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I don’t follow cycling closely, but I once praised Lance Armstrong, who I had read about in the media, to a friend who had been a journeymen professional in the sport in the late 1990s. My friend expressed some irritation, shrugged, and told me that everyone in the sport knew that Armstrong doped. He didn’t seem to want to talk about it in any depth, as he’d left the sport anyhow, and I didn’t pursue the conversation any further. Honestly I wasn’t sure at the time whether my friend was correct, or, whether he was jealous. I assumed the former, but I didn’t totally discount the latter. How could I truly know at the time?
This was in the early 2000s. Obviously if my friend, who was very far down the rankings of competitors, knew this, many more did so. The media almost certainly suspected, but Armstrong was a great story, and most people didn’t have definitive proof. I thought of this when reading this piece in The New York Times, Clean Athletes, and Olympic Glory Lost in the Doping Era:
Babashoff arrived at the Montreal Olympics in 1976 with a chance to match the performance in 1972 of Mark Spitz, whose seven golds sealed his status as an American icon and propelled him into a career as a product pitchman. Babashoff, a teammate of Spitz’s at those Munich Olympics, swam significantly faster four years later only to settle for four Olympic silver medals and one relay gold. Her career path as a high-profile endorser and motivational speaker was blockaded by broad-backed, husky-voiced East Germans later found to have been unwitting victims of a government-sponsored doping program.
Shamed by the news media and shunned by swimming officials for pointing out her competitors’ cartoonish musculature and suggesting they were cheating, Babashoff retreated into a self-imposed, decades-long exile. She raised her son, Adam, now 30, as a single mother well out of the spotlight while working as a postal carrier in Huntington Beach, Calif.
…
“People knew what was going on at the time, they just didn’t know what to do about it,” Babashoff said. “It just seems so weird in this day and age that they can’t right the wrongs. It just seems like such an easy fix.”
…
“Well, except for their deep voices and mustaches, I think they’ll probably do fine,” she said. Her remarks were the beater that churned Cold War politics. Apologetic United States Olympic Committee officials sent the East German women flower arrangements, Babashoff wrote. In her book, Babashoff includes an open letter to Bach requesting that the female swimmers from the 1976 Olympics who finished behind the East Germans be awarded duplicate medals.
…
At the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, the swimmer Allison Wagner finished second in the 400 individual medley to Michelle Smith, 26, of Ireland, whose winning time was 19.76 seconds faster than her 26th-place effort four years earlier at the Barcelona Olympics. Smith’s remarkable improvement at a relatively advanced age made her competitors suspicious.
…she had left the pool deck, panting from exhaustion, after the 400 I.M. final and had been cut off by Hungary’s Krisztina Egerszegi, the defending champion, whom she had defeated by five-tenths of a second. Wagner said: “She came right up to me and said: ‘Congratulations. You’re the true winner. I just want you to know that.’ I had never talked to her before in my life, and she said that to me.”
But when Wagner met with the news media shortly thereafter, she refrained from denigrating Smith or questioning her performance.
“I didn’t say anything because people in our swimming federation used to say to me, ‘You don’t want to be Surly Shirley, do you?’” she said, referring to Babashoff.
Depressing. But in sports where differentiation at the highest echelons can be split second, resulting in huge variation in monetary outcomes, I do wonder if there is a lot of subtle cheating which we can never even hope to detect.
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(Just trying to make sense of some things.) Form follows function. Interests select and shape function over time in feedback with environments. What is the function of the Olympics? To attract the attention of viewers and sell them sports equipment. In the absence of decentralized decision-making the wishes and social norms of the viewers are hacked and instead of having some direct influence on the shaping of function they are instead lulled by viewing various forms of dream fantasies. (In this sense the Olympics is not ‘democratic’.) Is there a lot of subtle cheating? The interests of the individual athletes conflict with the interests of those who finance the Olympics, but both are aligned in wishing to not be involved in breaking the fantasy that anyone who trains hard can win. (A strange fantasy indeed, ignoring genetics, cultural-accumulation of training methods i.e. access to the best coaches, and so on.) So I for one would expect a lot of subtle cheating. One possible way forward is to use a structured semi-transparency to align interests of the non-doping athletes against the rest. Here what comes to mind is the highly successful Richard Feynman associated program for the Federal Aviation Administration’s program for the anonymity of pilot-error reporting. (If done badly however it can turn into the worst sort of ‘informer system’ destroying reputations based on lies. So details matter.) Or, in an opposite direction – consider gene doping. In effect allowing transsexuals to compete in their self-identified gender category is allowing what might be called gene doping. What the Olympic organizers have done is pushed the limit on the willful blindness of viewers toward genetics at a time when there is an accelerating increase in knowledge and acceptance of genetics throughout the general population of viewers. A cognitive dissonance is being set up between allowing the biology of gene-doping in the form of gender self-identification and disallowing the biology of drug-doping (which in many cases might involve up-regulating or down-regulating gene expressions.) So the way forward in this wholly other direction is for the Olympic organizers is to allow a change in the ~form~ of the fantasy sold to viewers to align more with the scientific reality of the influence of the biology of genes and gene expression on sports performance — to allow the use of gender self-identification gene doping to eventually undermine and perhaps eliminate entirely the restrictions against drug doping.
Further thoughts – Regarding gene doping see gene therapy and Bioviva CEO Elizabeth Parrish’s telomerase experiment. The technology is already here. By the way, a major limitation on a lot of drug development is getting the drug to (or inside) the right cell at the right time for optimal effect. By hitch-hiking on the already evolved machinery for gene expression, gene therapy as it becomes better developed will most likely become more and more able to get around a lot of limitations of drug development.
Unwitting ?? *cough*
They didn't understand exactly what was in the injections or pills. They had no reason to doubt what they were told, and no way of learning otherwise.
I think unwitting is the right word.Replies: @anonymous
Cheating is never a thing specific for one people. People just have different price tags for cheating behavior. For poor, they can cheat over $1. For rich, they would not cheat until the bounty is over million dollars.
Honesty test like this is obviously defective.
http://drjamesthompson.blogspot.ca/2016/04/honestly.html#comment-form
For higher price tag, rich people will cheat too.
‘Made in Germany’ lies in the ‘gutter’ after Volkswagen caught cheating
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/11880921/Made-in-Germany-lies-in-the-gutter-after-Volkswagen-caught-cheating.html
Blind trust on anyone including your own people is for idiots. Be cautious. For profit, anything can happens.
Be able to predict honesty range (up to $1, or up to $ millions) on a person or people is critical in business decision. The same rules apply to politics and international relationship.
Like age-old wisdom
We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests(or profits) are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow…
I don’t understand your reference to Bayesians. A proper Bayesian analysis of the unusual patterns in the progress of winning times and sports records would straightforwardly give the result that the posterior probability that the winners had cheated was much greater than the prior probability given to that assumption. That is, in fact, the way you look at the question, isn’t it?
the east german swimmers in the 70s and 80s were notably masculinized. swimmers from other nations would routinely observe and complain that something was off. but at the time it seems there was a lot of pap about how the soviet bloc had these awesome training regimes to explain the physiognomy, as opposed to excellent doping programs (if you click the youtube you see a standard explanation of the sort i’m describing). the story above highlights the unfortunate career of an american swimmer who was vocal about the suspicions everyone had, but few wanted to voice lest they be attacked in the public arena.
there was something similar that occurred in baseball in the late 90s and early 2000s. the physical changes to players like sosa and bonds, and their spike in HRs, aroused suspicion. but for a long time they were shushed or explained away….
I see your point now, that there WERE Bayesians protesting back then but they got no traction with their complaints.
I’m happy to see the IOC taking the Russian doping seriously at last, but it’s too bad there isn’t a greater awareness of how statistically extraordinary the results would be if there were no cheating. In the Tour De France the course is different every year so the anomalies aren’t as obvious as in track and field, or in baseball HRs where the stadiums are the only significant other variable and their effect is precisely measurable.
They should simply have two divisions, dirty and clean, with comparable prizes, and let the athletes choose where to compete. Then it would be easier to justify extreme penalties for dopers in the clean events.
It would be very interesting to see whether dirty or clean events would be more popular.Replies: @AG
There is an apples to oranges comparison here. Cheaters are defined by their actions. Bayesians are defined by their beliefs, not their decision to speak their beliefs. Cheaters prospers because how they deploy their beliefs; and they must start with accurate beliefs.
agreed
In an ESPN documentary on the Ben Johnson fiasco, one of the guys who did drug testing for the Olympics back in the ’80s said that, having saved some his samples from the period, he decided to go back and re-test them, with more advanced modern testing techniques that can detect substances that couldn’t be proved back then. He gave up on the project because his results were too depressing- sample after sample after sample, from certified “clean” athletes, were coming back with banned substances.
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2003/apr/24/athletics.duncanmackay
I'm happy to see the IOC taking the Russian doping seriously at last, but it's too bad there isn't a greater awareness of how statistically extraordinary the results would be if there were no cheating. In the Tour De France the course is different every year so the anomalies aren't as obvious as in track and field, or in baseball HRs where the stadiums are the only significant other variable and their effect is precisely measurable.
They should simply have two divisions, dirty and clean, with comparable prizes, and let the athletes choose where to compete. Then it would be easier to justify extreme penalties for dopers in the clean events.Replies: @gruff, @Psmith
This seems to me to be the only real solution. Food labelling for athletes. They could even go as far as informing viewers of the exact drug regimen followed by each athlete.
It would be very interesting to see whether dirty or clean events would be more popular.
Well, these guinea pigs would be heroes for advancing science.
It would be very interesting to see whether dirty or clean events would be more popular.Replies: @AG
As scientist, I would be very much interested in sports events in which humans who want to become Guinea pigs with all kind experiments. It would be fascinating to compare effects of different types of drugs or manipulations.
Well, these guinea pigs would be heroes for advancing science.
Jon Jones and Brock Lesnar are two recent cheaters caught recently. Jones *was* considered the best MMA fighter ever, to some, but now we’ll never know.
It doesn’t get talked about in the NHL that much but occasionally a player gets caught. I’ve always suspected Alex Ovechkin is doping because he’s Russian and mainly because he’s almost unbelievably dominant.
What should we think about the role of Ritalin and friends in getting tenure?
Puzzles that I couldn't solve sober if my life depended on it.
If I had Ritalin as a kid I'd be emperor of the planet by now... I finally understood why people hoarded them during exam times. And they give this stuff out to kids which baffled me why half of them still acted like retards. I can only imagine what it can do in the hands of a grown educated man.Replies: @Robert Ford, @Psmith, @FKA Max
One suspicious thing about Soviet Block athletics (and of China) is that their women ranked so much higher than their men.
The effect of androgens will be greater in women than in men.
Cheating abounds in sports. Highly competitive people cut corners without moral qualms about it all the time. In baseball, doctoring the ball is a time-honored tradition. Soccer players “dive” all the time. Basketballplayers foul, runners cut each other off, football players make dirty hits, etc. Doping is just the latest addition to an already big bag of tricks. So of course people are going to push the limits with meds, supplements, drugs and so forth. There isn’t really a clear line between strong competition and cheating when you get down to it.
I remember, for example, coming across Tomas Wassberg’s XC-skiing team in the Holmenkollen (Oslo) back in 85. As I skied past with my stepdad, Wassberg and his waxing coach eyed us suspiciously as they fiddled around with tape. We had no idea what they were doing, but later it became clear. The Norwegian officials were trying to discourage skating, a technique introduced by American Bill Koch a few years earlier, so they declared that skating would not be allowed in a certain section of the course. The presumption was that this would effectively prohibit skating for the entire race, because you need grip wax to ski with the classical technique, and grip wax makes skating very inefficient.
What Wassberg and his crew did was put grip wax on tape, then stick the tape to the bottom of his skis. When he got to the end of the no-skating area, he simply pulled off the tape, tossed it aside and skated on to victory. Was that cheating? Technically it wasn’t, but it still gave him an unfair advantage over those who followed the spirit of the rule. It’s all part of the game.
It’s not only cheating by using performance enhancing drugs.
Cyclists have been caught using small motors inside their bicycles to give them a little edge.
http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/a19366/heres-how-that-cyclist-hid-a-motor-in-her-bike/
https://www.rt.com/viral/340087-mechanical-doping-thermal-cameras/
As for PEDs: the problem is if you’re about to hit your 30s and still want to continue to develop strength/muscles/stamina/etc. your only options is to take something to help you. How else can you compete against the young bloods (20-24 year old guys)? It’s either you find some way to give you that little boost or just watch yourself get weaker and smaller every year, even if you work out daily. Everyone I know that competes and is in their 30s has at least done one cycle of roids (this includes women who tend to do only one cycle, but it does really change their body structure before and after with just one cycle).
I did Ritalin once back in university. I bought a few pills from a friend, I can’t remember the dose or how many I took in a sitting or even the type of mood it put me in but I do remember beating countless puzzles, riddles, crosswords, Sudoku puzzles, computer puzzle games (SpaceChem, etc.) etc. etc. etc.
Puzzles that I couldn’t solve sober if my life depended on it.
If I had Ritalin as a kid I’d be emperor of the planet by now… I finally understood why people hoarded them during exam times. And they give this stuff out to kids which baffled me why half of them still acted like retards. I can only imagine what it can do in the hands of a grown educated man.
Why 'smart drugs' can make you less clever
http://medicalxpress.com/news/2016-07-smart-drugs-clever.html
maybe this could be why
I also studied two semesters of fashion design (we were three males in a class of twenty, and all of us were straight, as far as I was able to tell (a rarity in the fashion industry)). By the second semester a fair number of my class mates were said to have started taking cocaine to cope with the heavy workload and long hours. I never personally saw them take it. I dropped out of fashion school around the same time I first heard about those rumors, because I personally couldn't handle the pressure and didn't like the constant and, in my personal opinion, artificial demands put upon us, the students.
Speaking of Ben Johnson, his chief rival Carl Lewis failed three drug tests during the 1988 US Olympic trials. The USOC let him compete anyway.
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2003/apr/24/athletics.duncanmackay
Puzzles that I couldn't solve sober if my life depended on it.
If I had Ritalin as a kid I'd be emperor of the planet by now... I finally understood why people hoarded them during exam times. And they give this stuff out to kids which baffled me why half of them still acted like retards. I can only imagine what it can do in the hands of a grown educated man.Replies: @Robert Ford, @Psmith, @FKA Max
“And they give this stuff out to kids which baffled me why half of them still acted like retards.”
Why ‘smart drugs’ can make you less clever
http://medicalxpress.com/news/2016-07-smart-drugs-clever.html
maybe this could be why
Recently the Ultimate Fighting Championship introduced USADA testing, and there has been a string of embarrassing positive tests of champions and other prominent fighters for PED and other banned substance violations (some of which have led to cancellations of big, lucrative fights days before the events). It seems likely that cheating has paid in this sport until now.
It’s all very depressing to those who hold dear to the idea of fair play and good sportsmanship. Eric Liddell* is probably turning over in heaven.
*The great British Olympian and Christian missionary who was memorably portrayed in “Chariots of Fire”:
Apparently less-than-fair play has been with us as far back as the original ancient Greek Olympic Games. I read once that striking the groin was not explicitly banned or penalized in the ancient sport of Pankration (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pankration), the ancient equivalent of the mixed martial arts, but crowds would react very negatively to such moves. So there was tacit tolerance but public disapproval of cheating in sports even in those ancient days. I wonder whether that means the greatest glory went to those fair play athletes who were able to overcome the cheaters while cheaters who won were grudgingly acknowledged as winners.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/what-banned-drugs-do-cheating-athletes-take/2016/07/29/52ff3242-4f84-11e6-a7d8-13d06b37f256_story.html?tid=sm_tw
I guess I should stop talking smack about Russia cuz the U.S. has the second most violations total. I’ve always been intrigued by the thought of trying beta blockers for golf. Once you get to the 16th – 18th holes it becomes much more likely to over think things and blow the entire round.
It's pretty common on the senior golf tour (over age 50) for golfers to have beta blockers prescriptions for legitimate medical reasons. The ones who say they do usually claim the drugs reduce their competitiveness from tee to green more than they help on delicate putts, but who knows?
I'm happy to see the IOC taking the Russian doping seriously at last, but it's too bad there isn't a greater awareness of how statistically extraordinary the results would be if there were no cheating. In the Tour De France the course is different every year so the anomalies aren't as obvious as in track and field, or in baseball HRs where the stadiums are the only significant other variable and their effect is precisely measurable.
They should simply have two divisions, dirty and clean, with comparable prizes, and let the athletes choose where to compete. Then it would be easier to justify extreme penalties for dopers in the clean events.Replies: @gruff, @Psmith
This is more or less the status quo in certain non-Olympic sports. I’m thinking of powerlifting and strongman in particular. There are bouts of periodic agitation for a cleaner sport, usually coming from heads of the drug-tested organizations with an eye on an Olympic spot, but by and large it works out pretty well. Hard numbers are tough to come by, and the situation isn’t precisely analogous in any case since these aren’t really spectator sports and most revenue comes from entry fees, but I believe the plurality, but not majority, of lifters compete in drug-tested organizations.
Puzzles that I couldn't solve sober if my life depended on it.
If I had Ritalin as a kid I'd be emperor of the planet by now... I finally understood why people hoarded them during exam times. And they give this stuff out to kids which baffled me why half of them still acted like retards. I can only imagine what it can do in the hands of a grown educated man.Replies: @Robert Ford, @Psmith, @FKA Max
One of the classic symptoms of speedy-type drugs is thinking that you’re much hotter shit than you actually are (clinically known as grandiosity, I believe), so that may be a factor as well.
Puzzles that I couldn't solve sober if my life depended on it.
If I had Ritalin as a kid I'd be emperor of the planet by now... I finally understood why people hoarded them during exam times. And they give this stuff out to kids which baffled me why half of them still acted like retards. I can only imagine what it can do in the hands of a grown educated man.Replies: @Robert Ford, @Psmith, @FKA Max
My first, short-lived roommate in boarding school – he was expelled from school for one year 2 weeks into the school year (even though he was the scion of a powerful Old Money family), because beat up a younger student with a cane and broke his arm – snorted crushed Ritalin pills every morning before school. He obviously had ADHD and anger management issues, and got the pills prescribed by his doctor.
I also studied two semesters of fashion design (we were three males in a class of twenty, and all of us were straight, as far as I was able to tell (a rarity in the fashion industry)). By the second semester a fair number of my class mates were said to have started taking cocaine to cope with the heavy workload and long hours. I never personally saw them take it. I dropped out of fashion school around the same time I first heard about those rumors, because I personally couldn’t handle the pressure and didn’t like the constant and, in my personal opinion, artificial demands put upon us, the students.
I know that “natural” bodybuilding is often not very natural. Especially since they don’t really have the resources to control everybody, so what they do is do some simple and cheap test at the competition itself. That’s, of course, not very effective, since you can stop juicing and your muscles will stay big. (In fact, apparently with anabolic steroids your musculature stays big for a very long time after you stop using them, it might permanently alter body composition to an extent.)
Well. They knew a bit of what was going on, but from childhood they were told by the government, doctors, trainers, friends, and family that this was the way that all atheletes trained.
They didn’t understand exactly what was in the injections or pills. They had no reason to doubt what they were told, and no way of learning otherwise.
I think unwitting is the right word.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VvKQ2kVBwTU
Thank you Razib, for bringing to people’s attention one of the greatest performances in sports of all time. Every woman on that 1976 relay team bested her own previous individual, personal-best time for the 100M. The world needs more stories of heroism, of greatness, courage, heart and overcoming. Thank you again.
They didn't understand exactly what was in the injections or pills. They had no reason to doubt what they were told, and no way of learning otherwise.
I think unwitting is the right word.Replies: @anonymous
For those wishing to see first-hand what Rick is talking about, there is this revelatory, documentary video.
Here’s another incredible Olympic 4×100 meter freestyle race. Given zero chance by commentators who compared individual times……..
Anybody got an explanation for this phenomenon in which these swimmers post the fastest times of their careers in TEAM RELAYS versus their individual performances? Doesn’t this shoot some holes in Game Theory or Free Market Theory which assume that all humans act only to maximize their individual self interest? Isn’t there some sort of synergistic, whole greater than the sum of the parts effect going on here? Can we generalize from this to nations or ethnicities?
Question answered by Ben Golub, Harvard Dept. of Economics; Ph.D. in economics, Stanford- https://www.quora.com/Is-altruism-compatible-with-game-theory- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inequity_aversion#Punishing_unjust_success_and_game_theory
The Evolutionary Dominance of Ethnocentric Cooperation
http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/16/3/7.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxy920Nd7yY
Anybody got an explanation for this phenomenon in which these swimmers post the fastest times of their careers in TEAM RELAYS versus their individual performances? Doesn't this shoot some holes in Game Theory or Free Market Theory which assume that all humans act only to maximize their individual self interest? Isn't there some sort of synergistic, whole greater than the sum of the parts effect going on here? Can we generalize from this to nations or ethnicities?Replies: @FKA Max, @Ola
Is altruism compatible with game theory?
Question answered by Ben Golub, Harvard Dept. of Economics; Ph.D. in economics, Stanford
– https://www.quora.com/Is-altruism-compatible-with-game-theory
– https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inequity_aversion#Punishing_unjust_success_and_game_theory
The Evolutionary Dominance of Ethnocentric Cooperation
http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/16/3/7.html
They all cheat to a greater or lesser extent. Americans skirt rules in a more sophisticated way. During the Ben Johnson (Canadian sprinter) scandal, a collegiate strength coach from a top program said told someone I know, that he trained with the top track and field performers from the U.S. (names you’ve heard of) and said he knew firsthand that they all used PED. He said the U.S. program was just much more sophisticated with PED masking agents. He also said the PEDs were used in training and healing.
It's unbelievable to me that Peyton Manning caught grief for (allegedly) using HGH to improve the healing of his neck bones. We should all have the right to try to get better from injury, especially something like neck surgery, using whatever works best. It's probably standard medical practice to recommend HGH for recovery from that surgery.
Manning should have been proud to use it, rather than having it shipped to his wife bla bla ...
Of course once he was recovered, he stopped before playing. Otherwise he would have been able to throw the ball in the Super Bowl.
I guess I should stop talking smack about Russia cuz the U.S. has the second most violations total. I've always been intrigued by the thought of trying beta blockers for golf. Once you get to the 16th - 18th holes it becomes much more likely to over think things and blow the entire round.Replies: @Steve Sailer
A number of classical music soloists take beta blockers for stage fright. That’s a highly competitive field, but it’s not organized as competition so it’s not a big topic, just as scholars taking ritalin isn’t particularly controversial.
It’s pretty common on the senior golf tour (over age 50) for golfers to have beta blockers prescriptions for legitimate medical reasons. The ones who say they do usually claim the drugs reduce their competitiveness from tee to green more than they help on delicate putts, but who knows?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxy920Nd7yY
Anybody got an explanation for this phenomenon in which these swimmers post the fastest times of their careers in TEAM RELAYS versus their individual performances? Doesn't this shoot some holes in Game Theory or Free Market Theory which assume that all humans act only to maximize their individual self interest? Isn't there some sort of synergistic, whole greater than the sum of the parts effect going on here? Can we generalize from this to nations or ethnicities?Replies: @FKA Max, @Ola
1st position swimmers do not swim faster in relays than in their individual races – that should be a hint.
2nd-4th position swimmers get better times because of flying starts. They are anticipating the start, already in motion, when the previous swimmer approaches. In individual races you have to remain still until you hear the gun/horn. Typical “reaction times” for swimmers are 0.7 s.
If you don’t cheat, you didn’t want it bad enough.
Joe Montana: If you ain’t cheating, you ain’t trying, so the Patriots are trying hard
Many other variations
– Old sports adages.
It is acceptable to be naive about Lance Armstrong in the 90s. It is unacceptable to remain this naive about professional sports In The Current Year, as the shitlibs say.
Everyone in every physical sport is on awesome-sauce of some kind. Every single one of them. Hell, the ping pong teams have been busted for PEDs. There is nothing subtle about it; it is simply a contest between pharmacists at this point.
Hell a large fraction of performing artists in movies, almost all male models, and a ridiculously huge fration of female models and actresses are taking significant amounts of PEDs, and virtually everyone on WS and in Silicon Valley take various flavors of speed and “neutropics.” That’s just life in the 21st century. Everyone’s looking for an edge.
The use in healing should be allowed.
It’s unbelievable to me that Peyton Manning caught grief for (allegedly) using HGH to improve the healing of his neck bones. We should all have the right to try to get better from injury, especially something like neck surgery, using whatever works best. It’s probably standard medical practice to recommend HGH for recovery from that surgery.
Manning should have been proud to use it, rather than having it shipped to his wife bla bla …
Of course once he was recovered, he stopped before playing. Otherwise he would have been able to throw the ball in the Super Bowl.