I remember reading an account of an opera singer who claimed it was well known among performers that semen helped with singing performance. So she blew stagehands before each show.
I believe it happened, I believe she believed it but I don’t believe it actually helped.
I’ve been on beta blockers. They do make you feel better and more confident but I seriously doubt the calming effects could offset the lack of muscular control.
Similarly, despite the fact that curlers think PEDs help them that doesn’t mean it’s true. I like curling. I watch curling. Sure they are sweeping but not enough to need steroids.
Let’s not get carried away, here. We’re talking about being an instructor at “learn to curl” events only. Let’s face it, if you’ve been curling for a couple of months you’re going to look like an expert to a bunch of folks who have never been on a curling sheet before.
I’d served as an assistant at a couple of l"learn to curl" events at our curling club, so I was familiar with the drills we walked the new curlers through. One day we were short an instructor and I asked the fellow who was running the event if I was qualified. He felt my wrist for a pulse and declared “you’re qualified”.
Some banned substances help with recovery; if you take them after the first day; you’re fresher for the next day’s competition than someone who hasn’t taken them.
One thing irritates me is that this “banning of PEDs” really means “only the ubermensch may compete”. Basically, if you can’t use any substance to manipulate your biology to do better than it’s base programming, the only way to be world class at all is you must be lucky enough to be born with the right genes.
If no doping is allowed, the people with the right genetics are the ones who have an insurmountable, unfair advantage.
I mean I see practical reasons to ban them.(some PEDs have lethal side effects) It just annoys me that it turns world class sports into a competition to see who inherited the best genetics. Whatever advantage that PEDs give, someone was probably born with a mutation that gives them a similar advantage and they are going to wipe the floor with ordinary people.
It almost seems like instead of testing for PEDs, there should be a test for fairness. For instance, cycling : instead of testing for PEDs, test for red blood cell count. Whether you used Epo to get there or had a high RBC count naturally, there would be a limit to how many oxygen carriers you get per unit of blood volume. Instead of testing for steroids, test for lean muscle mass. Whether you were born with it or used d-bol, you can only bring so much to the contest. And so on and so forth.
That’s how I started as well. I didn’t know everything, but I knew more than the people who’d never been on the ice before.
But the USCA finally had one of their instructor classes near me this year, so I took that. I need to do a first aid course and submit some paperwork, and I’ll be a certified level 1 curling instructor.
If ordinary people can take performance-enhancing drugs to compete with the genetic mutants, what prevents the genetic mutants from taking the same drugs to be even better?
I thought professional cycling (and probably others) did something like that already to detect blood doping, but a check on Wikipedia doesn’t seem to confirm that. I imagine if the sanctioning bodies did establish a maximum red blood cell count, the athletes would take whatever drugs they needed to get their RBC just up to that limit, without going over.
While I’m on the subject, my club had some rental events on Saturday, the day after the men’s gold medal game. A TV station sent a camera crew to get some local reaction to the game, and some footage of local curling.
Which would be a fair contest. Whether you were born with the right genes, spent a million dollars on high altitude training, or used Epo, all the contestants have the same RBC count.
In principle some “legal limit” on the physiological stats that affect outcomes, whatever those are. Admittedly this would be complex and maybe not even practical to regulate sports this way. I’m just saying it would be more in the spirit of legitimate fairness.
This would mean in rare cases a “mutant” would not be allowed to compete, even though they take no PEDs, because they are ‘naturally’ above these limits.
Genetics is important, but there is another important piece of the equation: training. You didn’t even touch upon that. So, in the Olympics, being just genetically gifted will not do, because there will be his and her peers that are equally gifted in the genetic department, whom also may have put in not just the longer hours of training, but possibly trained smarter too. There are so many variables going on, to where it still isn’t easy to predict who is going to win based solely on genetics. That’s what helps make it interesting. No one truly knows the outcome in advance, some may be favored due to past performances, but there will always be upsets.
If everyone wants to get a ribbon, they do have the Special Olympics. I’m glad that have such a thing.
That’s a slipperly slope one could go down, to where they might as well call off the whole thing if they factored in every single nuance.
Even with elite sprinters, where one is either born with speed or not; I understand they still train up to 20 hours a week to compete with the best. Sprinters have a much higher proportion of faster twitch muscles vs the marathoner who has a much higher proportion of slower twitch muscles, while the average person generally has roughly an equal mix. I could see one even arguing they were actually the better athlete, but only lost to their competitors because they put in far more hours training, so there should be a limit on how many hours each gets to train for an event. I’m sure everyone could find a factor to where they lost only because their competitor had more of the fast or slower twitch muscles, was taller or shorter, leaner or had more mass, older or younger, more RBC, larger lung capacity, stronger heart, less calcium build-up, intellectually challenged, etc. No need to even stop there though, maybe one could say he lost because he didn’t sleep well the night before, or got sick, lost a loved one, lousy diet, too poor to afford equipment to train, ad infinitum. If such a thing were ever possible to where everything was exactly the same on all levels for everybody, there would be no winners or losers, just ties. Who wants to show up to see that?
PED’s have a negative impact on ones health if not immediate, then in the foreseeable future, so there’s good reason to ban them. Even if a PED could be shown to be 100% safe and effective, and if all one had to do is use them; while his genetically superior competitor that also put in the longer hours to train much harder than themselves without their use; then, nothing fair or honorable about that.
With curling, there are probably some genetically gifted with certain motor skills and coordination to be able to manipulate and understand the physics involved with the stone going over the ice to reach that upper level that others will never be able to acheive. They will still have to train long hours to reach that upper level, much like those involved in billiards, shuffleboard, bowling, darts, golf, etc.
In the days before there was a test for EPO, cycling had a rule like this based on hemocrit level. The problem is, that’s not fair either. People with naturally lower hemocrit levels who boost up to a higher level with EPO have better aerobic performance levels than someone who naturally has that same higher EPO level. People with freakishly high natural hemocrit levels had to get exemptions. It was not a satisfactory solution.
In discussing the sport during the Olympics, it was pointed out that the curling sheet is not smooth like a figure skating rink. Instead, it has a pattern of bumps across it, sort of like inverted dimples. I would imagine that the sweeping, the sliding of the rocks, and the movement of the players breaks off these little bumps. So, does the rock sometimes take an unexpected path due to its getting stuck in a path from a previous stone? At the end of a game or tournament, is the ice sheet pretty well torn up?
I wouldn’t say it’s torn up or that there’s ever a rut. The ice sheet does change over the course of a game, not just from rocks sliding over it, but temperature and humidity affect it, too. If all the spectators leave, the lack of warm, breathing bodies will change the ice conditions. It’s part of the skip’s job to stay on top of that. He’ll watch his stones and the other team’s to see how different paths are reacting, and he’ll hold his broom on the ice as a target based on how much curl he expects for a particular shot.
If you watch the eighth end of the men’s final again, that great double takeout was on a line that both teams had been playing before, which probably helped Shuster’s read on it.
In regard to ‘leveling the playing field’ through the use of PEDs:
Athletic excellence has always been associated with unique innate abilities, i.e. winning the genetic lottery. Certainly we respect and admire the athletes who work the hardest at their sport, the most gifted athlete isn’t necessarily the best, and in the modern world of sports science it’s rarely so, the very best are to some degree manufactured by training starting at an early age and enhanced with technology. But there’s never been a solid concept of egalitarian athletic competition. We do have in some sports weight classes where size differences can be quantified fairly. We also have a great deal of adoration for great athletes even if they exhibit only natural gifts with no virtuous effort on their part. But that’s the same for just about everything, we don’t give dumb people Nobel prizes for insignificant developments in science.
Now, on the question of the use of PEDs whatever the reason, I don’t really care. I don’t see a great difference between an athlete having access to the best training facilities, trainers, and the time and money provided for training that is given under the pretense of a scholarship and education and the use of PEDs to enhance performance. The entire cosmos of athletic endeavors has been changed by high tech surgery that repairs injuries once career ending. The life of an athlete has been extended as a result and lifetime records will continue to increase as a result. Where athletic success once required sufficient luck to avoid these injuries is there something wrong with helping the unlucky continue to compete through arthroscopic surgery and implants?
I can understand the use of stimulants should be restricted, but there was no great panic when baseball and other sports were rife with amphetamine usage (and probably still are). There is no greater PED than an stimulant that can be taken right before competing, that will clearly and measurably increase stamina and reaction time. Much of the concentration though is on steroids and hormones that will help build muscle over time but may have no effect at the time of competition, not too mention questionable results in terms of even increased strength at a particular body size. And who cares about blood doping, whether using EPO or just transfusing your own red blood cells? These methods could be used by anyone so why not allow them?
If it’s going to matter in anything let’s look at academics. Shouldn’t there be an asterisk by the name of that guy who made it through medical school by dosing on Ritalin? Or is it that we really don’t care about any true aspect of fairness here, but rather in sports we just don’t like seeing the other guy win, and we’ll try to diminish the victory by crying that they have an unfair advantage?
Robot Arm I hope you realize I’m just poking fun at curling. I’m glad you like this sport. It’s still going to look a little silly in comparison to the rest of the world of athletics though. I know it requires actual ability and skill, it’s just not so apparent without looking at the game in much more depth. It’s not alone in the world of sports though, I look at golf as an absurd almost always failing effort to kick a one inch wide ball into a three inch wide hole a half mile away. Soccer is an hour long effort to get a foot wide ball into a 24 foot wide opening more than once in a game. And despite the heights of pointless Calvinball level inanity it has reached I am still a life long fan of professional wrestling. One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.
Sports and fitness are supposed to, in some sense at least, improve our lives; a healthy mind and a healthy body, that sort of thing. If those at the very top of a sport are pushing themselves so hard that it becomes destructive of their bodies, the whole endeavor loses whatever reason it has for existing in the first place. Maybe the various leagues and organizations that ban PEDs are doing it for idealistic reasons, or maybe they think a couple generations of shriveled up husks of PED-abusing athletes would turn their audience against them.
