There’s certainly a juxtaposition between this and all the big-money sports (of which there are many). Ultimately the message could be that only ball-sports is a good deal. Even combat sports & F1 only make a good living for a select few. But you can make a respectable living playing 3rd tier football in any number of countries.
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Covered a match for English 5th tier team recently and I asked out of curiosity - their players are on ~£35-65k base salary + bonuses
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Case proven!
….or become a YouTuber!
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I disagree with this strongly. One aspect of the evenness is the access to the drugs and the experts in how to use them. While the EG allow the former, you still have to be able to afford them and more importantly the expertise. Working with Michele Ferrari or Angel Heredia wouldn’t be cheap. Secondly, it dismisses one of the things we have learnt from the revelations about doping in cycling. Riders would look to get their haematocrit as high as they felt they could get away with. So if you’re an excellent cyclist but a relatively lower Hct you would benefit more than one whose Hct is naturally high. Using T to recover on a 3 week stage race again means you may be an excellent cyclist but you can’t recover well enough over the course of the race. You end up with a slightly lesser cyclist but one who can recover better than you naturally, beats you over that 3 weeks.
You end up with the athlete who is prepared to push the boundaries of safety the most being the one who gains the most from the PEDs. They may not win but I don’t think that is what a competition should be aiming for.
Ben Proud was on the radio this morning and basically said that he is doing it for the chance to earn more money than he can earn racing clean. He also tried to make out that he may do the EG clean, when asked directly about what he will take. yeah, of course you will.
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Fairness to me mainly means everyone playing by the rules.
One of the reasons for objecting to PEDs is that it’s cheating and not fair.
If you change the rules to allow PED, it’s no longer cheating and things can become fair again between those who use them and those who don’t.
Say you race in crocs against someone in Alphaflys - and the rules allow any footwear. It’s a fair race, and Alphafly Guy has a fair advantage.
I’m 100% against it like it sounds you are, but unfortunately I’m not sure the “it’s not fair” argument holds.
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Doesn’t the Lottery funding get reduced if the athlete has other income? I seem to recall something about the Brownlee’s getting medical and coaching support from the governing body but not the cash bursaries.
The rowers I knew on Lottery funding in the early 2000s were having to base themselves in London because their squads were based on the Tideway, but they were pretty much living a student lifestyle and putting lucrative careers on hold to live as full time athletes.
Interestingly, an Australian Olympic rower who I used to cycle with said that central funding was almost non-existent for athletes there.
He got some financial support in the run up to the Sydney games and would have got a bonus if he’d finished in the medals (his crew came 4th 
), but in the run up to Athens and Beijing he was having to work full time and train around that.
I think the Australian Institute of Sport provided support to younger athletes, but once they were beyond that point they were on their own 
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I see Trump Jnr’s investment firm is a big investor in the EG
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It’s all a big advertisement for anti ageing products. Very little to do with performance sport.
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he’d have also got iirc $15k for his silver at the recent worlds as well, think WA gave 20k,15k,10k for the medallists this year, but its not life changing for a single event sprinter and a once (twice inc. SC Champs) a year event but for Summer Mcintosh, a nice bonus on top of her Red Bull gig, she is a generational talent though and the top US (OK she is Canadian) and Aus swimmers all do very well from the sport.
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I’m a bit out of the inner circles of non league these days but the 5th tier is basically a league 3 now and fully professional, hence a lot of the big local teams dropping down the pyramid as they cant compete anymore, but even non league 3rd step (regional leagues) where players are part time, they will be getting a tasty weekly bonus on top of their normal jobs and probably topping up £500 a week or so
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But isn’t that sport in a nutshell. Person A has attributes of 6, 8 and 10 out of 10. Person B has attributes of 10, 9 and 9 out of 10. They’ll both be better at different things.
Safety - again, you could say, using cycling as an example, that the sprinters that were the most loco were the ones that found success through exploiting the tiny gaps at full speed due to their assessment and acceptance of risk. It’s just in these instances we’ve socialised/normalised the inherent risk, so it doesn’t seem as bad.
FWIW i don’t like the idea myself. But i just think some of the arguments against can easily be applied to currently accepted practises. At the end of the day sport is just a competition that’s heavily dependant on perfect combos of genes, environment and opportunity. Whether that environment/opportunity piece is access to drugs or being able to go for a run every day vs. working in a cobalt mine.
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The drugs generally do work, so if you make them legal for sports, you are pretty much compelling anyone who wants to be competitive to take them.
Clean athletes will just struggle to compete.
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Exactly, so PEDs change the equation to who responds best to the drug in question, in combination to all the other existing factors. To me, that shouldn’t be part of who wins. There were several deaths in the 90s linkd to EPO & blood doping.
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Is that any different to the different TdF parcours? (i’m being intentionally beligerent here). The introduction of longer and more TT’s vs summit finishes is a major determinant in who wins. Same argument, but more awkward topic.
As i say - I don’t personally back it all. Sport should be done without PED intervention. Though it does get hazy when you look at caffeine, chemically altered nutrition etc etc.
I don’t profess to know the answer here; and my gut reaction is very anti PEDs. But if you went back 100 years, would an athlete then consider athletes now to be ‘clean’?
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Training is most effective for those who respond best to training…
Supershoes are most effective for those who respond best to supershoes…
Are PEDs different, if explicitly allowed in the rules of some murky weird corner of sport?
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Fuck’im. Hopefully no UK club or coach wants any association with him. Let him count his Trump money in quiet disgrace.
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Yeah but supershoes won’t kill you, training won’t kill you. PEDs definitely can. Changes in course obviously affects any race, TdF, IM world champs, F1 race, etc. But then different positions in team sports suit different body types. In fact different sports, in general suit different body types. To equate that to taking PEDs and the amount of change they make to each individual seems a facile argument to me.
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I was watching a bodybuilding channel on YouTube the other day and they came up with a concept I hadn’t really thought about before.
As well as taking a sh1t load of gear, the top bodybuilders are all genetically gifted; nothing new there, pretty obvious. But what I hadn’t heard previously was that they’re not just genetically gifted in terms of muscle building ability but also in the ability of their bodies to handle the sheer volume of drugs they’re, that would probably kill someone less so.
The problem with a no rules is you then bring in such a factor, who can survive the level of PEDs being taken to win, which will undoubtedly continue to increase over time.
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Mrs might if she finds out what they cost
I don’t want to take the position of the guy arguing for doping in sport, because I’m really not and hope PEDs stay far far away from anything mainstream.
And the reason why is exactly what you say, because they can harm you - although so can falling off a bike in training or twisting your ankle in a 5cm heel stack. So I agree with the moral argument but still don’t conceed the logical argument 
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Nah. To inverse that logic, drinking too water water can cause death, drinking too much alcohol can cause death. Alcohol and water are both dangerous drinks.
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