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Performance enhancement.
NB: Originally posted elsewhere on the Global Riders Network and appears via syndication.
Do MTBrs use performance enhancing drugs or is it just a roadie thing?
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Beer does it for me. Not too many coffee shops out there.
some weekend mornings if I feel a little bit lethargic but do not want miss a days riding I will pop 1 cold n flu tablet & swig some CocaCola to get me going!(60hr working weeks do not help)-then use quality craft beer as an after ride beverage!!!
Given that Lance 'won' the Leadville 100 in '09 & Levi in '10...
Basically, I'm sure you will find elite athletes in all types of sports who bend the rules. Soccer players who take the piss and dive. Rugby players who gouge eyes. And then you will find those who take drugs because they cannot scythe down their opponents or grab their balls as a means to get ahead.
Sadly sports are never clean, it's a fact of life. Even if you removed all the sponsors and all the prize money there would still be those who would cheat to win just because of their ego.
They key is to know this and just enjoy your sport, not worrying what the rest are up to
The answer would be yes, at most levels.
The 2004 MTB doco Road to Athens features a Belgian guy who is completely dominant on the world cup in XC... until getting caught for using Edgar.
Yes.
Imagine how easy it is at club level with no testing to bulk up the legs quickly with some steroids. That's where it starts.
the pressure on elite athletes to perform week in week out no wonder it goes on, like most performance enhancers/drugs they should be legal, then they can be educated and managed rather than being swept under the carpet
Yep, thats the answer for everything thats hard to manage, eh... legalise it.
Got kids? I thought sport was meant to encourage good health.
I use a performance enhancer when ridin - oh wait you mean for riding an MTB not ridinerrr OOPS!
so what defines performance enhancer's .. would pre-workout supps be illegal? as u can buy them from any gym supps store , or is there some underground roid munching drugs that we are all missing out on ?
wonder if ya can OD on "shotz" style gels , they seem to help when going gets tough
If you are talking about cycling - & I think we are
- look to the governing body, in this case the UCI. The UCI publish a list of banned substances that they test for. These may be performance enhancing (like growth hormone, steroids, etc) or they might be masking agents (cortisone I believe) that are known to confuse the testing process for performance enhancing drugs. Ie. you can't take cortisone because doing so means we can't accurately test you for steroids.
As I'm sure you can imagine, this banned substance list is very useful. Especially if your team doctor comes up with a concoction that isn't on the list but has the same effect. Like when EPO hit the scene - the riders and teams knew about it long before the governing body could test for it.
EPO (which a lot of the recent Lance related fuss is about) was particularly useful in the 90's and early 00's because there was no test for it. All the UCI could do was test a rider's hematocrit level (which relates to the efficiency of the blood to carry oxygen to the muscles - clearly a good thing for an athlete!). EPO lifts a rider's hematocrit level (that's the point) so If during testing a rider's level was found to be very, very high then this was an indication that a rider may have been using EPO, but not absolute proof of the same (they might just naturally have this high level).
A side effect of having a high hematocrit level is that one's blood becomes thicker, and when an athlete is resting and their heart rate slow, the thick blood can cause them to heave a heart attack, blood clots, etc! Because of this, the UCI didn't used to ban riders with high hematocrit level (after all - no proof in itself of anything), rather, they suspend them from racing 'for their own safety'. If you follow up on this you'll find stories of doctors monitoring riders and waking them up in the middle of the night to get on the wind trainer and get the HR up due to thick blood and dangerously low heart rates. Sounds like fun, no?
As a slight side issue to all this, as I said before, just about every sport will have athletes that will bend & break the rules. Way back in 1904 some riders from the TdF were accused of taking trains during stages and thrown out of the race. Then they figured out taking drugs was easier.
Another slight side issue... they guy on Four Corners was bothering Phil Anderson about alleged payments between teams for 'throwing' a particular series of races. Or put another way - Phil's team (with Lance on it) are accused of paying off another team to not challenge Lance for wins so he can collect some bonus. This is nothing to do with drugs so am not sure why they went there. Besides, the practice appears to be common place - I've read several cycling books where such deals are mentioned and none of the riders involved seem to find this immoral. It's just a strategic alliance between teams to win more races/cash - so what?
We bring it out in the open, we educate the masses and it is managed properly, kind of same principle ....kind of, granted the side effect of riding sweet legal trails has a far better outcome than taking performance enhancers, though I do think that it is better to have these types of issues out in the open rather than behind closed, and usually, seedy doors.
And yes got kids and yes freaks me out thinking about what trouble they can get themselves into, though I'll be open, frank, honest and giving them as much info as possible so they can make an informed decision
decision
That would be a good comparison if drugs where good for you. And if NPWS seemed as ambivalent towards those 'using' as UCI was back in the 90s (I will give them the benefit of the doubt that things are a bit better now).
Don't forget we (most of those that 'use' and those that don't) are fighting for legal single track. On the flip side, no-one is fighting to legalise performance enhancing substances. Well - unless I missed it.
Nice try though
There is quite a bit of testing at State and National Level in Road Races in Australia, one of my mates has been tested quite a few times at NSW Open Races and Masters races as well, so it does happen.
To answer the initial question, at the elite level there really isn't that much distinction between roadie and mtb. The young australian Garmin rider that Matt White referred to one of Lance's spanish doctors was in the winning team from the Scott last weekend.
As Logan suggests there is scheduled testing at events and all of the MTB riders getting government grants would also be subject to random out of season testing. Not sure how often they generally test out of season but my wife did get tested in the years she had government funding.
I recommend everyone read Paul Kimmage's Rough Ride....it gives you a good idea of what happened in the 90's.
"There is quite a bit of testing at State and National Level in Road Races in Australia, one of my mates has been tested quite a few times at NSW Open Races and Masters races as well, so it does happen."
Lamce Armstrong says he was tested over 500 times. I get the impression that ALL drug testing of cyclists is either incompetent or corrupt.
As I said, part of the problem is that EPO, the peloton's main drug of choice back in the day, was undetectable. Lance may well have had this in his system but passed many tests as they just weren't looking for it.
I have said before that Lance won within the rules that were laid down by the UCI at the time and you can't blame the guy for that. This includes allegedly taking EPO knowing the UCI could not find this in his system. If one doesn't like that, one should look at the governing body and other anti-drug bodies and ask what the hell they thought they were doing taking this stance.
Not that I'm a Lance fan, or ever was, but the new allegations include stuff that goes beyond just working around this testing. How many other riders were giving 6 figure sums to the body that is suppose to oversee these tests and 'make the rules', for example?
P.S. While we are recommending books, 'Bad Blood' by Jeremy Whittle is pretty good.
My race day always starts with some performance enhancing drugs - 2 latte's and a bowl of porridge! Didn't Alex Watson (some sort of pentathlete?) get sentenced to 1000 years in jail and 6000 lashings once for too much caffeine?
Beta blockers used to be common at the top level of golf in the 90's (stop nervous yips on the putting stroke) - maybe still are?
The "winningest" Nascar racer of all time Richard Petty (The King) once claimed (after retirement of course) "there are 2 types of race drivers - losers and cheats!"
I'm surprised one of our elite racers above says there are drug cheats in our sport - he surely mustn't be referring to our local guys as the drugs would cost them about 10 times the prize money they win for a race? I'm confident one of our top mountain bike racers doesn't take drugs. He snotted his head at my brother's place and, when given some Panadol for his headache, refused to accept it as he claimed he must open the tamper proof seal before taking any drugs just to be sure ....
If you do some reading you will find that testing needs to occur at the right time to catch the cheats. Floyd Landis was caught with testosterone, supposedly because he fell asleep with the patch on his arm. If he hadn't fallen asleep his level would have been elevated but still below the limit when he got the mandatory testing as a stage winner.
Contador, Schlek and Hamilton etc all tested positive as well.
Bottom line is that if your doctors are good then you know that you can beat the EPO test, some other drugs are only positive for 8 hours etc. It appears that the UCI allows riders to come back in an hour to be tested. Thats completely different from most sports where they take you directly to the test. Essentially with an hour you can do some thinks that make the testing much less effective.
Anyway read Tyler Hamilton's book if you want to know how bad it was.
They legalised caffeine a while ago. For some people it may make a small difference but you need to take something like 400mg.
I though Floyd rode that day with a patch on his balls which he forgot to take off
Cheating doesn't have to cost a lot of money. Sure an institution like LA built build would cost, but hormones, cortizone, and stimulants cost relatively little.
As ps suggested, just this very weekend i raced one of Australia's best ever mtb riders, who rightly or wrongly got caught up Operation Puerto.
I don't think people are currently 'charging' to win races, but it's certainly not impossible.
also with mtb , drugs dont give u skill .. u need skill to ride a mtb fast .. u have have the strongest fastest legs out there , but something ive noticed in the 2 public races ive entered .. u can really pick the road bike riders as they fall on anything slightly technical.
also dont eat buns with popie seeds , these can show up as drugs .. scary to think u can get hard banned drugs from ya local super market
Actually according to the USADA records it was more like 200 tests for Lance Armstrong and he actually went positive twice, once for Cortisone and the other for EPO but somehow the results never got out there.
Why these 'never got out' were both covered in the 4 Corners doco the other day:
To explain the cortisone a team doctor wrote a back-dated prescription for cream they claimed was to treat saddle sores and must have got into his system through the skin. Doctors are meant to disclose this at the time of prescription, but as it was back-dated of course they couldn't disclose something that didn't exist. Lance should have been thrown out by the UCI for failure (his? his doctor's? the teams?) to file this paperwork but wasn't.
The EPO positive is his '99 sample that wasn't tested until the lab happened to be running old samples through a new process and hit some positives. They didn't know who it was, but that journo at L'Equipe cross referenced sample IDs and published his story in August '05.
Rob, just didnt bother going into the details on here, as it is well publicized and documented on multiple other sites.
The USADA document also states that after winning the 2001 Tour of Switzerland, LA was openly admitting he tested positive to EPO but 'made the results go away' by 'making a financial agreement to keep the positive test hidden'
He and his right hand man Bruyneel arranged a meeting at the UCI headquarters and made a $100 000 'contribution to the development of cycling'
The current UCI president confirms that the 2 visited the UCI headquarters and made the donation
But of course he 'vehemently denies' that it was in any way related to the cover up that LA was very open in talking about to his (at the time) trusted co-conspirators Floyd Landis and Tyler Hamilton
The UCI created this stinky mess by creating the uneven playing field, and now of course they are keen to 'move on'
Lance will ever admit his guilt as the diehards will never believe the evidence until Lance himself admits that it is the truth
And unfortunately he has proven that he is a pathological liar
But it isn't Lances problem, it's the UCIs problem. If he cheated as much as they allege he has has, then the whole system is useless. Lance even raced in Australia so the Australian officials are as much to blame. It's no good blaming Lance for everything.
Yup, I agree. The UCI clearly have some... erm... 'issues' to work through.
I think Lance is being blamed for everything at the moment because he was clearly the puppet master
And is yet to come clean or respond to the overwhelming evidence in USADA's 'reasoned decision'
Yet it is the UCI who allowed him to become the puppet master
They allowed him to become the hero the enigma and the inspiration
They turned a blind eye while holding out the hand for the brown envelope
Now that the shit has hit the fan, they want to move on
I would dearly like to see the UCI cop the same backlash that LA is
It's early days in this saga, so let's hope this happens in the future
http://www.scribd.com/doc/109619079/Reasoned-Dec...
For anyone who hasn't seen it, this is the document that started the backlash
Hard to have any sympathy for him (or the UCI) after reading it
I was a staunch LA supporter before reading this
Yep, most of the top riders were doping, but Armstrong's use of intimidation, bullying, and coercion is disgusting
PS: Sorry to get so off topic, but this whole thing is so bloody disappointing I need to get it off my chest
You forgot bribery and blackmail
And look at how the UCI is going after journalists as individuals instead of suing the paper that publishes their story - nasty and personal
http://road.cc/content/news/68122-uci-reiterates...
Bit of a thread-dig, but this is proof that even 'average' MTB riders will take drugs to win National titles.
He isnt an exceptional rider (i.e. not a Kulhavy / Fontana / Schurter), yet he is charging.
Very disappointing.
http://www.cyclingnews.com/news/former-armstrong...