Also, leaving aside the scumbaginess of doping to cheat in the first place, since neither of the accused is based in the USA FDA approval seems somewhat irrelevant.
I'm assuming this is just an NY Times shorthand for saying the drug isn't approved for human use anywhere and wasn't made in pharmaceutical grade facility.
Actually, apparently those who order [medically purposed] drugs online through spam solicitations generally end up getting what they order. NPR has done a couple of stories on this, and I can't find the best link now, but here's one NPR story (from Planet Money) about online spam drug stores largely meeting their commitments: http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2013/01/11/168967999/black...
edit: qualified for "medical" drugs (those meant for medical conditions) instead of enhancement-performing drugs
I'm not too surprised at this. Recreational drug users have been doing this for years. I'd guess they are likely getting any number of not yet illegal stimulants like this too.
Blood samples, I believe, can be stored cryogenically for some period of time and evaluated at a future date using tests/techniques not yet developed at the time the sample was originally drawn.
The efficacy of all this depends on having a rock-solid chain-of-custody for the blood samples-- just like evidence used for a criminal court. Not easy.
^ This can become one of the best deterrents to doping. Put a rigorous system in place and notify athletes that their samples will be re-tested for 'new' drugs every 5 years for the next 20 years. Some athletes may be too focused on the immediate fame and wealth to care, but if enough high profile athletes, like Armstrong, eventually get busted, then perhaps that will help deter the younger generation from trying new drugs.
The interesting thing about Armstrong wasn't the testing that got him - it was Floyd Landis.
The scary thing is had Armstrong not tried to come back to cycling the last time he would've been in the clear. The reason Landis turned him in was Armstrong refused to let him on his team.
Yes, it's true that Armstrong didn't get admit doping because by of the retesting of old samples. It all unraveled with Landis. But Armstrong is a good example of how people will eventually get caught. In 2005, L'Équipe reported that 6 of his urine samples from the 1999 Tour de France that had been frozen had tested positive for EPO. But since it was part of a research project and had not been properly controlled it couldn't be used against Armstrong. It did add fuel to the speculation that he used drugs.
Agreed. 'Stop At Nothing' [1] documentary captures this and more in a gripping fashion. It's available on Netflix and a must watch if you want to understand the whole Armstrong saga.
Great documentary. Watching someone as charismatic as Armstrong look straight at the camera and lie so convincingly, over and over is illuminating to say the least.
> The interesting thing about Armstrong wasn't the testing that got him - it was Floyd Landis.
Which reminds me: Mr. Landis still owes me $35 for that book of his that I bought. [0] His book did highlight what an unprofessional ass Dick Pound (head of WADA at the time) is, and how loosy-goosy some of the testing was. But in the end, Floyd doped just like the rest of them and deserved to be stripped of his TdF title. Once Landis' story broke, I can say that's the point at which I just gave up on pro cycling. That's when it all became clear that cheating also includes lots of lying, and regrets only come when they're caught. I gave the whole lot the benefit of the doubt, and now feel foolish for doing so. I'm a former Cat 2 racer, USAC race official, paid loads of money for pay-per-view races, loads of money on gear; now I don't do any of it, and if I watch sports on TV it's MotoGP. Sports participation is now trail running, where the most insidious drug I see evidence of is the cloud of pot smoke rolling out of some dude's car right before the start.
If Armstrong had just left well enough alone, as you mention, he would have walked away a hero. But I'm guessing his cockiness caught up with him, and he just didn't know when to leave well enough alone, convinced that if he hadn't been caught before he'd continue to not get caught. Which seems to be the downfall of many criminals that get caught.
And as unprofessional as Dick Pound's behavior might have been, it turns out he was right. That's where I'm conflicted. Not "innocent until proven guilty", but "I'm convinced you're guilty, and whether you're guilty or not I'm going to dig until I find dirt". But he was right, at least this time.
Despite all of that, Floyd's attack to regain the yellow jersey after his bad day in the 2006 tour is still one of my favourite tour memories. Drugs or no, his ride that day was really entertaining.
Oh, no doubt. Drugs or not, that was an amazing ride with a large amount of risk that paid off. Even knowing what I know now, if it showed up on my TV screen I'd watch it again. Because even if Landis was pumped to the gills with testosterone, he still had to put out a huge amount of effort to pull it off.
> rock-solid chain-of-custody for the blood samples
Proof is the "alleged" steroid use of Ryan Braun - the Major League Baseball case where the guy in charge of the sample left it in his home over the weekend and Braun got off on this technicality
Freezing tends to damage (amount of damage depends on freezing techniques) hydrophilic cells, so basically anything organic. Even frozen tissue still deteriorates to some degree. Which means that not only new techniques for drug discovery have to be devised, but more importantly, techniques to account for deterioration and change in chemical structure.
You really don't want someone who did sleep at that microscope for past 5 minutes to yell "this seems familiar to compound x" and have your titles removed at the blink of an eye.
You may be oversimplifying here. I can't speak to Eukaryotes, but Prokaryotes are routinely flash frozen in liquid nitrogen and then stored for years at -80. Gently thaw them out and they're happy to go on reproducing.
For the purposes of a drug test, your requirements are even looser. I don't see why you'd need or care about lysing your cells. A test is only going to be screening for small molecules, so destroying organelles and lysing cells should be largely irrelevant.
I'm no chemist/biologist by education (happen to touch the field from time to time) and I am oversimplifying, but the point I wanted to stress is that the delayed test results largely depend on what are you searching for: something that is unnatural to human body or something that is naturally occurring/produced by human body. And unless you have extremely highly controlled test procedures and account for any changes to specimen caused by the test process, including but not limited to storage, then well... you have a biased test. That's scientific testing 101. Yes, sometimes this bias can be safely ignored, but I'm of no competence to tell if drug testing positive/negative results differ by a margin large enough.
AFAIK, even flash frozen and gently thawed prokaryotes do not have 100% survive rate and eukaryote survive rate is considerably lower. My comment revolves around the idea that biochemical reactions have pretty strict requirements on conditions for happening at all, while chemical reactions are much looser in this regard. Even 99.999% survivability calls for scientific research on structural/biochemical/chemical change prior to using such techniques for anything touching legal system with anything shorter than ten foot pole. IMHO. Happy to be corrected.
I'd be nervous about the 98% purity. What makes up the other 2%?
I mean if they're making stuff that is designed to alter your production of red blood cells, is that 2% of stuff likely to be inert or be stuff that has an effect on you?
What's the usual purity percentage of say, OTC aspirin?
By products of the process, left over reagents, whatever was used to extract or separate the product in question. Think heavy metals, intermediates and a lot of mystery chemicals.
It's not FDA approved and probably made in lab with the same stringent quality controls as the clandestine ones in China pumping out similar things.
The 98% purity thing shows that they weren't willing to put in the extra investment to run enough solvent washes / whatever to not poison their customers.
Unless its being sold as a reference compound for analysis, I highly doubt that. Reference chemicals are sold in sub gram amounts because they are not being consumed. They are also extremely pure and cost a lot because of that.
There really aren't other offerings online for this chemical and I doubt that the suppliers are doing back alley deals with research teams in the US.
Someone in the supply chain knows exactly what this compound is for. They know people are buying it to be consumed. They commissioned a foreign lab to have it produced. They could have found a pharm grade lab to produce it. They didn't, because the margins are high on quasi-illicit substances produced in Chinese labs.
It was a cheap synthesis to get tons of the stuff on the market quickly with a huge margin. It's certainly meant for human use.
You're gonna worry yourself sick thinking like that. Forget about wanting to know the purity of OTC aspirin. Don't even start thinking about all the things that could have gone wrong in making the particular bottle of aspirin you got, and assume it's good old aspirin that you've always taken.
This is a bit more anecdotal than I would prefer, but school level chemistry questions/experiments fairly consistently suggest that OTC aspirin tablets are around 85% pure.
If the drug is a peptide, the SPPS process typically produces a lot of shorter chains of amino acids that result from incomplete reactions. The longer your desired peptide chain, the more of these shorter chains you get with amino acids missing.
Peptide drugs will also typically be cyclized with sulfur bridges, so they don't get destroyed by proteases before doing whatever it is they are supposed to do. They're also pH adjusted.
So once the initial synthesis is complete, your purity may be pretty low. You then run your mix of desired molecule plus oodles of incomplete reaction products through a HPLC column a few times, and take the fraction that has the right molecular weight, until the desired purity is reached.
After doing so, whatever is left is going to be a high fraction of the molecule you want, and a tiny fraction of coincidentally similar peptides, which will probably be inert in the body and quickly destroyed by proteases.
If the drug is from an organic synthesis, the 2% impurity is going to depend on the synthesis processes used. It might be leftover catalyst that can't easily be separated, or stereoisomers, or incomplete reaction products.
For regular pharmaceuticals, that 2% is likely to be harmless. For home-made krokodil, that 2% could cause your skin to rot and fall off. Chinese biochem labs will send you pretty much anything you ask for, but you'll have to do your own QC on it. You're not going to win a consumer protection lawsuit there, and the only weapon you have for compliance is to stop paying them and switch labs.
An OTC aspirin tablet is going to start with x% pure acetylsalicylic acid. The dosage mass per tablet is added. Then inert, known-safe binders and fillers are added, like cellulose and dextrose, to make the dosage amount more convenient for handling and swallowing. The original impurity amount is swamped by fillers, so you really just need to know the percentage to determine what mass of the powder you need to add per tablet to get the correct dose. If your aspirin starts at 50% pure, you add 300 mg of it to get a 150 mg dose. Then you add 700 mg of filler to make a 1 g tablet. If it's 98% pure, you add 153 g to get a 150 mg dose, and add 847 mg of filler. The only concern would be whether the original impurities are more dangerous than the filler you use.
Typical impurities for synthesized acetylsalicylic acid are salicylic acid (unreacted starting reagent), ortho- or para- substituted salicylic acid, which may be esterified, acetic acid, salicylic acid ester dimer, and ethyl salicylate. The impurities will mostly be salicylic acid and vinegar. Salicylic acid is a metabolite of aspirin anyway, and is also antipyretic, analgesic, anti-imflammatory. A lower-purity batch of aspirin probably won't be dangerous to use. But for different drugs, the impurities will be different! If the impurity could be a deadly poison, there's a big difference between 98% pure and 90% pure.
You can look up the purity requirements of pharmaceuticals on the FDA website. When I worked in the industry, it was typically a maximum of 0.5% impurities, with no single impurity higher than 0.1%.
Of course, it depends on what the impurity is. If it's ethanol, you can have a few percent. If it's a suspected carcinogen, the level might be in ppm.
How do these drug tests work? I was under the impression that drug tests only found things that they were looking for. How did they know to be looking for this new drug? I'm googling to try to figure it out but maybe someone is familiar with this process?
Maybe. Part of the reason that he contested it for so long was that although he had doped he had not actually taken anything that would produce the reported result.
What? Yes they do. They look for the chemical itself or its metabolites. Getting a sample sent off to a lab usually means "give this to a facility that can perform a GC/MS or whatnot and has enough reference samples on hand to determine what is in this fluid"
Same thing with HIV tests, they don't look for the virus because they can't. So they look for other signals, which might be incorrect. You may even test 3 times positive and the fourth time negative.
I don't know the details in the case of this new drug, but in the last few years there has been a lot of collaboration between drug manufacturers and anti-doping testers. For example, when CERA was introduced, the manufacturer worked closely with WADA to develop tests before the drug even hit the market. Here's an article from that time - I assume a similar collaboration was at work with this new drug:
The World Anti-Doping Agency constantly update their list of prohibited substances and develop new tests on a proactive basis. FG-4592 (and a number of similar compounds) have been on the prohibited list since the beginning of 2015. The list can be seen at the list below, and it is extremely comprehensive. Several other substances are not currently prohibited, but are monitored for their possible use as performance enhancing drugs.
Alongside track and field athletes, cyclists are the most tested athletes in any sport, and are subject to three core testing regimes.
Firstly, cyclists are subject to in-competition testing. The winner of any race (or the stage of a race) and a random sample of other riders will be subject to blood or urine tests.
Secondly, the whereabouts program requires cyclists to notify the authorities of their location every day to facilitate out-of-competition testing. Athletes are randomly sampled, with extra scrutiny paid to the strongest performers.
Thirdly, the biological passport scheme creates a long-term profile of a rider's physiology, to track changes in markers like testosterone/epitestosterone ratio and hematocrit that may indicate the use of performance enhancing drugs or methods. A sudden change in any of these markers or deviation outside normal ranges is grounds for sanctioning.
In all tests, two samples are taken to safeguard against anomalous measurements or failures in the chain of custody. A portion of both samples is stored indefinitely, to facilitate retroactive testing if new drugs or methods are discovered.
It looks as though the UCI has finally caught up wit the dopers. For decades, the cycling teams were always two or three steps ahead of UCI testing methods.
Good to see they're developing the means to uncover these new drugs before they become widely used.
This is another reason why I've stopped watching baseball and will probably never follow competitive cycling, even though I enjoy cycling myself.
What's the point of the competition when a good portion of the top athletes are doping? It's not a pure contest of man, willpower, carbon-fiber, and asphalt.
The real spectacle is now between the athletes, regulators, lawyers, coaches. I see no romance/art in watching them chase money and evidence around.
> What's the point of the competition when a good portion of the top athletes are doping? It's not a pure contest of man, willpower, carbon-fiber, and asphalt.
I'm a transhumanist, so I just want to see the most impressive things the human body can pull off, and that includes the use of chemical enhancement..
> I just want to see the most impressive things the human body can pull off
This may be a ship-of-theseus sort of question with no widely agreed upon answer, but at some point doesn't it stop being what the human body can pull off if you modify it enough?
Personally, I don't see any reason to be bothered by doping; it's just another form of performance technology. To me, it isn't any different from eating a high-protein diet. Or having a genetic anomaly that makes your muscles slightly more efficient.
They chase money and evidence around precisely because people like you will stop caring if they can't prevent doping. You draw a (very arbitrary) line between 'natural' and 'unnatural' athletes, and you create a market for goon squads to hunt down the unnaturals to preserve the purity of the culture.
It never was a pure contest of man, willpower, carbon-fiber, and asphalt. It's also a contest of means, luck, money, food, biology, and genetics. Even without the doping.
I'm not arguing that people shouldn't be allowed to dope if they want to. Nor am I arguing that unnatural or transhumanist athletes should be "hunted down" by goon squads.
I'm arguing that athletes who perform in games and competitions must follow the rules of these games and competitions, or else what is the point of having the structured organization of a sport? No one would care about the Tour de France if it wasn't assumed that the athletes were all following the same set of rules. Athletes who dope should play in their own league, with their own set of rules.
I agree: the line between different performance enhancing technologies is blurred. I'm not trying to pass judgment on whether taking steroids is more or less "wrong" than following a high-protein diet.
All I can comment on is my decline in interest given the shaky boundaries and clearly unethical actions of the top layer of these sports.
Unfortunately I am but one individual in the greater market of people who determine athlete salary by attending games, sitting in front of the TV, and buying endorsed products.
I do love to watch a good old Federer v Djokovic match every once in a while though ;)
I have tended to feel the same way but arguments can be made that allowing unrestricted doping would force those who want to compete to take something potentially/increasingly dangerous to their long term health in order to do so at the top tiers (as if you didn't, there would certainly be someone who would be willing to burn the candle at both ends for the fame and money).
Even in the case where you were to break things out into a doping/vs. non-doping leagues, I have a feeling that in the ultra-competitive world of top athletes, there would be a temptation to get an edge in the non-doping league by similar means as are used today thus buying nothing (except, perhaps, an additional league of super-human athletes who I suspect would get more recognition, fame, and money than their counterparts and therefore push more athletes into a doping arms-race).
I used to think that but what sticks in my throat is the bullying of other athletes into potentially dangerous practices for other people's short term gain.
David Millar's autobiography goes into some detail about it.
Someone saying "take this blood transfusion or inject this 'recover' syringe or you're out of a job" to a young athlete, far from home, is a scary thought.
This is why I'm hesitant to say that sports should just legalize doping. It will trickle down from the pro level and have extreme consequences on the young athletes whose bodies are still developing.
"Natural" forms of athletic enhancement (pre puberty rigorous training) lead to stunted growth from the stress and impact placed on growth plates. What happens when the only way to get ahead is to gamble with Human Growth Hormone and steroids pre puberty?
60 comments
[ 127 ms ] story [ 1360 ms ] threadI guess this happens to millions of people every day, ordering drugs online through the internet.
I'm assuming this is just an NY Times shorthand for saying the drug isn't approved for human use anywhere and wasn't made in pharmaceutical grade facility.
edit: qualified for "medical" drugs (those meant for medical conditions) instead of enhancement-performing drugs
The efficacy of all this depends on having a rock-solid chain-of-custody for the blood samples-- just like evidence used for a criminal court. Not easy.
The scary thing is had Armstrong not tried to come back to cycling the last time he would've been in the clear. The reason Landis turned him in was Armstrong refused to let him on his team.
[1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3511812/
Which reminds me: Mr. Landis still owes me $35 for that book of his that I bought. [0] His book did highlight what an unprofessional ass Dick Pound (head of WADA at the time) is, and how loosy-goosy some of the testing was. But in the end, Floyd doped just like the rest of them and deserved to be stripped of his TdF title. Once Landis' story broke, I can say that's the point at which I just gave up on pro cycling. That's when it all became clear that cheating also includes lots of lying, and regrets only come when they're caught. I gave the whole lot the benefit of the doubt, and now feel foolish for doing so. I'm a former Cat 2 racer, USAC race official, paid loads of money for pay-per-view races, loads of money on gear; now I don't do any of it, and if I watch sports on TV it's MotoGP. Sports participation is now trail running, where the most insidious drug I see evidence of is the cloud of pot smoke rolling out of some dude's car right before the start.
If Armstrong had just left well enough alone, as you mention, he would have walked away a hero. But I'm guessing his cockiness caught up with him, and he just didn't know when to leave well enough alone, convinced that if he hadn't been caught before he'd continue to not get caught. Which seems to be the downfall of many criminals that get caught.
And as unprofessional as Dick Pound's behavior might have been, it turns out he was right. That's where I'm conflicted. Not "innocent until proven guilty", but "I'm convinced you're guilty, and whether you're guilty or not I'm going to dig until I find dirt". But he was right, at least this time.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positively_False
Proof is the "alleged" steroid use of Ryan Braun - the Major League Baseball case where the guy in charge of the sample left it in his home over the weekend and Braun got off on this technicality
For the purposes of a drug test, your requirements are even looser. I don't see why you'd need or care about lysing your cells. A test is only going to be screening for small molecules, so destroying organelles and lysing cells should be largely irrelevant.
AFAIK, even flash frozen and gently thawed prokaryotes do not have 100% survive rate and eukaryote survive rate is considerably lower. My comment revolves around the idea that biochemical reactions have pretty strict requirements on conditions for happening at all, while chemical reactions are much looser in this regard. Even 99.999% survivability calls for scientific research on structural/biochemical/chemical change prior to using such techniques for anything touching legal system with anything shorter than ten foot pole. IMHO. Happy to be corrected.
I mean if they're making stuff that is designed to alter your production of red blood cells, is that 2% of stuff likely to be inert or be stuff that has an effect on you?
What's the usual purity percentage of say, OTC aspirin?
It's not FDA approved and probably made in lab with the same stringent quality controls as the clandestine ones in China pumping out similar things.
The 98% purity thing shows that they weren't willing to put in the extra investment to run enough solvent washes / whatever to not poison their customers.
Then why does it come in pill form? And why do they only sell it to researchers - including those doing clinical trials?
It is available to researchers as they are able to use it in non-human assays, experiments and studies.
[1] https://www.caymanchem.com/app/template/Product.vm/catalog/1...
There really aren't other offerings online for this chemical and I doubt that the suppliers are doing back alley deals with research teams in the US.
Someone in the supply chain knows exactly what this compound is for. They know people are buying it to be consumed. They commissioned a foreign lab to have it produced. They could have found a pharm grade lab to produce it. They didn't, because the margins are high on quasi-illicit substances produced in Chinese labs.
It was a cheap synthesis to get tons of the stuff on the market quickly with a huge margin. It's certainly meant for human use.
e.g. https://uk.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=201008170449...
This is mostly deliberate, but acetic acid is a common contaminent in the manufacturing process.
Peptide drugs will also typically be cyclized with sulfur bridges, so they don't get destroyed by proteases before doing whatever it is they are supposed to do. They're also pH adjusted.
So once the initial synthesis is complete, your purity may be pretty low. You then run your mix of desired molecule plus oodles of incomplete reaction products through a HPLC column a few times, and take the fraction that has the right molecular weight, until the desired purity is reached.
After doing so, whatever is left is going to be a high fraction of the molecule you want, and a tiny fraction of coincidentally similar peptides, which will probably be inert in the body and quickly destroyed by proteases.
If the drug is from an organic synthesis, the 2% impurity is going to depend on the synthesis processes used. It might be leftover catalyst that can't easily be separated, or stereoisomers, or incomplete reaction products.
For regular pharmaceuticals, that 2% is likely to be harmless. For home-made krokodil, that 2% could cause your skin to rot and fall off. Chinese biochem labs will send you pretty much anything you ask for, but you'll have to do your own QC on it. You're not going to win a consumer protection lawsuit there, and the only weapon you have for compliance is to stop paying them and switch labs.
An OTC aspirin tablet is going to start with x% pure acetylsalicylic acid. The dosage mass per tablet is added. Then inert, known-safe binders and fillers are added, like cellulose and dextrose, to make the dosage amount more convenient for handling and swallowing. The original impurity amount is swamped by fillers, so you really just need to know the percentage to determine what mass of the powder you need to add per tablet to get the correct dose. If your aspirin starts at 50% pure, you add 300 mg of it to get a 150 mg dose. Then you add 700 mg of filler to make a 1 g tablet. If it's 98% pure, you add 153 g to get a 150 mg dose, and add 847 mg of filler. The only concern would be whether the original impurities are more dangerous than the filler you use.
Typical impurities for synthesized acetylsalicylic acid are salicylic acid (unreacted starting reagent), ortho- or para- substituted salicylic acid, which may be esterified, acetic acid, salicylic acid ester dimer, and ethyl salicylate. The impurities will mostly be salicylic acid and vinegar. Salicylic acid is a metabolite of aspirin anyway, and is also antipyretic, analgesic, anti-imflammatory. A lower-purity batch of aspirin probably won't be dangerous to use. But for different drugs, the impurities will be different! If the impurity could be a deadly poison, there's a big difference between 98% pure and 90% pure.
Of course, it depends on what the impurity is. If it's ethanol, you can have a few percent. If it's a suspected carcinogen, the level might be in ppm.
Same thing with HIV tests, they don't look for the virus because they can't. So they look for other signals, which might be incorrect. You may even test 3 times positive and the fourth time negative.
Ah, the unspoken limits of Science!
http://www.cyclingnews.com/news/manufacturer-helped-wada-wit...
Alongside track and field athletes, cyclists are the most tested athletes in any sport, and are subject to three core testing regimes.
Firstly, cyclists are subject to in-competition testing. The winner of any race (or the stage of a race) and a random sample of other riders will be subject to blood or urine tests.
Secondly, the whereabouts program requires cyclists to notify the authorities of their location every day to facilitate out-of-competition testing. Athletes are randomly sampled, with extra scrutiny paid to the strongest performers.
Thirdly, the biological passport scheme creates a long-term profile of a rider's physiology, to track changes in markers like testosterone/epitestosterone ratio and hematocrit that may indicate the use of performance enhancing drugs or methods. A sudden change in any of these markers or deviation outside normal ranges is grounds for sanctioning.
In all tests, two samples are taken to safeguard against anomalous measurements or failures in the chain of custody. A portion of both samples is stored indefinitely, to facilitate retroactive testing if new drugs or methods are discovered.
https://wada-main-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/resources/files/wada...
Good to see they're developing the means to uncover these new drugs before they become widely used.
What's the point of the competition when a good portion of the top athletes are doping? It's not a pure contest of man, willpower, carbon-fiber, and asphalt.
The real spectacle is now between the athletes, regulators, lawyers, coaches. I see no romance/art in watching them chase money and evidence around.
I'm a transhumanist, so I just want to see the most impressive things the human body can pull off, and that includes the use of chemical enhancement..
This may be a ship-of-theseus sort of question with no widely agreed upon answer, but at some point doesn't it stop being what the human body can pull off if you modify it enough?
They chase money and evidence around precisely because people like you will stop caring if they can't prevent doping. You draw a (very arbitrary) line between 'natural' and 'unnatural' athletes, and you create a market for goon squads to hunt down the unnaturals to preserve the purity of the culture.
It never was a pure contest of man, willpower, carbon-fiber, and asphalt. It's also a contest of means, luck, money, food, biology, and genetics. Even without the doping.
It's especially visible in running, where sprinting world records never last long thanks to new knowledge of nutrition.
wait, it was just the introduction of EPO.
I'm arguing that athletes who perform in games and competitions must follow the rules of these games and competitions, or else what is the point of having the structured organization of a sport? No one would care about the Tour de France if it wasn't assumed that the athletes were all following the same set of rules. Athletes who dope should play in their own league, with their own set of rules.
I agree: the line between different performance enhancing technologies is blurred. I'm not trying to pass judgment on whether taking steroids is more or less "wrong" than following a high-protein diet.
All I can comment on is my decline in interest given the shaky boundaries and clearly unethical actions of the top layer of these sports.
On the other hand, if you're going to pay them so much to win, it will naturally be worth the risk to lie and cheat to do it.
Unfortunately I am but one individual in the greater market of people who determine athlete salary by attending games, sitting in front of the TV, and buying endorsed products.
I do love to watch a good old Federer v Djokovic match every once in a while though ;)
Even in the case where you were to break things out into a doping/vs. non-doping leagues, I have a feeling that in the ultra-competitive world of top athletes, there would be a temptation to get an edge in the non-doping league by similar means as are used today thus buying nothing (except, perhaps, an additional league of super-human athletes who I suspect would get more recognition, fame, and money than their counterparts and therefore push more athletes into a doping arms-race).
David Millar's autobiography goes into some detail about it.
Someone saying "take this blood transfusion or inject this 'recover' syringe or you're out of a job" to a young athlete, far from home, is a scary thought.
"Natural" forms of athletic enhancement (pre puberty rigorous training) lead to stunted growth from the stress and impact placed on growth plates. What happens when the only way to get ahead is to gamble with Human Growth Hormone and steroids pre puberty?