Adrenaline does make you stupid, but years of training makes you smart. The reason you train so intensively is that when the adrenaline is up you will fall back to muscle memory.
They're not being stupid by continuing the fight and trying to hide injuries. They are trying to get a w instead of an l, and sometimes that just means you need to keep the fight going another minute or two until the time is up. That can literally mean the difference between having a successful career and retiring with a mediocre record. It can be the difference between a shot at the world title, versus being on the free undercard fights. Fights. They are making a calculation, and probably the same one I would make in their same situation. It is very easy to look back on the reckless youth as being stupid. Fortunately, I have enough recording of myself from that era to see that I actually had thought it through pretty well, I just didn't realize how bad it could be in the future. But, if I had a world title under my belt, none of my current maladies would feel nearly as bad :-D
We train the fighters to go until the ref tells you to stop, for similar reasons to what you already illustrated. Which is why I blame the refs and the committee. They know exactly what goes through your head when you’re in a fight and it’s their job to keep your opponent relatively safe. And they aren’t, which is why I don’t watch.
But wanting to continue when even your coach knows it’s over is a kind of pressure sale situation. You’re in the moment and sort of trapped, and having a concussion and a brain full of adrenaline makes you have even worse judgement.
What is the deeper meaning of being a world champion fighter? I pursued a risky sport for many years myself until I was struck by the utter hollowness of it. How would my winning benefit anyone besides me? What was the purpose beyond self exaltation? How was this the best use of my short time on earth?
For me, I can hardly
think of a worse use of a life than fighting for sport. There is not a single fighter on earth I would trade places with. Not one.
When I consider how Naoya Inoue fought 11 rounds with a broken orbital socket I am profoundly inspired by the heart he demonstrated and his will to win - his focus and his skill to change strategy mid fight.
It's easy to handwave his ability to fight through pain thanks to adrenaline... until you try it for yourself.
It's inspiring to know just how much we can overcome ourselves if we want something enough.
You gotta be pretty far down the nihilism hole to wonder about the deeper meaning behind being a world class athlete.
My girlfriend was a martial arts trainer for a few years, and many of the girls she worked with cited Ronda specifically as their inspiration. They're not competing, this is a hobby, but they're doing it because they were inspired by people like Ronda.
Sometimes the process is an end in itself. A constant focus on "what's this good for?" can turn into a toxic, hollow mindset itself. Taken to an extreme, everything becomes just a stepping stone to a final action of death, which makes the practice of living rather pointless. Oliver Burkeman has some good thoughts on how to get out of that mindset.
Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher, vanity of vanities! All is vanity.
What does man gain by all the toil at which he toils under the sun?
A generation goes, and a generation comes, but the earth remains forever.
All things are full of weariness; a man cannot utter it;
the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing.
What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun.
Is there a thing of which it is said, “See, this is new”?
It has been already in the ages before us.
There is no remembrance of former things, nor will there be any remembrance
of later things yet to be among those who come after.
They aren't stupid they're just trying to make a career of it. Even though I think more work needs to be done on this issue, I do understand how things got this way.
This is refuted by Chapter 3[0] ("Violence") of the book "Testosterone" by Rebecca M. Jordan-Young and Katrina Karkazis.
Scientific American agrees[1] that violence is not correlated with testosterone:
> "When aggression is more narrowly defined as simple physical violence, the connection between [testosterone and violence] all but disappears."
Another study finds higher testosterone promotes pro-social behavior[2].
Personally I've found that rather than androgens being a mediator of violence, estrogen seems to be a much powerful inhibitor of rage/violence-potential. Low estrogen causes particularly difficult-to-control emotions. Generally when someone is taking high amounts of steroids they are likely also taking anti-estrogens (blocking testosterone's conversion to estradiol).
This low estradiol, due to another drug, not steroids seems to be what most often causes violent emotional dysregulation. Generally not testosterone or other androgens without anti-estrogens.
Perhaps my TRT is making me extremely dumb though ;-)
Obviously PEDs are bad but IMO non-falsifiable accusations about athletes using them are uninteresting. You can always claim (and someone usually is) that an athlete is dirty and just hasn't been caught yet for some reason.
Slightly off-topic though; you're acknowledging that they might contribute which isn't unfair here.
Suppose that there are enhancement drugs. They work, and a lot of competitors are using them. Then it becomes far more believable that the current champion is enhanced and has managed to hide it, than that someone who is not enhanced has miraculously managed to beat the entire field of people who have such a big advantage.
My view lead to me being certain about Lance Armstrong years before he was caught.
Greg LeMond has evolved into my Fred Rogers of athletics. Every time either of them is in the news my first thought was, “please don’t be bad news”.
The fact that Greg was such a brittle rider - a god one day and barely finishing another - gave me hope that he was legit. The fact that he has focused in retirement on cheating cemented that for me.
Last I heard he was trying to watchdog riders sneaking small electric motors into their bikes. Even 50 watts is a lot of boost for a cyclist.
Jeez I can kind of overlook PEDs insofar as you're still kind of the one doing the training and the race but sticking a motor into your bike - like what even is the point anymore.
Why not bring a gun to an MMA fight while they're at it too
The point for (many/most) is to get the sweet victory, get rich and famous. It doesn't matter if you cheated or not, your ape brain will find reasons why you deserved to win anyway.
I agree, given "they work" and "a lot of competitors are using them", the rest follows logically. But those assumptions are simplistic, they do some very heavy lifting and are typically presented without evidence.
The most effective doping agents are often the easiest to detect, and modern anti-doping programs like the biological passport and whereabouts program are very effective. It's no reason to be complicit -- the science continues to evolve, athletes who go awry will continue to get caught, and athletes who follow the rules will continue to have to work hard to stay within the boundaries (it is not trivial to stay within WADA guidelines even as an amateur athlete; a lot of people who get medical treatment for a common issue would violate the rules a few times over without realizing it).
But to look at an entire sport and disregard them all as cheaters without evidence does nothing but encourage young athletes to feel like they need to risk their health in order to compete and belittle the accomplishments of clean athletes. We need to hold cheaters accountable, not throw in the towel.
Is there any reason to doubt that performance enhancing drugs enhance performance? The science on that has been clear for decades. It would make no sense for people to give a list of citations on such a well-known fact every time.
I agree that "a lot of competitors are using them" is an assumption. In the case of Lance Armstrong, so many other bikers had been caught before him that it was no longer an assumption. But that does vary by sport.
I entirely dismiss the argument that our tests catch cheaters. There have just been too many examples over the years of athletes getting away with cheating for years. At this point the burden of proof is on those who think we're catching them. In fact as articles like https://www.shu.ac.uk/news/all-articles/features-and-comment... show, anonymous surveys show that most athletes are getting away with it.
All that said, I agree on holding cheaters accountable. And think we should go farther. If someone who trains with you gets caught, you should also be punished. On the assumption that there is a chance you were just not caught, and if you weren't doping, you likely knew and didn't tell. That would create social pressure to not put your teammates at jeopardy. And I think THAT would finally end cheating.
> Is there any reason to doubt that performance enhancing drugs enhance performance?
Haha no, definitely not. For clarity, we're talking about banned substances, which isn't always the same thing as performance enhancing drugs. It is actually debated whether a lot of the WADA banned substances are performance enhancing drugs; but WADA would rather athletes don't take things that could be harmful to them because they might enhance performance so they tend to err on the side of adding things they worry about or have evidence of athletes abusing.
Moreso, I mean that it's simplistic to assume that the type and amount of illegal substances you can get away with while skirting an increasingly aggressive testing framework will be sufficient to be the world champion. There's a risk tradeoff here and a million variables in high performance training -- athletes put their entire career on the line when they take banned substances and get no guarantee of return. Take the recent case of Collin Chartier in triathlon: reached #14 in the world, started doping over the off season, caught within a few months of use, and career is now over.
> In the case of Lance Armstrong, so many other bikers had been caught before him that it was no longer an assumption.
Right, and once they're caught, they're banned. They are no longer a "competitor who is using them". Your logic makes an assumption that the population that is left just hasn't been caught yet, rather than that their negative tests actually indicate a lack of doping. And that is an assumption.
> anonymous surveys show that most athletes are getting away with it
These surveys come up with numbers showing anywhere between 1% and 70% of athletes have consumed a banned substance. Remember that weed is a WADA banned substance that 50% of the US population has tried. These studies are glorified guesses that vary depending on the wording they use.
I assume that all professional athletes are on PEDs of some sort (I read awhile back that essentially all tennis players are on some heart medication that is allowed and they probably don't all have a heard condition). I don't think they care about what is legal, just what is detectible. The incentives are just too big for them to abstain.
You're maybe thinking of Meldonium, which is banned. The drug was developed in the 1970s and is a very common OTC sale in eastern Europe. It was banned in 2016 when WADA decided it was possible it could be able to act as a performance enhancer. Maria Sharapova, a tennis champion, made the news later that year when she tested positive, and received a two year ban which was later shortened when the court determined she had originally started taking it years ago in good faith on a doctor's recommendation. About two hundred other athletes from eastern Europe across different sports received positive tests shortly after the ban as well, a lot of which were reversed when it turned out they were detecting use from 2015 (it takes months after use for it to stop showing on tests).
I think there’s a loophole with endurance athletes and asthma medication as well. But I would not immediately think, “mood or judgement altering” there.
We are still looking at whether over the counter pain killers are mood altering substances. I’ve seen circumstantial evidence of this in myself. (Though I don’t think I’d want me or a friend to fight on painkillers - reduced coagulation and bruises are no joke).
We didn’t catch Lance Armstrong using PEDs for something like eight years.