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Comment by Beijinger | Hacker News Reader

Well, people dope now with CarbonMonoxide

https://escapecollective.com/exclusive-tour-riders-are-inhal...

Under the rules, how different is that from something like just taking caffeine?

Doping is usually in reference to banned substances. But huffing CO genuinely seems completely out of left field of any rules that I know. They probably will ban it, but before they do is it correct to call it doping?

Yes. The point is to see who is the best cyclist, not to see who can come up with the most clever biological hack to give themselves an edge.

Every single world class athlete spends most of their waking hours coming up with the most clever "biological hacks" to give themselves an edge. Training regimens, diets, rest and recovery schedules, equipment, sports psychology support, etc. etc. all are optimized to the nth degree to give athletes an edge.

I think you are missing the point of pro cycling to be honest.

As other commenters have said, the very purpose of this all is to see who can cheat in a way that's not outright illegal.

We are at a point of such peak human performance and conditioning that if you bring in equalisers such as the same bike for everyone etc, you'll just have a whole peloton crossing the finish line at the same time.

That story is a nothing burger. CO rebreathing is the technique to monitor hemoglobin mass changes after a period at altitude. It's a test that lasts 3 minutes and has no consequence.

It's like saying "cyclist get better by drawing blood" when they just have their bloodwork done to see how they are doing with training.

They aren't sleeping attached to a car exhaust.

Don't think you read the link. It talks about CO rebreathing as an analytics tool, and then specifically talks about a more aggressive method to increase performance:

> A second, more aggressive approach, which is called carbon monoxide inhalation and uses the same equipment and techniques, steps into the scientifically new and much riskier realm of inhaling the poisonous gas for the express purpose of performance enhancement. A growing body of recent scientific research suggests CO inhalation can have a powerful impact on measures of aerobic capacity like VO2max, or maximal oxygen uptake.

And the teams say that they only use it to analyze blood values during altitude adaptation. As the article mentions, the technique isn't new, so why imply that teams are using it for nefarious purposes?

> And there is no hard evidence that any WorldTeams are currently using CO inhalation for performance gains. But multiple sources for this article voiced concern that it might be imminent, and possibly already happening in cycling or other sports.

To go from that to "people dope now with CarbonMonoxide" is dishonest.

> And the teams say

i think it's equally as dishonest to believe anything these teams say about topics which relate to doping, performance enhancements etc.

of course not a single team says that they're using these methods to get performance gains, why on earth would they admit it?

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