Quote:
Originally Posted by PaceAdvantage
Secretariat was juiced to the gills. You probably think he's one of the best ever.
Look at that sucker's neck. Built like an NFL linebacker juicing like there is no tomorrow.
Look up the history of steroids and tell me the 1970s weren't the golden age of steroid usage in horse racing. Three triple crowns that decade...hmmmm...what a coincidence.
And Riva Ridge didn't do too shabby either...maybe he was their test case and they perfected the ratio with Secretariat.
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He may very well have been on steroids, but your understanding of how they work defeats your argument.
Steriods are primarily for recovery. They help speed up healing the inherent damage of physical exertion. Back in the 70s people didn't understand this. People didn't really understand this until the late 1990s to be honest.
They don't really make atheletes faster, they make them tougher and more aggressive/competitive. In regards to their increasing muscle mass, this is only a benefit in sports in which endurance is not an issue, because muscles are expensive energy-wise and they increase the weight to power ratio. As weight increases, power decreases. This is why just about any motorcycle can beat any car. This is one part of the diuretic/Lasix trinty, you literally drain weight to increase power. The other two parts are masking other drugs and buffering lactic acid.
In sprinters, the increase in muscle mass/strength increases strike force of foot/hoof to ground, which increases propulsion, but at a steep energy price. And it makes them aggressive, which you need when charging out of the gate/blocks. In humans the increasing muscle mass disadvantage is clearly seen in runners. Sprinters have legs like Popeye's arms, milers are much leaner, marathoners are skeletal. You see this less in swimming because of the power needed to dislocate water, but you still see it.
Being doped to the gills with steriods would have negatively impacted Secretariat's Belmont. However, moderate use would have kept his appetite healthy, his weight on, his energy up, his coat shiny, and his aggression stoked, which is seen in bucking, biting, fighting exercise riders etc. Horses that don't show the physical effects of 3 races in 5 weeks are on steroids. Period.
EPO did not exist in the 1970s or even the 1980s. It entered human sports in the 1990s, and likely did not take hold in horseracing until the 2000s. Say what you want about Secretariat, Slew, and Affirmed, but they weren't running on EPO and it is the most beneificial dope a doper can dope with because it increases your VO2 Max. They were running on their own inherent athletic capacity. You cannot say this of EPO-era horses, like AP and Justify. The odds these two horses are EPO free are greater than the odds of the 2nd Coming, coming at 6:47 this evening, just in time for hotdogs on the Solstice.
I loved Holy Bull too. He was almost certainly running on steriods.
You can replace Secretariat's name with Justify's in your comment and have an equally true discription of the horse. You can also hhmmmm about 2 TCs in 3 years, by the same trainer, and run almost identically. At least in the 70s, there were 3 very different horses, owned by wholly unconnected people, who ran completely different races.
The article in this thread about the peptide doping vortex out of Arizona should make us all pause. It is too bad the FBI has not released the whole list of clients. It has released the atheltes and human trainers it knows, but there are dozens of names it does not recognize. How many of those would we recognize I wonder.
