't want to lose their competitive edge by telling others they use.

I can't believe some of you guys are so naive.

The other point, and I've made it a few times before but it apparently needs re-stating, is that yuppies don't really come from an athletically gifted gene pool. This is not where America's best athletes come from. So why would anyone believe that cycling is the only sport where these guys hit maximum athletic capacity only when they become master's racers? What a physiological oddity these yuppies are...

As many are aware I live in Italy. I have seen how strong guys who didn't make it to the pros, continued to dope as a matter of habit in the amateur curcuit. Because that's what they were weened on coming up through the ranks. I have seen these guys, many of whom have families, devote their very souls to the sport, wrecking their marriages, with fridges that look more like pharmacies than places where the kids get their after school snacks.

I have been around the NAS investigations that brought down a doping racket in Lazio after one 40 year old, who suddenly started going balistic, died on a training ride because his heart literally exploded from the third generation EPO in his system. Another guy, just recently, in his mid 40's with three kids and a bike shop business (his brother was a track World Champion in the 80's), tested positive for three substances after a race he finished 2nd in.

I will spare you the rest of the details.

Yet I still wouldn't be competent in puting myself on a good program. And I wasn't bad. Go figure.

 

[BotanyBay]

Ralph is high on life baby! That and a steady soundtrack of '70's and '80's tunes...

 

[MacRoadie]

Gotta find a pic of the camper...

 

[ergmonkey]

Anybody who is slower than you is weak, and anybody who is faster is on da dope.

While I have no doubt that many Masters aged athletes are getting some extra help, don't overblow the problem so that you see dopers hiding in every BMW. At the local amateur level there is a huge variation in athletic talent. Most results come from the amount of time people can devote to training and the effectiveness of that training. There are a lot of guys who have twenty years of training experience and are wicked fast. No dope required.

As far as middle aged people not being capable of being in better shape than they were in their teens or twenties, go race an Ironman distance tri sometime. That whole freakin' sport is filled with yuppies who train twenty hours a week and are in better shape at forty than they were at twenty.

And a lot of yuppies were the type A personality jackass jocks in high school who went on to have decent careers and at middle age have lots of free time to devote to their hobbies. The whole personal coaching industry is supported by people like that.

I think this post is spot on. And for those who (willfully?) missed the point, BroDeal is not saying that masters racing is anywhere near dope-free.

Rather, the talent pool is thin enough at that amateur level that hard work and talent will allow some guys to crush many others. From what I've seen, there isn't much of a correlation between talent and the decision to continue long-term in this sport as a masters racer.

Some guys will definitely dope to get an ego boost out of beating guys who don't matter anyway. In other cases, though, you'll see guys who have always been talented, do train hard, and continue to beat up on all of the guys they should beat up on.

Basically, there are two types of riders whose masters age strength shouldn't be too suspicious: 1) riders who have always been talented and who continue to work hard; and 2) athletes who demonstrated talent and strength in other sports as young studs and then turned to cycling later as fit, well-developed athletes.

As for the poster who questioned what sort of a forty-five year-old has the time to train 15-20 hours a week, well, I can tell you one type that I know quite a few of: extremely intelligent, ambitious people who made millions and millions of dollars before the dot-com bubble burst. Plenty of "yuppies," plenty of "type A personalities," and plenty of guys who love to ride bikes hard in this category. And before you get the wrong idea: no, I'm not one of them.

 

[HelmutRoole]

Of course they are

If you've got guys willing to put in 20-hour weeks, believe me, putting a needle in your glute is nothing. Nothing. Masters riders doping? Of course they're doping: there is no testing.

Now, are there some great masters out there who are clean? Who win races clean? Absolutely. But there's plenty -- I'd say 20 percent of the top 20 guys -- are not clean.

And are there guys who were great in their day who come back to the sport and are still great within their age group? Sure. But some of those guys -- especially national team guys and guys who did it internationally -- leaned to dope in their early years and it's ingrained. In their mind, it's part of the sport. EPO? Maybe not so much. But testosterone, steroids and amphetamines definitely yes.

One might ask, but isn't racing a masters race just recreational? This link explains a lot. Doping is fun.

We know there are some top masters and local pros who either test positive or get caught up in some investigation. Not many. But weighed against the amount of testing and investigations? These guys don't have to pass a single test locally. I'd say, if you see a guy cleaning up locally but won't race a UCI or national race, then you've got to wonder.

 

[MarkvW]

All the young baldies.

Check their nuts. One pair looks more like raisins.

A lot of prematurely bald young pros is also an indicator. I wonder how peloton baldness compares to baldness in the general population.

 

[Juicy McDrip]

Sort of an aside from the usual banter, but I take a keener, more skeptical look at the local shop-ride heroes these days. You know - the guys who always smash everyone on local rides and semi-important local races but who always seem to be too busy to compete in the events where there's any testing - no matter how limited.

I was too naive for a number of years, but now I speculate that at least a few of the local big fish were ordering their goods from a pharmacist, who himself was also likely growing his massive jambes with a little chemical help.

A bit of sour grapes, I guess, but these fools deserve a special kick in the groin for needing to boost their egos at the local level through PED use.

Is anyone else more skeptical of their geographical contemporaries?

Did Rose Kennedy have black dresses in her closet?

Yes.