How Many Athletes Are On Drugs?

[SkylightTonight]

With the Lance Armstrong saga and some other recent developments, I've come to wonder how many athletes are using performance-enhancing drugs. Even Andre Aggasi came out and said he took drugs. I wouldn't have thought tennis would be the sort of sport where drugs would help significantly, but there you go.

Perhaps if it weren't for drugs world records would be broken far less frequently. Think of it this way: the tallest man ever died around 1960 or something. Even though the world's population has doubled in the 50+ years since we haven't had a single taller man, yet we've had multiple faster and stronger men (and women). Records get broken all the time, and in some case by huge margins.

Perhaps you were an athlete and saw drug-taking and would like to say something. In any event, say anything you want about drug-taking in sports.

 

[Necromancer]

Well, it wouldn't surprise me if it's rife. Like most people, I am always suspicious of athletes who either improve too much in a short space of time or who aren't ranked and then start winning medals or breaking records. But then again, you have some athletes who have been brilliant performers and/or breaking records since childhood. (I recently watched a video on YouTube of a young Ian Thorpe at a swim meet and he had a haul of medals around his neck and he was 12 years old. I laughed at how cute he was and commented, he was an overachiever even then.) It must be frustrating for non doping athletes to be automatically suspected of taking performance enhancing drugs when they do win. I'm not sure what the answer is, but it is an unfair playing field.

 

[lifestylekitty]

It really is quite disappointing... really, what's the point of a competition if people are taking performance-enhancing drugs Ugh...

And Lance Armstrong lying all this time ... must be disheartening for people who believed in his success story over cancer and all.