Well?
Well?
Yep.
He should just come out and hold his hands up.
They're all at it.
He's a cyclist...
Technically no, morally yes. Like basically any sports person you can think of.
Is there any evidence to say that he is, aside from "he's a cyclist lol"?
When everyone cheats, no one cheats.
They all are.
Neither technically, nor morally. It's professional sport. Taking part is for amateurs.
All high level sportsman or cheating to some extent. It's better that you don't be so morally twatty about it because when it comes out that the marginal gains are actually drug gains you're going to look a dick.
If he wasn't Paul Weller on a bike he'd have been labelled a cheating Frenchie/Iti/Spaniard long ago.
Obtaining PEDs by overplaying your 'asthma' goes against the spirit of anti-doping rules even if it is technically allowed.
The thing I find hard to understand is how asthma medications are actually performance enhancing beyond treating your asthma.
I didn't think bronchodilators did anything unless you had bronchoconstriction (maybe I'm wrong) and I definitely don't see how inhaled steroids are going to be of any benefit whatsoever. They aren't anabolic steroids, they don't big you small bits and big muscles. If anything I'd have thought they'd make you worse.
As an asthmatic that's used steroid inhalers, they do have a benefit. There's not a lot of steroid to them but they sit on the lungs and, surprise, make them stronger. I used to use them before going to bed to stop me coughing during the night.
@Shindig
Sorry I didn't explain myself very well.
Obviously inhaled steroids help your breathing if you actually have asthma. But they work by reducing inflammation. If your airways aren't inflamed (i.e. you don't have asthma) then I don't understand by what mechanism they are going to be beneficial. If you do, then they can only take the inflammation away and at best get you back to what you'd be like if you didn't have asthma.
Last edited by randomlegend; 09-03-2018 at 11:31 PM.
It seems like an abuse of the therapeutic usage exemptions. Dodgy as hell, but probably alright by the letter of the law (depending on the specific way in which abuse of that rule is defined).
If Sky hadn't ridden that high horse so hard, it probably wouldn't be as big a deal. But we spent half a decade watching the "plucky underdog Brits honourably sticking it to the nasty, cheating foreigners" narrative, and they got money from the UK government, so you can understand people taking some umbrage.
He doesn't really have asthma, so these things help to increase airflow into (around?) his lungs, and, as an anti-inflammatory, have obvious benefits for anyone doing sustained high-intensity exercise.
It doesn't work like that. If you don't have asthma, and so you don't have constricted bronchi (airways), taking a bronchodilator (like salbumatol) does absolutely nothing. It won't make your airways SUPER BIG so you can do SUPER BREATHING.Originally Posted by Lewis
A bit of evidence to back that up:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21083771
There's some evidence that it's mildly anabolic (muscle building) in massive doses, but realistically you'd need to be taking it orally to get enough systemic absorption to have that effect. Perhaps the swindle is taking it orally and then claiming it's inhaled if you get caught out, but I would have thought the difference in levels would be fairly fucking obvious.
If you managed to inhale enough corticosteroids to absorb enough systemically to have an effect, I'm pretty sure the negatives would massively outweigh any benefits. Corticosteroids might reduce inflammation but they have about a million other effects which you absolutely would not want as a competitive athlete.
EDIT: There seems to be some (poor quality, anecdotal) evidence that short courses of high dose steroids can be beneficial during training. If there's evidence he's taken oral steroids then yeah, probably cheating. I'd be absolutely stunned if you can get enough systemic absorption from inhaled steroids to have those effects though - I doubt you could do it if you breathed nothing else all day.
Last edited by randomlegend; 10-03-2018 at 12:07 AM.
From what I've read you don't even need a TUE for salbutamol provided you are taking less than the dose limit they set.
Yeah, I imagine Sky were very careful to ensure that they went right up to the line, but not across it.
Which would have absolutely no beneficial effect whatsoever, other than returning someone with actual asthma to baseline (at the absolute best).
I stand corrected. Still, maybe asthmatics should just get lost. Shit out, lads. Unlucky.
I'm loving how sure Ital is that British cycling are cheats after he defended this:
from an Aussie.
I don't know the answer to the asthma thing either, but it sounds similar to a gluten free diet not turning you into superman if you're not a coeliac.
It's well documented that Mark Henry was sucking inhalers dry in his WWE days.
Without them he was only above average strength.
Maria Sharapova got her inhalers from a long-time family doctor.
They’d all be welcomed to my drugs friendly Olympic alternative.
He's an upstanding British. Drugs must ave got planted by a dirty facking forrin innit. Oi oi oi oi waaaaar.
Hands up who went to medical college!
This Mick puts all of Mo Farah's shite in one place, and it sounds a bit iffy.
He's guilty just like Radcliffe was.
If Farah gets biffed it'll piss on so many people's chips he'll have to go into hiding.
I'm halfway through that and it's an interesting read.
If he gets done it'll either lead to an end of "our plucky boys and girls would never cheat" (which would be nice), or more likely a revisionist approach to his nationality with him being labelled as the "Somalian born athlete" from that point onward.
'Mohamed - formerly "Mo" - Farah has today been stripped of his...'
Yes. His council house.
Chris Froome awarded 2011 Vuelta a Espana as Juan Jose Cobo stripped of title
"It retrospectively makes him Britain's first Grand Tour winner - Sir Bradley Wiggins had held the honour after his 2012 Tour de France victory."
Cycling.
Can't wait until they all get stripped of everything and I win all the awards retrospectively for breaking my own personal best back when I used to cycle to work. Drug free.
Or they just go "fuck it" and let them all take what they want and make it a proper freakshow.
You never know, that might even make it worth watching.
Why is cycling, seemingly more than any other sport, absolutely full of drug cheats? Is the testing 8 years behind the dodgy doctor curve? Do they just not care?
Or is it the other way around and drugs are just as rife everywhere else, but cycling are doing much much more to root it out?
It's both.
Cycling, historically, as a sport lends itself to chemical assistance (first booze, then amphetamines, then more modern PEDs). It is ridiculously physically demanding, so any 'marginal gains' are amplified by the intensity and duration of the events - both in terms of benefits from training and one off on the day hits (Landis, the greatest single ride of all time). It's heartland has, historically, been in nations where cheating is pretty much par for the course in everything, no offence Beneluxers. I do think they now do a lot more than most sports to try and get on top of it, but the range of things to try and cover is probably insurmountable - and the range of what is and what isn't allowed is far from simple. Spikey would probably be stripped of his titles for having taken some sudafed before riding to work one day. The biological passport is quite a good idea, I think. I don't believe Sky, as they were, were systematically cheating in the way teams did in the 1990/2000s, but they were systematically gaining advantages through legally abusive practices (TUEs etc).
Spikey being outed as a cheat and a disgrace before he's even been awarded his titles.
Fuck's sake.
Atleast I'm up there with the best of them.
I would guess it's that cycling is almost purely a test of physical endurance/strength/speed etc. so you stand to gain a lot more from drugs than you can in sports which rely equally (or more) on tactics or technique.
You could give Marouanne Fellaini steroids til his nuts were the size of raisins but still won't be Cristiano Ronaldo.
Oh and the idea of cheating with asthma inhalers is still nonsense.
Why would he want to lessen his ability anyway?
Ah sorry, got the names the wrong way round.
I'd say that it is the latter.
Endurance athletes will benefit more from it, so cycling is a prime candidate, but there is no way that people running the marathon, for example, are not as likely to cheat. As for 'technique' sports like football, it might be less beneficial, but knowing the state of affairs, does anyone really think that half of those players/teams/owners/associations are not looking for any advantage they can get?
Can we use the 'fund' to get Pepe on the gear?
Tour de France winner 2020.
About £440 in the kitty at the moment. What will that get us?
A decent course of roids and some Lemsip.
I'm in.
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