Soviet Fighters- Injuries

i wouldn't be surprised if that was really true.

 

i've watched a few videos and documentaries were young soviet kids were performing insane jumps and other plyometric activites, i didn't think things like that would be possible for kids.

 

Bull****

 

I think Arum may have watched Rocky IV a few too many times.

 

Yea i really just think Bob is trying to rationalize hte unfortunate rash of injuries.

 

Doping is not only part of the Soviet system, it's part of professional sports in general. In communism, they doped their sportsmen for political reasons, in capitalism it is done for financial reasons. Seen this way, the occurence of injuries shouldn't be more often among ex-Soviet fighters, if doping was the cause. I rather think it's the training methods of the Soviet System and other socialistic or communist countries. What I've got to know there, is partially pure insanity. Much more torture than training.

 

I think it's probably quite accurate.:yep

 

Must be mad that Russians are the top dogs.

I can't speak on Vitali but Chagaev and Maskaev are natural heavyweights. They aren't ripped like Holyfield.

I dont even understand why he would even get into this.

The majority of russian athletes during the USSR days were naturally athletic. Nobody was fed anything.

If athletes wanted to bulk up, they could on their own just like people over here.

 

It is likely very accurate, there is other documented histories of this type of doping children like the east germans in the 80's the women looked like men. Steroids are a bigger part of all professional sports than most people want to admit. Doping is at an all time high, just lookat the recent steroid bust in the US. The problem is growing nto shrinking, I firmly beleive more than 50% of ALL professional athletes dope in one way or another if not more.

 

Ahem...

 

True. American Olympic athletes had just as ready access- if not moreso- to steroids and other "performance enhancing" substances as Soviet, East German and Bulgarian athletes, but were drastically inferior in most sports. The difference was that there were two big differences between American and Eastern European training: 1, the Soviets etc. picked their athletes from a very young age, put them in special sports-schools, and gave them both intense physical training and a huge degree of sports-focused training (which gave Eastern Bloc athletes a far degree of knowledge and initiative than their more robotic Western counterparts); and 2, speaking as someone who has done a lot of Russian/Bulgarian weightlifting routines, their train far harder. The Smolov squat routine, for instance, is about 11 weeks of high intensity, high frequency, high volume training.

These methods produced some of the most amazing results in sports history: the GDR by the 1970s and 1980s usually got significantly more gold medals than the USA, despite having only 16 million people and much smaller budgets for their training. The USSR won pretty much every Olympics; even after they broke up, the CIS (which didn't even contain every Soviet Republic) smoked the world at the 1992 Olympics. These nations were, in short, bad-ass factories that produced intelligent and supremely fit athletes.

The problem is that, if you're the "right" human shape, like Pavel or the Soviet track-and-field athletes, this will indeed give you a life-long healthy body. Pavel has to be getting on now, but there isn't a neck on this site that he couldn't snap in seconds (before doing some pull-ups on a wall and swinging some kettlebells around). If you're the "wrong" human shape, ie. out of the parameters that human organs and bones are designed for, like Vitali or Maskaev, there's probably trouble afoot. It doesn't help that many Eastern European fighters are getting a bit old, and old bodies are less capable of dealing with their intense training.

But injuries are hardly purely found amongst Eastern European boxers. Calzaghe has china hands, but is a Welshman of Italian descent. Holyfield, if you'd believe him, has barely ever had a fight without some injury or sickness, and he's an African-American. I suppose one thing that Holyfield, Calzaghe, Vitali, Maskaev etc. etc. all have in common is that they're gym-rats, which for all its benefits has its cost for the physical constitution.