PED's and the Tour de France.

Not written by me, a guy who made a thread on Reddit that has blown up has some interesting topics of discussion/points and i figured I'd post it here for anyone that would like to read or further explore the thread themselves. Made for some good reads while i was killing some time earlier.

Cyclists use lots of PED's at the top level.

Testosterone, they use testosterone just to stay healthy.
A doctor who worked with TdeF cyclists wrote a book explaining why he gave testosterone to his cyclists. It went something like this (paraphrasing from memory) "After a day's race a cyclist comes to me, I conduct various blood tests. After such a grueling effort his testosterone will plummet and his cortisol will be sky high. My first medical recommendation would be to take a few days off from physical activity. That is obviously not possible since the Tour is several days long. My medical decision, which is to secure the health of the individual is to administer testosterone to rebalance his hormone levels".
They obviously use "blood builders" like EPO, actovegin, etc. They use it in conjunction with a mix of hGH, injectable B12 and iron. Without B12 and iron you cannot get the full effect of EPO and hGH enhance the effects.
Amphetamines are HUGE as are glucocorticoids. Now, these don't make much sense since they are basically catabolic substances BUT they help mobilize fat for fuel and when used in conjunction with amphetamines it puts the cyclist in a "high mental haze" which makes the pain of the race tolerable.
Insulin is VERY big. Because these guys have to store about 7-8k calories worth of fuel per day to avoid bunking (thats what they burn on each day event). They will consume at least 1000g of carbs per day, a majority consumed after the event, they need the insulin to store all that.
Electrolyte IV drips are very important too, rehydrating is easy, re-establishing electrolyte balance is the real challenge.
blood doping was very popular before EPO started being used. And now that EPO is somewhat easy to detect, they are coming back to it. A lot of guys will actually:

Draw their own blood and store it (it has to be done during a period they are 100% clean, so very early off-season)
Allow for their body to restore normal red blood cells level by using high doses of iron, injectable B-12 and oxymetholone. This process can also be accelerated by using hGH. A lot of cyclists will also use hypoxic tents (they sleep in it) which also speed up the red blood cell rebuilding process
Then the preparatory period starts. They will use EPO/ iron/ b-12 during most of that period, so that they can train on elevated red blood cell levels (more oxygen transport, more endurance, faster recovery)
When the competitive season gets close they will stop the EPO and start to use blood doping (re-injecting their withdrawn blood). That added blood (which also contains red blood cells) will allow them to keep their RBC count high, even as they stop the EPO. During that time they will also use plasma infusion to avoid testing for an excessive hematocrit level. Hematocrit level is the ratio of red blood cells to blood volume. So if red blood cell level is too high versus blood volume they will actually be forbidden from racing because that is actually (1) dangerous (blood is too thick, can lead to cardiac issues) (2) an indirect sign of blood doping. So by using plasma they can keep an acceptable hematocrit level while still having elevated RBC levels.

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At the pinnacle of sports, nobody is clean, just a bullshit illusion.

Sprinters use mostly:
hGH at a fairly low dose. The low dose is to avoid gaining water weight (or even excessive muscle weight) which would slow them down. It is mostly used to enhance recovery, allow them to tolerate more volume of work and MOSTLY for tendon strethening/repair. Sprinters are like F1 racing cars: high performance but break VERY easily. A common approach is 4-6IU EOD.

Insulin (mostly humalog or novolog). This is to facilitate recovery by enhancing glycogen resynthesis following training. It isn't used all the time; mostly after the most grueling training days (e.g. a day where they would have both high volume track work and strength training)... sprinters normally strength train 3 or 4 days a week, so they use insulin 3-4 days a week on average.
EPO. The role of EPO for improving endurance is well known. For that reason it is mostly associated with endurance athletes and it is often assumed that it doesn't give anything to the power/strength athlete. That is not true. EPO allows one to tolerate a greater overall volume of work and increases the rate of recovery. In performance athletics, drugs are mostly used to allow the athlete to train more often and with more volume.
Testosterone. Some synthetic steroids might be used far away from competition (if the athlete doesn't live in a country that conducts random testing) but testosterone is the most comonly used AAS to improve strength and power. It is much easier to pass the drug tests when using testosterone, especially since some natural compounds can decrease the testo/Epitesto ratio that is used to test for testostetone use. A lot of athletes can get away with 50mg of testosterone propionate or suspension every 3 days without testing positive... some races can even use much higher doses of testosterone than that because they lack the enzyme UGT2B17 which increases testosterone excretion in the urine. Approximately 60% of Asians have very low levels of this enzyme. More than 50% of the individuals having low levels of enzymes can take 300-400mg of testosterone per week and not test positive.

Obviously athletes from countries with a rich track and field support program use more exotic compounds that are harder to detect.
The only reason Ben Johnson tested positive for stanozolol/winstrol is that he and Charlie Francis (his coach) didn't know that he was taking winstrol!

Johnson never liked winstrol, the few times he used it it gave him severe joint pain which reduced his capacity to train.
Charlie Francis went on record saying that he knew exactly how long before the last winstrol intake you needed to wait to avoid testing positive for it (harder now since the tests are more precise).

What happened is that Dr.Astafan told Francis and Johnson that he could get them furazabol. At that time furazabol was not detectable (a doping test doesn't scan for ''steroids''... it needs the exact molecule or it's metabolite to know what to search).
So all 3 believed that Johnson could continue taking it right up to the race whereas the other sprinters had to stop whatever they were using 10-14 days before, enough to get a small performance decrement that could make a big difference in placings.
The problem is that the furazabol they bought was actually relabeled winstrol sold for 4-5 times the price.
The anti-doping procedures are fairly strict now. In the information age, any stunt like that (pouring the piss down the drain) would eventually surface.
However:

Many countries/federation do ''home tests'' for their athletes. So they know EXACTLY when they need to stop using XYZ substance and which one they can keep taking without testing positive. Each physiology is different so this gives top athletes (as it is very expensive) the insurance of being able to use without risking testing positive.
A lot of the people who design drug tests are hired by some countries/federation to explain how to beat the tests.
A urine test needs to know the exact chemical structure that they are testing for. It can either be a drug itself or it's metabolites. Any decent chemist can make slight modification to the structure of a drug to make it undetectable (e.g. the clear).

Believe me, nobody wants unbeatable tests. Why?

If all of a sudden you can test everybody who uses drugs with 100% efficacy, the winning numbers or speed would drop by about 10% across the board. This will make the decades of abuse obvious as performance levels will go back to what they were around 1960-1970. No sport federation, or the IOC wants that.
We have been used to a certain level of sporting performance. Why are people who don't give a sh*t about track keep talking about Bolt's 100 and 200m records? Because they boggle the mind... if all of a sudden nobody runs below 10s the general interest will drop... we could say the same about baseball for example. After the 1 year strike people lost interest and the next year's crowd started VERY low... what saved the season (financially speaking)? The McGuire/Sosa home run race. People like unimaginable feats... they want to see 60 home run hitters... you wont see that anymore. Notice that all the new baseball stadiums are very small... in Miami they have a 35 000 people capacity... during the home run craze you could see averages of 50 000 people per game.
Sports is fueled by money:
Players want more money... to get it they need (1) to outperform their rivals (2) for the teams to make a lot of money (if the teams don't make money, they cannot spend it on the players).


Owners want to make money, so they need to pull more people to the stadium.
The leagues want more money (which is spread over to the teams) so they need big TV contracts.
The TV channels want more money and they get it by selling TV ads. The more viewer there are, the more they can charge for the air time.
The comissioners want to make more money and their salary is based on how much money the teams make.

The KEY if everybody is gonna make money is general interest... not the die hard fans who will come no matter what but rather the guys who are on the fence and need something special to go to games, watch them on TV and buy team stuff.
If overall performance goes down, so does general interest. Less people watch the sport on TV, companies will spend less in advertisement, the league make less TV money, the teams receive less transfer, they have less money to invest in the players, etc.

Coaches/trainers do not want effective tests either because people will realise that they aren't the geniuses people thought they were.

http://www.reddit.com/r/sports/comme...out_of/cb2jh0q