I believe the majority, if not all, of the competitive sprinters who take the starting blocks in world championships and the Olympics take illegal performance enhancing drugs (PEDs).
They use drugs that are hard to detect, that are successfully masked, and/or those that beyond detecting.
Some get caught. They are the unlucky ones.
Given the evidence at hand (times, muscle tone, % of improvement over prior records), I am going to cast my vote as: YES for Usain Bolt. Even his arrogance, much like Ben Johnson, is being considered as evidence.
When Ben Johnson blew Carl Lewis out of the proverbial water years ago, I can honestly say that my gym buddies and I said, “Winstrol”, when we got a look at his physique and his time (and his attitude). There is something humbling about being so great. When that physique breaks records in such a manner and comes around with that attitude, I can almost smell the Winstrol.
Put me down for “YES”, and the steroid he is taking is “Winstrol”.
note: Winstrol is well-know for building very lean mass, and is the type of steroid a runner would seek, as there are little side effects that would affect water retention and other things a lean runner would look to avoid.
I don’t think he is, no. Obviously no one is going to come in and say there’s NO WAY Bolt is doping, because us track and field fans have been disappointed that many times that we know better. But I’d still err on the optimistic side with Bolt. You can at least see that he is a very unusual sprinter - it’s rare for such a tall man to excel at the sprint. So I’m happy to believe that he’s an unusual specimen who can somehow capture the advantages of long, rangy legs without losing the power you need to compete. If that sounds hopelessly naive then so be it.
If he is doping it won’t be stanozolol, you must be joking. Piece of piss (heh) to detect - completely synthetic steroid.
I won’t go to the mat on the Winstrol claim, and it has become one of the easiest to detect, so I don’t want it to distract from my claim he used PEDs.
At the recent World Championships, no sprinter failed a single test. So I think that they’re all taking something, but have figured out a way to pass the tests.
What “dramatic change”? The guy is still at the start of his top-level sprinting career. He’s not a Flo-Jo, a journeyman (or -woman) who suddenly improves after some years of being merely pretty good. As soon as he reached maturity, he proved to be awesomely fast.
I’m not saying that that proves he’s clean, but I don’t really see suspicious sudden improvement.
Are you and your gym buddies casual observers of the sport, Philster? Sprinters are oftentimes boastful and cocky, it kind of goes with the territory, a part of the mind games that are played between the competitors; this is something that one can see at a high school track meet.
I have followed track for more than 25 years and have seen hundreds of races and thousands of athletes, and never in that time do I recall anyone close to Bolt’s height get in the blocks of a 100 meter race. Carl Lewis is 6 ’ 2" I believe, and if you remember seeing him, he was a head taller than everybody else - conventional wisdom in the sport has always been that someone that tall should be a quarter miler, maybe a hurdler, but never the short sprints. Bolt is 6’ 5" and because his stride is so much longer than the competition, he ends up taking fewer steps. His success is more attributable to his body length than artificial strength.
Absolutely not. He’s been on a winning curve since the World Juniors in 2002, and that was before he even took athletics seriously - he was 25-16 then.
Bolt may represent two interesting possibilities. One is that he’s a paradigm shift in sprinting; that, in fact, very tall men CAN sprint. Another is that he’s simply a freak of nature.
I an sure there are new and better substances available all the time. We do not even know what some lab came up with. I suspect he is on something. I also figure he is racing people who are using something else. Technology never sits still.
I believe that he is 6’2", at least he was throughout the 80’s, and every article I ever read about him (before this interconnected series of tubes came along), though I also believe that he says himself that he is 6’3".
He doesn’t have the crazy muscles than Ben Johnson or other PED users have. I think that he is clean, but as with any elite athlete I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if he uses.