5 Painful Ways Athletes Enhance Their Performance
When competitors inject themselves with “performance-enhancing substances,” their bodies sometimes pay a terrible price. Maybe their muscles grow, which is nice, but the valves in their blood vessels fall apart, their gonads shrivel up and they either grow breasts or lose their breasts (whichever one is worse for their personal circumstances).
But the usual steroids and pharmaceuticals are hardly the only tricks at athletes’ disposal. You could instead turn to such extreme measures as...
Breaking Your Bones
If you’re thinking of breaking your toes right before a big race, that’s probably not a good idea. You’ll find it harder to run with broken toes, and even ignoring that, the pain alone will surely impede you.
Don't Miss
None of that applies, however, to paraplegics. If you are a Paralympian and plan to compete in the sport of wheelchair rugby, you don’t need functioning toes and also can’t feel any injury down there. Your body will still respond to injuries, by raising your blood pressure, and the resulting swell of oxygen and nutrients to all your muscles gives you an advantage on the court.
It’s called “boosting,” and while it’s been banned since 1994, a good chunk of athletes in surveys admit to using it. Some methods of boosting are less extreme than fracturing bones. Even tightening a strap around the leg can boost you to some extent. Other methods sound even worse than the toe attack.
One quadriplegic climber from Canada, Brad Zdanivsky, revealed that his personal boosting techniques include delivering electric shocks to his testicles. We don’t even know if that’s more effective than shocking other parts of the body — he probably just chose it because it sounds the most hardcore.
Injecting Dog Testicles
Clearly, many athletes believe the testicles are the center of all power, even if they can’t explain exactly why. Testicles, being a primary sexual characteristic, were considered the source of masculinity even before we as a species knew about such concepts as “hormones” or “the circulatory system.” Then in the 1880s, when we were beginning to figure those concepts out, testicles became the ingredient in a new tonic called Brown-Séquard elixir.
Dr. Charles-Édouard Brown-Séquard mashed up the testicles of dogs and guinea pigs and offered to inject them into willing men who wanted to feel younger. Your sexual prowess would return, said the doctor, who was otherwise not a quack and had made many discoveries into how the body works. A pitcher for the MLB, Pud Galvin, took a dose of this elixir, and he immediately pitched almost a perfect game. He is now remembered as surely the first baseball player to ever win thanks to PEDs.
But now that we know more about testosterone, we don’t think that elixir possibly could have helped Galvin. Testicles don’t contain much testosterone. They produce testosterone, but they don’t contain much at any one time, so injecting the extract of animal testicles will boost an athlete’s hormone levels negligibly. If the elixir did anything, it only functioned like Michael’s Secret Stuff in Space Jam: It made Galvin believe in himself.
Breast Surgery
We mentioned earlier that breast shrinkage can be a side effect of steroids in women. But if you’re looking to do better in sports, smaller breasts might not be an unwanted side effect but your primary goal.
Consider Romanian tennis player Simona Halep. When she was 17, she had 34DD breasts, which happens to be the exact average breast size in America today, according to bra manufacturers. Those are a fair bit smaller than the really large breasts that might inspire the typical patient to seek surgery to reduce them. But they were a handicap during games, weighing her down and keeping her from reacting as quick as she wanted to. So, she got those cut down a couple cup sizes.
She’d go on to call that surgery the biggest sacrifice she’d made for tennis. She ended up the number one player in the world for multiple years, and she won the French Open and Wimbledon, so the sacrifice probably was not entirely in vain.
True, she was also caught using a banned drug called Roxadustat, but that was later. First, she got a boost from the smaller breasts.
Baking Soda
Baking soda is such an innocuous chemical that you may well have a big bag of it just lying about in your kitchen, and you can lob spoons of it into desserts that you make. It’s hardly surprising, then, that it’s perfectly legal to eat some before a race. Still, doping agencies have called eating baking soda a “restricted technique.” They can’t outright ban it, since it’s an ingredient in so much normal food, but they say you shouldn’t purposely eat the stuff because of the advantage it gives you.
In short, exercise produces acid in your muscles, and sodium bicarbonate is a base, which neutralizes the acid and lets you push harder. The exact mechanism may be a little more complicated than that, involving potassium ions or maybe something else, but it all means you can sprint or swim faster after you take some.
Still, many who try it once never want to try it again. You need to eat quite a lot of the stuff for it to have an effect, and this amount might leave you vomiting or with explosive diarrhea, possibly during the race itself. This will be unpleasant for you. It may potentially be even worse for whoever’s next to you.
Hallucinogenic Strychnine
Fans of mystery stories will know that strychnine is a poison, designed for killing rich relatives. When it’s not scoring you an early inheritance, it’s used as a pesticide, where it’s again designed to kill — though, Canada recently banned its use as a pesticide, calling it too cruel.
In the early 1900s, cyclists took strychnine to sustain themselves during long races. When it wasn’t strychnine, they took nitroglycerin or cocaine, each of which can be either fun or deadly depending on the dose. None of the substances were banned at the time. In fact, people assumed biking long without taking one of them was impossible.
One taker of strychnine was Major Taylor, an American sprinter. Taylor set several world records even when not on any unusual substances. When it came to cycling, however, he was fortified with strychnine.
Back then, the sport of the day was “six-day racing,” in which competitors would bike around the same track for six days, with the winner being whoever managed the most laps. Taylor competed in a six-day racing event at Madison Square Gardens in 1896, and he officially placed eighth, even though he gave up partway through.
He gave up because, as he put it, “I cannot go on with safety, for there is a man chasing me around the ring with a knife in his hand.” There were in fact several men going around the ring after him, but the knife was a hallucination, created by the strychnine.
Or maybe the knife was real, wielded by someone on cocaine. Racing used to be exciting back then. It was far more exciting than watching people bike around a track for six days today, which sounds like the most boring thing in the world.
Follow Ryan Menezes on Twitter for more stuff no one should see.
