If you heard a story that would hurt boxing legend, should you tell it?

Sorry, agree with you... When you are younger and you are still developing then it's possible. And yes if you've been keeping your weight down then that will also be a factor.

I really meant for established older guys who we jump up and dopwn the weights now.

 

Cheers mate, i probably didn't need to quote you to make my points. I know where you're coming from.

 

Unbelievably well said.

Hats off to you, sir.

 

Steroids weren't widely available to pioneering bodybuilders until the late 60s. Boxers take longer to get onto new technologies but they may have come in the late 70s and 80s, by the 90s they were wide spread

Boxers need stamina as much as they need muscle mass anyway and steroids are performance unenhancers in that respect

 

Why not? Training is an artificial advantage, in that it certainly doesn't come with birth, but we compare boxers who weren't physically gifted but who did a lot of hard work in the gym (like Marciano) with boxers who were physically gifted but didn't put the time in in the gym (like Super Greg Page).

If the use of an unnatural substance (and let's face it, "natural" is as questionable a word as there is) is necessarily contemptible, then all modern boxers are in contempt, since they use a variety of man-made substances that weren't available even twenty years ago.

As you say, if someone's tall, they're tall. If someone's taken steroids, they've taken steroids. Ban modern boxers from using steroids all you want, but does it make sense to try and factor in steroid-use to considerations of boxers of the past? In my opinion, no.

Why? Should we question the performances of boxers of the turn of the century because they used smaller gloves and thus were more able to KO their opponents?

Pachecho certainly has a mixed record with regard to Ali's health. On the positive side, he could have saved Ali's life in Zaire when Herbert Muhammad's doctor recommended Ali take sugar to deal with his hypoglycemia. Of course, Ali didn't have hypoglycemia, but if he did, Pachecho would have saved his life.

 

So the difference is in the measure of advantage bestowed rather than the actual legality of the advantage?

That surely suggests that steroids are disadvantageous as well as advantageous, doesn't it? Steroids can also have a very negative effect on one's personal life (which in Ali's case was a mess anyway) thus impeding performance.

At the end of the day, it's impossible to add up all the counter-factuals and talk about them sensibly. The best solution is to take Ali's 1970s career "as is", just as Arnold Schwarzenegger's bodybuilding career is taken "as is" despite the fact that he (legally) took a lot of steroids in the same period.

 

Lots of substances are available today that weren't in Ali's time; should we discount Lewis's chances against Ali's based on Lewis's access to superior suplementation?

The problem is, even if we had die-hard proof that Ali used steroids (and we don't even have proof) then I don't see how we could possibly work out how much of an advantage they gave Ali.

So if what's wrong about steroids isn't that they give advantages without effort (since, if that was the case, physical advantages would also be objectionable) then what is the problem with them?

That's an interesting question and one I don't have an answer to. Given how open, say, Arnie was about his steroid use, I suspect the reason why Pachecho and Ali were so hushed was because there were no steroids used. That's the most logical explanation, since there was no reason for them to be quiet.

True- but what arguments they are! :happy

 

You're going to need some pretty good evidence to back that up, given that boxers in the 1990s were all blood tested. Apart from "Evan Fields", I'm not familiar with even loose evidence of a high-profile heavyweight using steroids.

 

Vitali Klitchsko - tested positive
Morrison - admitted steroid use but never tested positive
Holyfield - got allot of advice from steroid gurus
Tyson - see above
Botha - tested positive

Etc etc, the clearance time for many steroids is 3-5days, you could ake a steroid for 180 days and come off 3-5 days before the fight and have a massive advantage

 

I believe it was actually human growth hormone that Holyfield was using under the name Evan Fields, and not exactly steroids, but still. I'm also not sure of he used them his entire career, or perhaps only as he aged and needed that extra boost to maintain all that muscle mass.

 

In the amateurs.

Means nothing. A lot of steroid gurus are also the top physical trainers.

That's one positive test out of all of the heavyweight champions of the 1990s. Hardly "widespread".

Possibly, but what evidence is there that this practice was widespread?

 

Hmmm, thanks for clearing that up.

 

We should probably downgrade what we see on film if we wanted to draw direct comparisons. But probably the bets thign to do is say Ali was the best of his era and lewis was the best of his era. Ali beat more great fighters closer to their prime than Lewis did so Ali should be given a higher ranking.

We can't... As a rule of thumb I'd say if a guy looks like he's got unnaturally fast reflexes, speed and power then he probably does have unnaturally fast reflexes, speed and power

No, that is not the same thing. Like I said weight classes put you in with someone roughly the same size. The dimensions are different and will effect your style. having long arms in no way equates to taking chemical enhancers.

Arnie was not open about his steroid abuse. He denied it for a mighty long time before eventually coming clean.

I don't know if Ali used or not. I would not be surprised if he did, but I would not be surprised either if every ranked fighter since 1950 did something...

What I am left with is a basic appreciation of style and boxing mechanics, what they proved in the ring and some contextual comparisons. A fast guy in the 50s would be a fast guy in the 80s and a fast guy in 2008. A guy in 2008 who appears quicker than a guy in 1935 wouldn't necessarily be quicker given the same environment.

 

This is starting to play on my concience now.

Jack Dempsey was knocked down nine times against Johny Sudenberg in one of their two meetings of 1915. History dose not record which one.

 

Yeah, I was running four to six miles a day and hitting the gym very hard. I'm just saying I hit a growth spurt in my late teens/early 20's, put on a ton of muscle and was still lean. it happens.