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It's swimming, I would've thought the drugs would help
(thelemmy.club)
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this post was submitted on 27 May 2026
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At that level, first there's a shit load of work and deprivation and raw talent honed in countless hours of training, sometimes through injuries and pain. You make it sound like it's all about the drugs and the cheating, I say there's titanic amounts of work to be done just to get to be able to cheat. To keep to your edge metaphor: step 1 to 99 are forging the sword.
I remember someone suggesting that for all Olympic disciplines we should first select a member of the public and let them attempt it. 100m dash. High jump. Walking across the narrow beam. Doing one pull up on the parallel bars. I bet we would appreciate those athletes more afterwards.
I'm not condoning cheating, to be sure, and I've been around for long enough to see this arms race unfold, in cyclism and tennis especially. Athletes are human, and the desire to win sometimes surpasses common sense. But even for a total lying cheater like Lance Armstrong I can still appreciate the sheer amount of work he put in to get lto the start of the race. If you dope an average Joe the same way, all they will accomplish is maybe walk faster.
I want to see an Olympics where they just pick people by lottery and grab a bunch of random average 30-50 year olds, have them compete with no training (okay give them like a few hours of training so they can actually give it a real try and don't hurt themselves), then again after 3, 6 and 12 months of training. I feel like that could singlehandedly make a massive difference in public health given the modern sedentary lifestyle by showing people exactly what is possible for an average person who just got off the couch to do
Didn't the people who exposed him also themselves get exposed?
There's still a shit load of work with drugs, and it's highly sport dependent, but I'd be shocked if there wasn't at least one top 10 Olympic athlete that used PEDs in the vast majority of sports. The most common would probably be things that speed up recovery time, especially from injury.
I replied to the other fellow but in no way am I calling them lazy, actually many of the drugs they use allow them to train harder for longer and as an Olympians they take full advantage of that to push the boundaries of what is possible. Those agents aren’t an “I win” button but at the highest levels people will do literally anything to push themselves to be able to shave off even fractions of a second or gain whatever advantage they can, and being able to train more and bounce back quicker is tempting.