One of the most compelling viewing experiences in the Games!

. . .They weren’t on the sauce, they were just apart of the softball team.
Hahahaha

and i so impressed with the knees of this guy!!!

the ligaments knees maybe has the most pained muscule? poor ligaments.

Congratulations with yours 4×100 freeestyle, amazing winning against frenchs.Like this race, the finals yesterday are so amazing: Kitajima with a great turn and second 50m.

And the 400 freestyle a great win, ADlington winnig in the last touch!! despite Hoof domination.

any athlete worth their medals should be this forthcoming.

swimming is my sport – we don’t have a “culture” of doping that i am aware of, but that said, yes it’s there. the whole sport has jumped up a level as Rowdy has been pointing out in his commentary. when you’re talking hundredths of seconds between glory and ignominy, and you have to train so hard for so long, it’s no surprise that doping cases surface. there is only so much the body can do at that level – it’s so ridiculous that yes, that swimsuit can make the difference.

but for those who don’t have Phelps’ and Thorpe’s genetic gifts, there is a wall and it hurts like hell when you hit it. same with cycling. and we glorify winners and forget the also-rans, even when we’re talking such ridiculously small differences (relative in each sport, of course).

the looks on the faces of the French swimmers when they lost that relay to the US tells such a story – they should all have been basking in the glory of a magnificent finish between two marvelous teams, and yet it was abject disappointment. it’s a shame it has to be that way…

That was the best 4×100 freestyle relay I’ve ever seen. Congrats USA, fantastic!

don’t you?

Me, I was perfectly content to go through life without imagining any of that, but now . . .

i can’t watch it anymore, either.

of a youth chinese academy , and the the boys, with 7 years old, doing flexibility and crying a lot. The trainers push them into maximum and the children suffring every day.

i’m guessing that the spanish woman positive got twisted in the rumor mill into an elite dude, probably sanchez. and voilà, out popped a rumor.

i have my doubts that they’ve even managed to test the road race samples yet. probably too soon for any news just yet. the spanish positive is from 31 july, which was quite some time ago. hopefully, there won’t be any news, of course.

But it looks like it was Moreno all along. There’s no implication there’s another one is there?

I’m not totally omniscient, you know ;-)

I wouldn’t want to work for Schumacher either.

very well done. Somewhat on the topic. Anyone see it, and remember the title or date? I read it at the gym, so it could be older than that.

... perhaps we should kneecap him and call him Professor.

I’m completely repulsed by the idea of freaky unknowable side effects… now. But I’m pretty sure you could have talked me and most of my high school class into this risk, back in the day, solely on the promise of freaky unknowable side effects.

We all have some new mutations, and some inherited ones. In most cases, they don’t affect our sports skills, so no-one cares. But things are tough for people caught out because the olympics can’t decide if they are totally female, totally male, or what. I mean, if you’re pretty much female, and you didn’t do anything to dope, and your genes are the ones nature gave you, should someone be tossing you off the competition list because you have an active gene that should only be active in guys?

... we won’t be able to know whether GT means Gene Therapy or Grand Tour.

“What defines you? Are you what you are at birth? Can you remake yourself? And if you can, should someone be allowed to tell you that you can’t?

nature or nurture with a Gene Therapy twist

Can I go home now?

Look at how regulated the O2 carrying capacity is. Go up to altitude, you start to make red cells. Come down, and they step back down again. Sure, any waste of energy should be slowly selected against (most of our ancestors were hungry most of the time, or starving periodically, and wasteful use of energy was a big evolutionary no-no.) However, you can also argue that a higher hematocrit would mean a) catching more food b) getting less exhausted and less prone to accidents and disease and c) outrunning the other guy, when being chased by the wolves / bears / bad guys. So with all the evolutionary advantage lined up on the side of ever-increasing hematocrit, how come we’re not all awash in O2? I don’t know if the answer is “death from sludge in your veins” or “damage from free radicals” but something in our biology clearly does NOT like us to have much more O2 carrying capacity than what we actually have.

Also, to be effective in an evolutionary sense, this “negatives of having a high hematocrit” would have to cut in before or during the peak reproductive years. (Stuff that kills you after you have bred is not really selected against, except insofar as your absence makes your kids less likely to survive.) Anyway, I don’t know what the payback is, but there pretty much has to be one.

Either that, or human evolution is 99% about sitting and (not quite) starving, and only 1% about catching food or catching hell.