Contrasting effects of performance-enhancing drug use on boxing holistically versus other pro sports

a) welcome
b) knowing and malicious PED use with the aim of gaining a competitive edge (as opposed to smoking weed or drinking an OTC supplement and not realizing it was banned) will always be wrong, even if we could prove empirically that "most top athletes" were indeed juicing - and I heartily reject the whole "let's all just shrug and get used to it" mentality. There will always be some clean, honorable athletes, even among the upper classes of each sport - to believe otherwise is every bit as naïve as believing there are none who partake. To adopt that sort of defeatist mentality would be a betrayal of those clean, honorable sportsmen. I'll never sanction that way of thinking, in my life.
c) with boxing I think you're just looking at far more complicated and dynamic a sport than most. Others, specifically the ones played by teams, have extremely specialized roles, where each individual only ever gets asked to perform a finite number of idiosyncratic tasks. Pitchers throw pitches. Receivers catch passes. Centers grab rebounds. Goalies block shots. Et cetera. Often there is a 1-to-1 formulary when it comes to customizing a designer pharmaceutical (or whatever other banned substance) tailored precisely to performance of a single task. Maybe you want a defensive lineman to have more "oomph" in his shoves. There's a drug for that. Maybe you want your left fielder to improve his arm throwing off-the-wall doubles to shortstop. There's a drug for that. Et cetera. Boxers have a wide array of responsibilities and every fight presents a host of different possibilities requiring on-the-fly adjustments, where vastly different things may be asked of the same individual's mind and body on different nights. There's no catch-all drug for boxing.

 

Yea no, in a sport as physical as boxing then of course performance enhancing drugs help you. Boxing is perhaps the most athletically demanding sport on the face of the planet. The sport which demands more from its athletes than any other sport in the world. So of course a drug that gives you extra artificial power or endurance helps you.

Isn't this obvious.

 

What magical elixir confers these abstracts of which you speak, this "extra power and endurance"? Each substance is designed with a certain goal in mind - to improve respiration, to heighten blood-cell count, to facilitate gaining/retaining muscle-mass in the gym, etc.. There's no single one thing you can ingest or inject or rub on your skin and say "Yep, now I'm good. Now I can be a world champion boxer!"

 

Yeah it does to an extent the gains are minimal if the the power and durability were not there before but if a fighter has the power and durability then the added strength and endurance/recovery abilities would allow them to compete physically with naturally bigger and stronger men......IMHO

 

Well physicality alone cannot make you a world champion boxer, you have to cultivate some technical skill as well. But when you combine practice in the gym and experience in the ring with artificially enhanced strength and stamina then you see the utility of PED's.

 

Strength and stamina are still pretty vague concepts, though, you won't find a 1:1 pill or injectable that yields such broad results. To fully equip yourself with everything a boxer needs to have physiologically you'd need to be taking an entire cocktail of different stuff, which you couldn't possibly hope to mask or dodge a dirty test on.

 

Ask Roid Jones and Evan Fields.

 

Yes I agree that boxing has a diverse set of physiological demands. Many sports demand that you need to be strong. So it's possible to take something illegal to enhance your strength. Likewise the same could be said for a sport that requires you to be fast or indefatigable. But boxing is unique because there is a very high demand placed upon a fighter's physical and mental toughness, his power, strength, speed, coordination, quickness, conditioning, cardio, intestinal fortitude and fundamental skill. It's unlike other sports in that it places a wide array of demands upon it's athletes. So it's not like you can just give a sprinter a pill that says take this pill and your ability to run faster will improve. In boxing it's more complicated because the demands are wide and encompassing.

That said even though the strongest man, the fastest man doesn't always win the fight. I'd still rather be stronger and faster than my opponent. It's generally advantageous to be faster, quicker, more resistant to tiring than your opponent. Even if being the physically superior athlete doesn't guarantee victory in the ring.

 

There's no dollars & sense reason for a conspiracy to keep top boxers on PED's.

Fans don't tune in to see boxers with jacked Schwarzenegger like physiques.

Boxing is boxing. It will always have its appeal, to certain elements of society. There will always be those who appreciate technical chess matches, and those who yearn to see knockouts. There's no drug you can take, however, which can be linked to scoring a correlative higher rate of kayos. There are zero studies to support a hypothesis that even a boxer juiced up to his gills on every major strength-enhancing PED in the book is automatically going to increase his rate of stoppage (let alone more specifically his attention-getting, highlight-reel, out-cold laid-out one-punch kayos) which in turns increases his ratings and thus his market value as seen by the "powers that be".

Baseball had a spike in popularity because little kids like too much of a good thing. Candy, rides at the amusement park..and home runs. So in the 90's there was a bubble (there was a demand for home runs, met by a supply, which in turn was fueled by widespread sanctioned/covered-up PED use) which eventually burst.

Other sports have their own versions of the home run craze. There's usually a specific thing drugs are targeting in order to change the game to boost gate tickets and TV numbers, a race to provide spectators ever more titillation. Boxing doesn't and won't ever need that. Its charm, inherently, belongs to its nickname, "theater of the unexpected". A guy like Paulie Malignaggi can get in with another top rated peer generally acknowledged to have a good chin, and from nowhere, BAM, score a KO. Do we assume PED use, right off the bat? No. We assume that in boxing one punch, from anybody, can alter the course of events in any given moment. We assume that styles make fights and nobody can ever afford to blink. Once in a while an Ottke will ice a Mundine. It happens.

There's no drug that can make you score a punch the other guy doesn't see coming. There's no such thing as artificially forging a correlation between use of any substance and the rate of kayos (which really would be the only metric that would affect the financial interests or motivations of the "powers that be")

 

Absolutely they work,check out PED Povetkin both performance wise and his looks compared to one we see now.

Same thing re Ortiz,he’s gonna have to face Wilder without his PEDs and he’s no chance because of it imo.

 

Pacquiao-Marquez IV.

 

No, they just take them to look cool.