@consolation:
Not that much of an expert on gymnastics, but being able to build muscle mass could definitely help with things like the parallel bars, the rings, potentially the vault, might help on the floor exercises by building upper body strength. Might help less (simply as an observer speculating) on the balance beam where strength isn’t quite that important.
It also can work against an athlete, steroids make you a lot more susceptble to injury, especially tendon and cartilege injuries, it is one of the negatives, and given what gymnasts do and the kind of load it puts on the joints, I wonder if that might make using them not a great idea (again, speculation).
The gymnastics scandal at the Beijing olympics involved girls with irregular birth certificates. It is suspected that they were younger than the required age. They were even told to smile with their lips closed so that you couldn’t tell that they looked like they had recently started to get big teeth in!
“Steroids has risks to it that means using it to enhance performance is Russian Roulette with 4 bullets in the gun. There hasn’t been any real studies done, but a number of players from the Steroid era of football, and from wrestling and weightlifting, have ended up with severe medical issues, like weird cancers, endocrine problems and you name. I wonder how those Eastern European athletes ended up later on.”
Many of the former East German athletes who took all those steroids have suffered serious medical issues later in life:
Excerpt:
“The stars of yesterday suffered severe depression, heart conditions, degenerative bone disease and infertility. Some even changed sex because of the drugs. Many spiralled into drink and drug addictions, unable to find work.”
As for gymnastics, I could see the dope helping a lot because in addition to building strength, it also reduces recovery time. The dope may not directly help you do the gymnastic tricks better, but it can certainly enable you to practice more often and for longer because you recover much quicker from the previous grueling workouts.
Scipio:
Thanks, I had heard that but not read about it directly. I had heard of some of the east german women swimmers ending up living as men, and one thing I read suggested that because the hormones they were given that basically they had no choice, it so changed the way they looked that they couldn’t live as a woman and not be treated horribly…which would be sad (it could be, on the other hand, that they already were gender questioning and this kind of let them go forward…)…in any case, it is very sad.
Yeah, steroids will help you recover from a workout, but paradoxically they can make recovering from injury harder besides increasing the number of injuries. HGH is reputed to help athletes recover from injury, but the anabolic steroids apparently from what (little) I know cause you to get injured more and can make it harder to recover from, too, I remember SI was saying when Barry Bonds was still playing, that a hamstring injury another player would recover from in a week would take him a lot longer, for example.
Sadly, I think doping is going to be around, if people can find shortcuts they will take it. Athletes are almost all amazingly well conditioned these days (well, okay, except maybe Bartolo Colon on the NY Mets, on the other hand you know he isn’t doing steroids, he doesn’t get hurt lol) , so it is hard to gain an advantage with that, so they look to other ways to make them stand out. It kind of makes me appreciate Babe Ruth more, the guy was way overweight, smoked, drank and was out to all hours carousing, yet take a look at his stats, including in the field, amazing. I guess maybe hot dogs and scotch were his PEDs lol.
Yeah, in baseball they talk about the “Steroid Era” like it’s some long ago time that is over now and never coming back, like the Medieval Era. But I bet we’re still in the heart of the steroid era in baseball and will be for a long time to come. They’re just less blatant about it. With the advent of some testing in baseball (kind lame testing but that’s another discussion), it has forced them to be more sophisticated in their drug regimens and in deceiving the tests - similar to what goes on in track and cycling.
Not to mention that the players union and teams also have made sure it isn’t entirely hard to bypass. The tests are not random, so the player knows when it will happen and can, for example, cycle off the stuff. I amazes me that players are even caught, it is kind of like seeing signs that say “traffic cops ahead” and get caught speeding. Thing is, the more they test, the harder and more expensive it becomes to try and mask it, but of course someone will figure it out. Quite honestly, I think it should be a years suspension without pay for the first incident, and if you get caught again, you are finished for good, but I am not holding my breath.
What I wonder about is football, football seemingly cracked down on roids long before baseball did, it seems like in Football most of the suspensions are for pot use, not steroids. Given how big football players have gotten, is that simply bigger guys being in better shape, or are they hiding steroid use? Back in the 70’s it was almost blatently out there, it didn’t take a genius to figure out players like Lyle Alzedo were juicing (poor SOB died pretty horribly, of brain cancer, and admitted he had used), and there were plenty of other examples, these days seems more subtle.
Male gymnasts are the ones who do events that require massive strength, the rings, pommel horse, etc, so it probably goes without saying that steroids would help them gain upper body strength.
The females, less so, which is why I wonder about them.
There can be a definite advantage in being small in female gymnastics, which is one reason why there were obviously underage Chinese gymnasts at Beijing.
But I’m with Scipio. I now assume that all track and field athletes are doping, which greatly reduces my interest. Marion Jones was kind of the last straw for me.
The IOC just announced that they are banning the entire Russian olympics team from competing, citing the widespread used of PED’s by Russian athletes. This is unheard of, it is amazing that the IOC, known for looking the other way with so many things, would resort to this. It is kind of sad for the athletes who don’t take dope (there are sports like Archery where steroids would be useless, for example), the ones who likely the Russians wouldn’t bother trying to dope in sports they don’t consider prestigious, it likely might have been their only opportunity to compete. On the other hand, given how blatent the Russians are and that it is state sponsored, I guess the IOC wanted to make a statement. On the other hand, they likely could ban the Chinese as well if that is the case, but I doubt that, lot easier to ban the Russians because everyone hates Putin and is looking for an excuse to stick it to them.
I’m also one that stopped paying much attention to the Olympics. I take it for granted that most of the winning athletes in sports that require strength and/or endurance engage in some kind of doping.
I used to compete in powerlifting and saw how steroids destroyed the sport. Lots of the people who went to lower-level meets saw that they wouldn’t be able to progress to upper level meets unless they injected themselves with steroids, so they left the sport.
Each individual sports federation will make the decisions, which sounds like (more than) a bit of a mess with so little time left before the Olympics. This decision has been criticized.
“The 28 individual federations now have just 12 days to ‘carry out an individual analysis of each competitor’s anti-doping record, taking into account only reliable adequate international tests, and the specificities of each sport and its rules, in order to ensure a level playing field.’”
No, I participated on the old t-and-f email listserv that was hosted out of the the Univ of Oregon. This was mostly back in the 90s. It started before websites became common as a place for discussion forums. t-and-f was popular for about a decade. I was one of the moderators. It had a fair number of high profile coaches and athletes regularly participating. It eventually got outdone by Track and Field News discussion website and sort of withered away. The T&FNews writers and editors at first were participants on t-and-f, and decided that online track discussion was a great idea started their own competing venue that operates to this day.
I kind of hated to see the discussion forum get taken over by commercial interests, because we had been run by and for the fans, athletes, and coaches, with a budget of essentially zero dollars. We’d have meet-ups at big track meets and even hosted a few road races. Those were the good old days.