Why America Sucks in Olympic Weightlifting?

[quote]wushu_1984 wrote:
2-SCOOPS wrote:
i’ve read through every post now and i’m going slightly off the topic at hand now but i pose the question: what’s wrong with steroids? so they make you recover better so you can train harder, bad stuff right there. it was argued that most other countries are on them, well if everyone is on them, why not make them legal? are people afraid of athletes beating records because they did everything to be as strong as possible?

i see making steroid use legal as leveling the playing field a little among countries, if you don’t agree and still think it’s cheating, then ask yourself what is cheating.

because cuba may not have enough food to provide 105kg and 105+kg lifters is it cheating that we as americans have a ridiculous over eating problem and have plenty of food? since other countries have better training programs than we do, is that cheating? or are you just using all of your resources to your full advantage, well that kind of sounds unfair and not a level playing field, well guess what, some people have better genetics to begin with and better training and better food and what not, the only thing people have access to across the board is steroids.

do they magically make someone into an elite caliber athlete…no. if i took them would i magically run a 9.7 second 100m race and beat carl lewis…no. we want to have top performing athletes but we don’t want to know what people do to get there, and if you tell us we will look down on you for trying to be the best you can be at what you do. so answer me why they are so bad and detrimental to our athletics, is it because people will get better?

yet in a medical sense they can be considered a miracle drug, sooooo how can this drug that is good in a medical sense be bad for athletes, and please no after school special or mother type shit reply.

There can be some health issues when administering steroids to children especially girls.

But I definitely see some of your points. What is cheating? I thought “Bigger, Faster, Stronger*” did a good take on this. The guy with the high altitude sleep chamber was great!

Honestly though no international organisation especially one such as the IOC would condone or allow steroid use. The issue is mostly political with a side order of health issues (though they won’t allow research involving steroids so alot of the health issues are hypothetical).

I think if they did more research on steroid usage the issue would move away from being political to being a health and medical science issue. Alas this issue is not up for discussion with the IOC or any politically minded organisation.

My personal opinion is to keep it drug free for the competitions and perform extensive medical research on Steroid usage before even considering revising this position.[/quote]

I like the reply and agree that steroid use should be not be condoned among children and i also think that it’s mostly political and that their stand is one that resembles something from the medieval time period, we fear what we do not know and just assume it’s bad, and we won’t do any research on it because we are afraid of being ridiculed for whatever the outcome might be. the earth is flat so you better not sail to far, oh wait you say it’s round and disprove everything that has been believed before you even though they had no proof of a flat earth to begin with, then how dare you. a little over the top but i think my point gets across. I wish politics had nothing to do with it, so we could get rid of all this red tape concerning the research of steroids. are they worse than previously thought? do they by chance have many more benefits than we previously have known? who knows, but if we don’t do any research because of some political bullshit i find that that would be ignorant of us as a human race and that we could find ourselves in a shoulda/coulda/woulda situation.

Honestly, the amount of crap people are making up in this thread is giving me a headache. First we had the guys who “knew East Coast Gold and other American lifters” were on steroids - Thanks for spreading rumors that only hurt the sport. Then we have Wushu changing his story and admitting to exagerrating things multiple times. Now we have the audacious claim that we don’t know what steroids do.

Look, steroids have been tested in clinical studies for a long time. They are remarkable hormones that can help cure/fix many different disorders/diseases/injuries. Doctors aren’t as dumb as you all are suggesting - we have a very good sense for how anabolic steroid hormones function, and thus we know a lot of the dangers associated with them. If taken under the care of a doctor, many, but not all of the side effects can be minimized. But that’s the thing! Not all necessarily! If we allow them to be legal, anyone who wants to be competitive would HAVE to be on them. Since they do pose serious health risks (like cancer, which you can’t control at this time with modern medicine), that would be tremendously unfair and dangerous.

Now you might argue that it would become a choice… which is true. But then we would be discouraging some part of our most gifted talent pool because they might make the choice that their health is more important than taking the steroids. This would be a HUGE loss to any sport.

Can we end this thread, please? Many of the people commenting have little to no experience with the sport of Olympic lifting in the US (or anywhere) and are just talking out of their asses.

[quote]Dr. Manhattan wrote:
If we allow them to be legal, anyone who wants to be competitive would HAVE to be on them.
[/quote]

The point I’d make here is that it may have ethical and medical implications, but it would not effect “fairness” or sportsmanship because the best athletes would still win. They would just have worse records than we do now.

What cancer do steroids cause, rather than exacerbate if already present?

[quote]conorh wrote:

The point I’d make here is that it may have ethical and medical implications, but it would not effect “fairness” or sportsmanship because the best athletes would still win. They would just have worse records than we do now.

What cancer do steroids cause, rather than exacerbate if already present?[/quote]

By unfair, I meant it would cause athletes to jeopardize their health or not be competitive. I am in no way referring to their performances.

Steroids don’t cause cancer, you are right. However, they certainly do raise the risk of cancer if an individual is at all predisposed to it genetically. Since nearly anyone could eventually develop cancer of some variety, this is bad.

[quote]Dr. Manhattan wrote:
Honestly, the amount of crap people are making up in this thread is giving me a headache. First we had the guys who “knew East Coast Gold and other American lifters” were on steroids - Thanks for spreading rumors that only hurt the sport. Then we have Wushu changing his story and admitting to exagerrating things multiple times. Now we have the audacious claim that we don’t know what steroids do.

Can we end this thread, please? Many of the people commenting have little to no experience with the sport of Olympic lifting in the US (or anywhere) and are just talking out of their asses. [/quote]

I’ll admit that I don’t know much about steroids so I won’t comment on them anymore.

I don’t think my posts have been that harmful or full of BS but whatever I’ll stop posting now. [end of thread - hopefully]

Just to give another perspective on this “weightlifting gets Chinese people out of poverty” idea: