Sorry, i=I don't mean this in a demeaning manner, were you an elite athlete competing in olympics, playing in NBA or premier league? When people say every athlete takes PEDs, it's usually athletes at the very top of their game. And yes, when there are millions or billions (if you're Cristiano Ronaldo or Lebron James) of dollars at stake, athlete's will take any advantage possible.

Do I think every professional athlete is on PEDs? Yes. Does it make what they are doing any less super human? No. It's like your typical person looking at a bodybuilder and saying, I could look like that if i did steroids. Which is total bullshit.

I had just reached an international level, but I was never at the olympic level. But a whole group I trained with for a time all became professionals, and some of them competed in the olympics. I knew them then before they got there, and I knew their level and their attitudes, and I saw nothing in their professional performances indicating that they had at any point moved into doping. How sure can one be? Never totally sure. But trying to be "sure" about the other possibility (that they were doping) will need more than "yeah, I'm sure they do".

EditAdd: I did know people who were fascinated about EPO-like medication, and asthma medicine when used without actually having asthma. That was when they were quite young, and that's also a long time ago. I never ran into any of them actually using anything, and they were in the minority - I met just two, and sadly one of them died in a traffic accident before he got to a professional level.

As a counterpoint : I have enjoyed quite some nightlife over the years, but I have never stumbled upon cocaine.

I am sure there is plenty.

That's all really great, but it's possible (even likely) that they progressed because they doped and you didn't progress because you didn't.

It's simply physiologically impossible to accomplish what these athletes are doing without assistance.

I know exactly why I "didn't progress" and they did, as you kind of put it.. I decided not to. They decided to continue. I stopped training, they didn't. When I was still active I progressed same as they did - and I saw nothing super-human in their later performance. Obviously I only have intimate knowledge about my own field, I know nothing about e.g. 100m sprinters, jumpers and the like. And, as everybody else, I'm pretty suspicious about pure muscle-based sports like weight lifting.

That's a ridiculous claim because it can't be falsified as long as you are not arguing with an unbeaten olympic champion. As long as an athlete has been beaten by somebody, you can always pull the "yeah well you know why you didn't win? Because you're clean, but everybody above you doped."

Just like arguing "well we only lost the election cause the other side cheated."

What many people in this thread don't realize is that sports is more than NBA and soccer.

In fact, less commercialized sports are much more interesting to watch and participate because they are not just full of over-hyped over-payed over-celebritized evening-entertainment shows designed to milk the audience of most money possible.

If "athlete" ends for you at what's on pay TV and on ads at bus stops, sure. But that's a very limited view of sports. And quite sad, frankly.

It is a public secret that at the finish line of cycling races at the junior level, parents stand around swapping tips on which asthma inhaler to get.

I'm curious what sport. My wife is a swimmer and had to make the choice to either dope and compete at an international level or give it up. She chose to give it up. And this wasn't a shock or anything. She knew the decision was coming since she first showed promise in high school.

Another question worth asking: did any of the athletes you knew take PEDs at any time in their past, but stopped once they approached a level where getting caught would mean the end of their career?

None of the ones I knew well enough to call friends or acquaintances did, and of those who continued to a pro level none of them arbitrarily stopped. They continued until their careers naturally started to decline, and then changed careers - some of them sports related, some not.