this post was submitted on 27 May 2026
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Let’s be real, the regular Olympics are already doped. Their entire careers are on the line with the pride (and eyes) of the nation bearing down on them and demanding results… and we think they and their teams aren’t taking every edge they think they can possibly get away with? All the time famous athletes of yesteryear are being revealed to have been up to shenanigans when science catches up to retest their samples more effectively or some investigation gets a co-conspirator to spill the beans.
There’s microdosing below what tests can detect, novel designer drugs that can’t yet be detected, therapeutic use exemptions for drugs that would normally be banned, setting up situations to evade tests unless you are prepared to take them, tampering with the sample, good old fashioned corruption… probably tons of things that would never occur to me but that would to highly motivated teams with vast amounts of money on the line.
You just demonstrated why Hunter won.
Your comment indicates its all drugsdrugs drugs. Nope. It's years of training and dedication, sacrifice and absolute laser guided focus.
You cant dope your way to a skillset and discipline you don't have.
I explicitly said they are searching for EVERY edge they think they can get. That includes insane hard work and practice. The hard-training Olympian who is doped will easily crush someone who is doped but just sitting around eating bon bons. Actually many agents people dope with are used because they allow people to train harder for longer and recover more quickly which is invaluable as an athlete. Saying that many athletes are doping is saying many don’t have integrity, not that they don’t work hard - that couldn’t be further from the truth at the Olympic level.
There's a book, The Sports Gene by David Epstein, that talks about elite level sports performance and the extent to which improvement in different sports is trainable or innate, which are social/cultural, and which have feedback loops to make sport performance a combination of all of the above.
Major league baseball players have very high visual acuity (including/especially much more precise visual determination of distance, like a rangefinder). NBA players are tall, and everyone knows that, but someone surprising is that most of them have much longer arms than even the people of the same height. Olympic high jumpers have tendon attachment points that are especially conducive to jumping high. Many world class marathoners come from ethnic groups that have certain genetic adaptations that help increase red blood count, especially in response to high altitude living (while also having the environmental benefits of living at high altitude in their childhoods and growing up in a culture of running every day as children).
What's interesting, though, is that there may be different genetic or physiological reasons for an untrained person's baseline ability, how quickly their body adapts to training, and where the plateau happens for that particular training. There are people who are naturally high performing, others who might be very responsive to training, and others still who have high ceilings so that they can reach the highest levels with sufficient training.
Drugs will only help with certain adaptations, and can't help with others. There isn't a drug that a 25-year-old can take to make him taller, or to make his Achilles tendon attach at a different point. Drugs probably don't help with hand eye coordination, reaction time, or strategic decisions.
This particular event shows that big muscles may actually hinder swimming ability, so taking drugs to make your muscles bigger might hurt your performance.
So it depends on the sport. I'd expect doping to provide very little advantage in some sports that involve a lot of technique or strategy. And I think swimming is a sport where performance depends heavily on technique, especially at sprint distances.
The drugs at play aren’t limited to androgens. For example in swimming many people have been busted for Methylhexaneamine, a performance enhancing stimulant.
Everyone is looking to shave off any time they can. Just taking drugs alone definitely isn’t enough to put you at the Olympic level. But if you have trained and trained relentlessly and have those sorts of passive genetic advantages you mentioned for your flavor of sport… that may not be enough to assure victory. You can expect your top opponents have similar advantages, since in a world of billions of people who are more mobile than they used to be you are likely not the only person with those particular in-born genetic advantages who trained a ton and has a good strategy… what can you do to get even the slightest edge?