Do you think drugs and stimulants would have been rife in the golden age of boxing ?

I have a hunch dirty tricks were more common back then and easier to get away with.

 

I know boxers were using all different methods to increase their chances, some even putting their hand in Urine as it was said to toughen the skin. If a boxer knew a way of making himself stronger, then yeah I suppose some would of taken that chance. They might not of looked at it as cheating if the method wasn't banned.

 

Definitely, the sport has only gotten cleaner. It was full of thugs and mobsters back in the day. Even those legends we all look up to could be some extremely competitive and petty *******s. Those are some hard dudes, and cheating goes back to the first Olympics more than two thousand years ago.

 

There would of been just as many people looking for am advantage for their fighter then as now

 

Fighters and trainers have always been looking for any edge they could get; there is no "good old days" in that regard.

Steroids have been in boxing since the late 1960's- the 1970's if you really, really want to give the benefit of the doubt.

 

PED's have been used since as long as sporting has been around.

And the PED's most think of nowadays, anabolics, have been around in competition since 1952.

So it's not a matter of "would" the boxers from past eras use but a question of "how many" of boxers from past eras used.

 

+1

 

Obviously alcohol was used prodigiously in the early days of the sport, but in the first coupla decades of the 20th C. the most likely PEDs would have been Cocaine, Heroin (in low doses), Strychnine or caffeine if drug use in boxing was anything like in other sports.

Although they didn't have the steroids and hormone treatments available today, athletes were well aware of the beneficial effects of stimulants and ****gesics.

 

they would have been more fatalities from their use if they were widespread. a stimulant becomes a poison in the wrong dose and an ****gesic can kill or have no effect (talking ml differences here)..
this doesn't rule out the ones that were considered safe, though why you'd use heroin for a fight is beyond me (or why you'd use it at all!)

 

Of course. It was a way to make big money so cheating in any form probably happend a lot. At the time a lot of currently known stuff wasn't even thought of to be illegal and we all know the stories about loaded gloves, fixed fights and mob involvement.​

 

Steroids and amphetamines are around since 1940, developed for war reasons.

The only difference is that until the '90s you weren't even tested, for no substance.

 

Performance enhancing drugs are rife in all sports and have been for a long time.