Performance Enhancing Drugs and Wrestling

[Snackem]

I hope you meant that the biggest difficulty in obtaining them is the cost. The biggest problem is kids taking them at all. Some parents will stop at nothing to make their kids winners, and the price of drugs won't prevent them from being used.

Spider that is exactly what I meant the biggest problem in obtaining them is the cost. The biggest problem is kids taking them.

[karamazov]

My roommate in grad school was a strength coach and he always said that the worst thing about steroids is They Work. I have heard rumors of different college wrestlers taking them but the problem is they are rumors. The NCAA has a serious problem with steroids just like all other sports leagues. I think steroids are rampant in college football.

[FalconWrestlingKY]

Pretty much all football players of that calibar have used a muscle builder of varying levels of legality, otherwise it is a crapshoot getting to the size needed. We had one kid on my team who took some seriously risky muscle builders for football. He went from a scrawny 112 to one of the scariest looking 152's I have seen, and he was only 152 because he is around 5'6. But they didn't exactly make him a better wrestler hence I had skepticism I posted about earlier. Using steroids to go up a weight class definitely makes sense though.

[Spider]

Using steroids to go up a weight class definitely makes sense though.

???

[ODH]

Steroids would help you if you are moving up a weight class, for sure... for example, all those Russian stars who moved up from 84 to full sized 96 kg in recent years (I'm not accusing anyone of anything, but that's the kind of situation you could see someone chosing to use steroids in).

There has been a small but steady number of international stars to test positive for PED's. Usually they go through a suspension and then return to competition. Off the top of my head, the following world medallists have had a positive test: Dogan, Jadidi, Purveytaar, Leipold, Ganev, Lebedev, Tigiev (though Leipold's may have been tampered with and Tigiev's looks like inadvertent use).

In Canada we had Dante Berlingeri test positive a few years back (went up from 84 to 96) and Colin Daynes tested positive at this year's Olympic trials, forfeiting his greco team spot.

I'm not aware of any American wrestlers that have tested positive for steroids per say, though some (Warren, Lee) have tested positive for marijuana, and I think Eric Larkin got in trouble for using the wrong kind of cough medicine.

Faruk Sahin, Greco wrestler won nationals in 2004 and tested positive and served a two year suspension

[FalconWrestlingKY]

???

As in that is the best use for steroids in wrestling. I believe arm-spin mentioned guys going from 84 to 96 kilo have tested positive

[DrFeelNice]

You must be kidding about the actual cost. Steroids are plenty affordable, even by broke college kids. I have known a few college wrestlers in the Division I, II, and III levels that used steroids at one point or another, generally in the summertime to bulk up, so they have 9 months or so to clean it out of their system before nationals. A cycle of most steroids, which would be about 10 shots, would cost about 100-150 dollars. So I highly doubt it is the price of them that would turn any potential users off.

[Spider]

As in that is the best use for steroids in wrestling. I believe arm-spin mentioned guys going from 84 to 96 kilo have tested positive

I understand. I meant that I hope you aren't saying that it's a good way to go up a weight class.

[BlueBloodLion]

There is another side to steroids - as a recovery aid. See Floyd Landis in the Tour de France. He wasn't trying to muscle up (cyclists upper body musculature is proof of that), he was trying to recover from a really hard, really bad day. It worked, and he smoked the competition the next day. And was out soon after. I could easily see wrestlers take them to recover over night in some of the tournaments where you get 5 or so matches a day. The question then would be, would they get caught? I'm not familiar with in-tournament testing at the high school and college level. I expect it is absolutely zero in high school and basically zero in college except for maybe the medal placers in NCAA's.

What does get more expensive (from what I have heard) is the good methods for avoiding short-term detection (ie. what Landis and others were doing). I don't think the knowledge and budget for beating testing are around enough college wrestling programs to try to use it during a tournament.