The incentive to use PEDs is almost certainly higher in other professional sports than cycling. For athletes in leagues like the MLB, NFL, NBA etc. the average career is quite short and you essentially need to make all of the money for your entire life in 3-4 yeas. Plus the step function of being in the league and making millions vs just missing a roster spot and making almost nothing is so extreme you'd be foolish not to take PEDs to give yourself the best chance at a payday.
Why is pay off greater in cycling than other sports? Salary of the top riders? Compared to say NBA players, pro cyclist make relatively little. Tadej Pogacar (best and top paid cyclist) makes about $8M (euros) in salary per year. Steph Curry (highest paid) NBA player makes $55M (dollars) in salary per year.
Basketball isn’t as demanding physically as cycling. You need to be fit but not to the extreme degree cycling demands. I would expect doping to be most beneficial in sports where pure physicality is needed. Marathon, triathlon, track running.
You can reasonably assume that some NBA players are using PEDs. However, the effect is different. To be an NBA basketball player you need to have several attributes, such as height and hand-eye coordination, that cannot be affected by PEDs AFAIK. If basketbally are using PEDs, it is probably to recover faster, which means coming back from injury or training more. More training can lead to a higher level of skill, but it's a second order effect. It's not like cycling where, for example, EPO directly affects performance on the bike.
yes, but those epo-esque drugs aren't exactly trivial to use these days. the testing process makes the doping process much more difficult for drugs that have these direct performance benefits.
recovery help is where it's at these days i expect, in most sports.
have you seen the physiques and workloads that nba/nhl/mlb players are dealing with these days? these athletes have more incentive than cyclists to dope ($$$), and the testing in those sports is a joke.
there are obvious performance benefits for traditional endurance sports, but the testing infrastructure is pretty robust and the financial incentives are much less than those big team sports. it's harder to dope (and get away with it) and the financial pressure is less.
I totally believe that a lot of basketball/football/baseball players take something. But the effect won’t be as important as in cycling or marathon or 100 m sprint where you need pure physicality.
The effect doesn't really matter. If it gives you a 2% edge, and you don't take it, then you're 2% off the top. That may be the difference between having a career at all and thinking about what could have been at your desk job.
Sure, there's no drugs that will turn you into prime Messi. But there are drugs that will let Messi play like prime Messi for 90 minutes, 3 times a week, 48 weeks a year, which is incredibly valuable.
The "pay off" the commenter is talking about is the results in the sport, not the monetary gain. Cyclists are like the engines in an F1 car. Not saying there is no skill involved, but any skill differences are irrelevant if the other guy is putting out 100W more than you over 200km. So it really comes down to raw power to weight ratio.
That's not the same in basketball or most other sports. You can't just jump on gear, lift weights and suddenly become Michael Jordan. Plenty of people could beat Pogacar if they could use anything they could, though, just like manufacturers could build an F1 car that would dominate every race if they could circumvent the rules.
Because beside some skill needed in going fast during descends at 70-80-90km/h without dying (which is not easy but not extremely difficult either), a cyclist is basically an engine. Most other sports need physical fitness (speed, stamina, strength, endurance etc) AND coordination skills, and the latter is not easy to improve chemically.
I could agree with this. You do need some physical gifts as far as muscular endurance beyond the capacity of most but after that, its a very limited set of movements performed over and over again for hours. Plus a massive amount of will power and pain endurance. No amount of chemicals will turn even most gifted people into an NFL athlete.
Not money. It's highly specialized in what physically benefits it, so even a small doping on that specific physical attribute leads to significant advantage.
Road cycling is a sport of extreme hyper specialization. Skill is much less of a factor than dedication, training, nutrition and genetics. Increasing VO2max by 5% isn't going to make you Messi, but it can put you on a tour podium.
"Juan Carlos Juarez, the town's mayor, said at the time: "They landed on our coast to confront a supposed enemy with typical commando tactics. But we managed to hold them on the beach.""
I would not have been able to get this out without giggling.
I see a lot of unicorn job postings here and elsewhere. Bunch of companies here in the midwest are looking for 5 years experience in AI pipeline engineering. Those people exist, sorta*, but they aren't taking $60/hr contract gigs from bureaucratic hellscape Acme Corp types. Likewise, I see a lot of startups led by technical hustler types (more power to them) who would never pass their own hiring expectations. Your CTO is a webdev with 6 months prompt engineering. Why would an actual expert agree to work for them?
*unclear if experience from 5 years ago is relevant to current practice.
>Your CTO is a webdev with 6 months prompt engineering.
I was once interviewed by a girl who was probably not much more than an intern, I ended up explaining a couple things for her during our call; she didn't know AWS services had quotas, for instance. She was interviewing me for a Devops job that required 10 years (yeah, 10) of experience with AWS.
After our call, the CTO came back to me (we are somehow acquainted, that's why I applied there in the first place), to tell me the feedback he got from this woman is that I don't seem to know my stuff real well ... It's been two years and their team are mostly the same people, I don't think they ever hired anyone.
Big waste of time. A lot of people on these nu-companies are just LARPing, they do that until money runs out, blame it on "the economy" and move along.
Calling it "precious" is just a bit too on the nose. That looks more like an art project than an actual solution. One of their shredders working 24/365 can get through <500 tons. In 2018, US generated 35.6 million tons of plastic. Industrial problems require industrial (or legislative) solutions.
LN and Westlaw's real service is their ubiquity. Every law student has access to it and every firm expects proficiency. While they generally suck, the last time I used it (looong time ago), their boolean search was quite nice. That kind of text search has mostly been replaced by non-deterministic black boxes which aren't great for legal research.
They've also got the Microsoft effect going on. Usually at least one of their products like their personal information aggregator used for locating people (like when serving lawsuits) is mandatory for a firm so it's just easier for them bundle everything else in.
If you want it digitized, yes, odd as that seems. You can go find individual prints of it or perhaps digital copies of opinions elsewhere, but those are also technically copyrighted in a lot of cases too.
In some jurisdictions, like Ontario, there are secret agreements that only allow 3 organizations to have digital access to Case Law (https://www.cameronhuff.com/blog/ontario-case-law-private/). This says a lot about our society, and how much we still have to improve.
I'm in my 40s so bit of a grey beard now, but I worked with the real grey beards at University of Michigan. Something like 75k active staff and students, and more than 600k living alumni, yet their email addresses were like bob@umich.edu. Setting up the first campus email server came with privileges.
I had the same thought, but in a different direction. They ended up just recycling most of these 800,000 nails. Seems like today this would be worth a couple million as souvenirs.
They did sell some as souvenirs for 5 shillings a piece (about 5 GBP today?) according to Wikipedia, but there's a limited quantity of people with an interest in buying ancient Roman nails at that price. They're not the most dazzling display piece.
Note also that they would have recycled most of them in the old days as well, and that's where much of the value would come from.
Woah. The first comment gave me a wave of nostalgia I couldn't place. This must have been it. Couldn't have been older than 4 or 5 last time I was in G Fox.
