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It's swimming, I would've thought the drugs would help
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this post was submitted on 27 May 2026
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Let’s be real, the regular Olympics are already doped. Their entire careers are on the line with the pride (and eyes) of the nation bearing down on them and demanding results… and we think they and their teams aren’t taking every edge they think they can possibly get away with? All the time famous athletes of yesteryear are being revealed to have been up to shenanigans when science catches up to retest their samples more effectively or some investigation gets a co-conspirator to spill the beans.
There’s microdosing below what tests can detect, novel designer drugs that can’t yet be detected, therapeutic use exemptions for drugs that would normally be banned, setting up situations to evade tests unless you are prepared to take them, tampering with the sample, good old fashioned corruption… probably tons of things that would never occur to me but that would to highly motivated teams with vast amounts of money on the line.
You just demonstrated why Hunter won.
Your comment indicates its all drugsdrugs drugs. Nope. It's years of training and dedication, sacrifice and absolute laser guided focus.
You cant dope your way to a skillset and discipline you don't have.
Exactly, there's tons of dudes who hop on gear and think it's instantly gonna solve all their problems. However, they never optimized their training or reached their natural potential in the first place. They either end up spinning their wheels, burning out and growing man boobs or gaining a little and thinking they're Superman (and probably growing man boobs too).
You actually see it spread even broader - people thinking they can cheese the hard grind. If i get this equipment i can run longer / ride faster / play better and now we're at the point where people think feeding gibberish into a plageurism machine means they can now Art without effort.
Nope. Stuff can help and it can elevate, sure...but there's gotta be the skill underneath. And you need to work for that.
I explicitly said they are searching for EVERY edge they think they can get. That includes insane hard work and practice. The hard-training Olympian who is doped will easily crush someone who is doped but just sitting around eating bon bons. Actually many agents people dope with are used because they allow people to train harder for longer and recover more quickly which is invaluable as an athlete. Saying that many athletes are doping is saying many don’t have integrity, not that they don’t work hard - that couldn’t be further from the truth at the Olympic level.
There's a book, The Sports Gene by David Epstein, that talks about elite level sports performance and the extent to which improvement in different sports is trainable or innate, which are social/cultural, and which have feedback loops to make sport performance a combination of all of the above.
Major league baseball players have very high visual acuity (including/especially much more precise visual determination of distance, like a rangefinder). NBA players are tall, and everyone knows that, but someone surprising is that most of them have much longer arms than even the people of the same height. Olympic high jumpers have tendon attachment points that are especially conducive to jumping high. Many world class marathoners come from ethnic groups that have certain genetic adaptations that help increase red blood count, especially in response to high altitude living (while also having the environmental benefits of living at high altitude in their childhoods and growing up in a culture of running every day as children).
What's interesting, though, is that there may be different genetic or physiological reasons for an untrained person's baseline ability, how quickly their body adapts to training, and where the plateau happens for that particular training. There are people who are naturally high performing, others who might be very responsive to training, and others still who have high ceilings so that they can reach the highest levels with sufficient training.
Drugs will only help with certain adaptations, and can't help with others. There isn't a drug that a 25-year-old can take to make him taller, or to make his Achilles tendon attach at a different point. Drugs probably don't help with hand eye coordination, reaction time, or strategic decisions.
This particular event shows that big muscles may actually hinder swimming ability, so taking drugs to make your muscles bigger might hurt your performance.
So it depends on the sport. I'd expect doping to provide very little advantage in some sports that involve a lot of technique or strategy. And I think swimming is a sport where performance depends heavily on technique, especially at sprint distances.
The drugs at play aren’t limited to androgens. For example in swimming many people have been busted for Methylhexaneamine, a performance enhancing stimulant.
Everyone is looking to shave off any time they can. Just taking drugs alone definitely isn’t enough to put you at the Olympic level. But if you have trained and trained relentlessly and have those sorts of passive genetic advantages you mentioned for your flavor of sport… that may not be enough to assure victory. You can expect your top opponents have similar advantages, since in a world of billions of people who are more mobile than they used to be you are likely not the only person with those particular in-born genetic advantages who trained a ton and has a good strategy… what can you do to get even the slightest edge?
At that level, first there's a shit load of work and deprivation and raw talent honed in countless hours of training, sometimes through injuries and pain. You make it sound like it's all about the drugs and the cheating, I say there's titanic amounts of work to be done just to get to be able to cheat. To keep to your edge metaphor: step 1 to 99 are forging the sword.
I remember someone suggesting that for all Olympic disciplines we should first select a member of the public and let them attempt it. 100m dash. High jump. Walking across the narrow beam. Doing one pull up on the parallel bars. I bet we would appreciate those athletes more afterwards.
I'm not condoning cheating, to be sure, and I've been around for long enough to see this arms race unfold, in cyclism and tennis especially. Athletes are human, and the desire to win sometimes surpasses common sense. But even for a total lying cheater like Lance Armstrong I can still appreciate the sheer amount of work he put in to get lto the start of the race. If you dope an average Joe the same way, all they will accomplish is maybe walk faster.
Didn't the people who exposed him also themselves get exposed?
I want to see an Olympics where they just pick people by lottery and grab a bunch of random average 30-50 year olds, have them compete with no training (okay give them like a few hours of training so they can actually give it a real try and don't hurt themselves), then again after 3, 6 and 12 months of training. I feel like that could singlehandedly make a massive difference in public health given the modern sedentary lifestyle by showing people exactly what is possible for an average person who just got off the couch to do
There's still a shit load of work with drugs, and it's highly sport dependent, but I'd be shocked if there wasn't at least one top 10 Olympic athlete that used PEDs in the vast majority of sports. The most common would probably be things that speed up recovery time, especially from injury.
I replied to the other fellow but in no way am I calling them lazy, actually many of the drugs they use allow them to train harder for longer and as an Olympians they take full advantage of that to push the boundaries of what is possible. Those agents aren’t an “I win” button but at the highest levels people will do literally anything to push themselves to be able to shave off even fractions of a second or gain whatever advantage they can, and being able to train more and bounce back quicker is tempting.