Hot Take About PEDs in Boxing

I think they all use them.

I know miners in Australia who are tested onsite for recreational drugs very rarely get caught and I'd assume athletes know the ropes too.

 

I get it, but all athletes should be held accountable for what is essentially cheating. Especially in a sport like boxing where it can contribute to serious injury or death.

Substantiated claims of PED use should be an automatic life ban from the sport, no matter who they are.

 

You are right when you look at other sports its clear boxing fans don't care about PED use. The same goes for "baseball style scandals" like gambling and fight fixing. Someone who did what Jake Lamotta did would just not be in the HOF in baseball.

However are boxing fans the problem here or do they have it right? Boxing fans don't condone steroid use they acknowledge it and weigh it into their opinions. If authorities take actions to strip a fighter of a result and suspend them it is what it is and then that fighter moves on and is treated fairly.

In other sports like baseball, cycling and MMA the media and fans will use one positive test to "cancel" the player or fighter for life and beyond. They will often do this without that test if they "know" because its really a round about way of targeting people they don't like. This then produces decades worth of drama that never ends. Boxing might have drama(everything does) but it doesn't have that specific kind of it. And it should stay that way.

Boxing is a violent sport and a boxer cheating is worse because that advantage is used(in part) to punch someone in the face. It should be punished worse then other sports. The reason this is not the case though is because the other sports go too far and boxing following them would be a mistake.

 

All I know that many of these old 'heroes' were roided out of their minds in hte 80's/90's and afterwards also.
Tyson, Evan Fields and the whole Murican gang really.
Lewis is also highly suspect.
And I agree Wlad was suspicious too.
AJ and Wilder, it goes without saying really. Wilder's magical lean 'weight gain' for Fury II was ridiculous.

 

Ishmael Davis's physique strikes me as someone quite clearly on steroids

 

Why condone or worse still encourage cheating in sport? Do we really want them all to turn into roided-to-the-gills freakshows? I don't.

 

The problem is when a generational talent tests positive everyones going to lose their minds.

I think sometimes regulations everyones cheating still have an impact in that everyone has to work around them. There was this arms treaty once that limited the size of warships. The restrictions were ambitious and everyone broke the weight restrictions. However it still limited the size of ships from where they would be as they had to be small enough to maintain the lie. Modern cheaters are micro dosing and being creative to get around tests and I think if "everyone cheats" today its got to be better then "the wild west" of the 90s. I'd rather everyone sneaking around to gain a small advantage then going to the extremes.

 

Life ban for the cheating ****s. I hate people that take them. Its weak. You're weak if you need them and weak if you take them.

 

Yeah with Lewis I thought he was definitely on something during the latter part of his career. People always say that he was overweight, out of shape an past his best when he kept putting on weight right up to the end an saying that most heavyweights like Ali an Holmes put on weight as they get old as they can’t train as hard because of all the wear an tear but Lewis unlike them wasn’t putting on weight in fat. It was all muscle. Not the shredded with great definition kind but just the solid blocky kind. I just thought you cant pack that amount of solid muscle mass on as he was getting older without steroids or some other kind of ped

as for Holyfield he was definitely on Peds especially during the period when he was moving up from cruiserweight but that Evan Fields stuff was definitely a set up by some disgruntled former member of his camp or maybe even another boxer who wanted to expose him and knew that every man an his dog would immediately make the so obvious connection once they saw the Evan fields name

 

There's all sorts of ways fighters look for advantages, both fair and unfair - PED's are but one of these.

Medical meddling in administering and monitoring the adverse affects of PEDs for a given fighter confers a definite advantage... So does medical monitoring of extreme weight cutting and reinflating, which also confers an undeniable advantage.

At the end of the day, there has to be lines in the sand which, practically speaking, prevent such ridiculous abuse that it results in significant harm or an "arms race" where guys are taking ever bigger risks for advantage.
Enforcement is necessary to make the rule something other than a total joke, but that's about it.

It's perfectly reasonable to suggest that the rules should be tighter or that enforcement should be tougher...
Ultimately, in a pragmatic sense, you have to accept that the limits of the rules will always be where the majority cluster and ways of creatively flouting them will always occur. You also don't want any potential for overzealous enforcement or excessively restrictive rules that might damage the sport in some regard.