After watching the replays of the Tour de France all month, I was astonished at how doping was never mentioned. Cyclists had “great days” and unbelievable performances. Ten years ago, that led to investigations and extra testing. Now we “assume” all is clean. Good. And it’s not because I think doping has been eliminated…

This religious zest for drug purity tests is bullshit at its best.

It starts with defining what is “performance enhancing.” Caffeine is performance enhancing, but somehow we don’t care how many cups of Joe, Jose had before he goes to bat.

If you have ever been on a long run or bike ride, you know sugar is super “performance enhancing. ” But nobody is slapping gatorade (or whatever-the-hell drink he has in the commercials) out of JJ Watt’s hands.

But take one little steroid, or EPO or whatever that Mela-what-the-fuck they busted Maria Sharapova with and the whole world comes to an end.

Cheaters like “sinners” must be punished. And it both cases, I call bullshit.

doping on the court

Athletes have always “cheated.” Babe Ruth in the 1920’s all the way to the 1986 Mets were pumped up on “greenies.” Speed was regularly given to athletes up to 1960, so all those old records were all “tainted”.

The intent of testing is to make it “fair” — performance should be based on how hard athletes work and their talents.

But steroid users work hard too. You can’t take a pill and sit on the couch and then hit 70 dingers in a season.

People are born with higher levels of testosterone, or steroids or tolerance for lactic acid. Why should they have an “unnatural” advantage just because of some random combination of genes.

We should set baseline blood levels for testosterone, humane growth hormone, red-blood cells and all the other shit we can measure that “enhances performance.” (viagra?)

Then let all the athletes take whatever they want as long as their blood does not exceed the limits. That would be “fair”. Everybody gets the same shot no matter what they were born with or what they take.

Then success is “based” on effort, not just genes. And yes, the rich will always have an advantage of time and money over the poor. But that’s how the world works buttercup, get over it.

Sure taking all these risks might give you cancer (Lance Armstrong) or kill you from a brain tumor (Lyle Alzado). But it’s not any riskier than putting on a helmet and running full speed to smash your head into someone else’s head.

Hurray for Darwinism — we weed out the crazy ones with brain disorders. Because if you are still putting that helmet on with all we know now, you are fucking crazy.

Maybe if it’s out in the open we can know what people are taking and measure the results. We get to see all the home runs, and new records from a whole set of rich, guinea pigs who will try anything for science and profit.

We could set the blood levels a lot lower for high school and college athletes to reduce their incentives. We could make the professional leagues pay for all that testing (they are the ones who will profit from the future test subjects). It’s just a farm team with pills and needles.

It might be crazy to see how big people get, how fast they can run and how long they can last when they are doped to the limits.

But it wouldn’t be any crazier than the fucking stupid system of hide and seek we have now.

That’s why I wanna see more dopers.

Originally written in 2017 — still true today.