No Stupid Questions @lemmy.world I Cast Fist @programming.dev 1y ago

Why there are no "secondary" sports league that allow performance enhancement drugs?

I mean, you'll find people using PEDs in any sport, despite the risk of bans and everything. Steroid use is also rampant among bodybuilders.

There is an "obvious market", but why do such sport leagues or federations that openly allow those drugs exist?

I can imagine that such a thing existing would create an immediate and widespread health problem with lots of people, athletes or not, using those performance enhancers and accidentally fucking themselves. But what else could be a problem?

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Maybe because we don't want to actively encourage a dystopian hellscape where people deliberately destroy themselves for entertainment.

I know it already happens, but the increased financial incentive will just mean the poor are even more likely to sell their health.

Pretty sure there was a short side mission about that in Phantom Liberty.
- Welp, Im sold....been screwing my health for free for years, you mean I could bow get paid?
They'd be opening themselves to civil and criminal liability as well as fighting an uphill battle of public acceptance.
It would defacto require athletes to use drugs and dangerous amounts to be competitive putting pressure on them to use more drugs to maintain their career. That's a massive lawsuit waiting to happen and also just unethical.
- It's already that way in cycling, for example. I guess the prohibition just allows the various governing bodies to avoid legal liability for any damage to the athletes.
Just because it hasn't been said yet, this already exists in bodybuilding. The professional league, the IFBB, which hosts the Mr. Olympia competition, does not prohibit drugs and they are de facto required. Essentially every IFBB bodybuilder uses steroids, and it's a very open secret.

Something that does need to be considered here is that not all sports necessarily benefit from steroids, at least not nearly as much as bodybuilding. More muscle isn't necessarily always a good thing if it makes you heavier or less mobile, so there's already some limited regulatory effect from that as well.
- PEDS aren't limited to bulking up via steroids. A lot of PEDS use is about shortening recovery time. As an example, cycling is the kind of sport you're describing where increased bulk is a disadvantage and doping in the sport has been absolutely endemic for years. It's what the Lance Armstrong controversy was about and Armstrong was more representative of the norm at high levels than not.
  
  I remember reading about Armstrong before he admitted to that, and he mentioned that he trains so that he has peak performance during the Tour de France. Then after the doping thing, I realized that's what he was talking about.
One reason could be that most of the audience doesn't want to watch them if it feels like what they're doing is artificial or inauthentic.

Might be a terrible analogy, but since people cheat on video games, why don't they have an esports league where aimbots, wallhacks, speedhacks, etc are all allowed? It might be a novelty for 2 minutes, but most people wouldn't want to watch that. It isn't how the games were meant to be played. It's not that it's cheating anymore if the rules allow it. It's that it isn't a good showcase for talent because it becomes about who bought the best cheats.
- This analogy doesn't work for me. First of all, I'd absolutely watch coked esports. Secondly, glitched speedruns are absolutely a popular form of competitive cheating. Nobody would watch an aimbot competition because that specifically would be boring, it'd just be cameras jumping around and death screens. There's no real competition happening. Wallhacks might be fun to watch - my favorite FPS Blacklight Retribution had that as a mechanic and it was great.
  
  Glitches aren't cheating. They're using knowledge about the game's internal workings. This is how the combo system that became the core of fighting games came about.
  
  Maybe you could argue TAS (tool assisted speedrun), but I've always gathered thats more for proof of concept
  
  And it's probably worth mentioning that glitches still need to be fun. There have been speedrun scenes hurt because the most optimal method made the game less fun to play.
- Cheaters battle each other all the time, deliberately, in private matches. The reason it's not a sport with spectators is likely because if you're a known cheater then you're stuck with that label forever no matter what you do.
- the audience doesn't want to watch them if it feels like what they're doing is artificial or inauthentic.
  
  I highly doubt that's the reason. There's definitely an audience out there for people with chemical and surgical alterations to perform at superhuman levels.
- The analogy with esports fails only because real people would still be limited by their own bodies, there's only so many drugs anyone can take before the body starts failing, not to mention that they don't make people godlike as some cheats do.
  
  Depending on the speedhack allowed and the game, it could be entertaining to watch, it'd become a game of human reflexes.
Some of that shit is fucking dangerous. At the height of the EPO (EPO being a hormone which increases red blood cell production and makes the chuckledick system more efficient) era of pro cycling, the rumor was some pros had to wake up in the middle of the night and get on a trainer because they'd gotten their blood so viscous that they risked getting clots of they stayed in one spot too long.

Also, if you do it wrong you'll absolutely fuck yourself up. Riccardo Ricco Basically gave himself kidney failure because he infused blood which he'd kept in fucking mini fridge.

It's not like elite athletes aren't already on weird shit normal people would never consider... they're on plenty of gear but what's allowed is already regulated. A lot of pros toe the line, some in better faith than others. The line is there for safety and because it would be a headache letting things be a free for all. People would get hurt and plenty of prospective athletes would be turned off if you have to be dangerously juiced just to compete
- There is also a shit load of pro athlete who died quite young. There is no evidence that they used drugs on their time, but dying at 40 is like a clue
Another take is that sports are all about rules. The goal of hockey isn't just to get the puck in the net. There are other rules that turn this minimal task into a game. Otherwise players would just come on the ice and fire the puck via a rail-gun. To make an entertaining sport you need a goal and a set of rules that make and interesting challenge.

To some degree if you allow performance enchaining drugs at least some of the focus moves away from physical skill, reactions and strategy into pharmaceuticals. Don't get me wrong, finding the best drug cocktail to play hockey is a very interesting challenge, but it seems interesting to a very different audience than that which appreciates the other aspects of the challenge.
- I mean.... Rail gun hockey sounds entertaining.....
  
  Rail gun hockey sounds entertaining
  
  "And I suppose the Pitch-O-Matic 5000 was just a modified howitzer."
As dumb as it sounds sports people are role models for kids.

So if a professional athlete is known for taking ped, a child will think that on order to be like them I will take ped despite the medical complications that come with those drugs.

Also, do we need more dumbasses like that Russian guy with roided up upper arms?
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/worldnews/14230629/russian-popeye-life-saving-surgery-remove-rotting-fake-muscles/
- That's not steroids... that guy literally injected oil - synthol - into his muscles to make them look ridiculously large. It's not performance enhancing in any way.
The moment the first roided up athlete's heart pops on the field, that league is done.
- Doubtful. It would probably increase the ratings. You think people tune into NASCAR to watch cars go round and round in a circle?
  
  Or watch hockey for the skating?
An organization can't outwardly support it because that would be a legal nightmare once participants get hurt or die as a direct result of it. They may also struggle to get events sanctioned by the jurisdictions that they're hosting the events in.

That said, there are plenty that turn a blind eye to it as best they can, as others have pointed out.
I think there should be an alternative sports league where performance enhancing drugs are mandatory. That shit would be fun to watch!
Because allowing them would be functionally the same as requiring them. Especially when there's already a "primary" no-PED league.
This just in: Weekend Update: Kevin Nealon on the All-Drug Olympics - SNL: https://yewtu.be/watch?v=jAdG-iTilWU
Too dangerous. Lots of leagues hate cheating not to mention.
- It wouldn't be cheating if it was standard and expected. Like having good equipment.
A lot of the drugs used generally requires a prescription and is only available legally for therapeutic purposes.

Most of the testing done by sports leagues is done because they would rather handle the issue internally than get the government involved. Even then, a lot of the internal regulations are usually only done to get the public off the leagues' back.
They tried this back in the1980’s, it didn’t go well…
Lots of good answers in this thread. I would just add one thing.

Start one. People will love it and you'll make billions. Make sure you get insurance.
I feel like your last sentence is a pretty big problem that doesn't require a "what else?"

We should be trying to make sports safer for the people being exploited, not less.
The US pro leagues already are full of PED use. While discouraged, the leagues only target egregious use.
Besides the health aspects, any minor or secondary league that openly allowed juicing would essentially be blackballed from any relationship with the big leagues. Lets say, for example, there's a Steroid Baseball League. Any athlete that competes in that league would likely be banned from Major League Baseball for life. Hell, MLB hasn't let in guys like Barry Bonds or Sammy Sosa into the hall of fame because of their steroid use. So any baseball player who believes they can make the Show isn't going to risk their lifelong dream and chance of fame and fortune for what might be a slightly better payday than Minor League Baseball. So there would be subpar talent in a league that could run into liability issues and it's easy to see why there really hasn't been any secondary league that allows PEDs.

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