re: Official 2013 Aussie Open Thread

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they are "performance enhancing" by name, but i think that discredits the athletes skill level to some degree. this is probably more relevant in baseball where the value of hand-eye coordination is supreme to strength in relation to hitting. i dont look down upon any hitting stats posted during the juice era. but in sports like cycling and tennis where endurance can be paramount, yeah it is kind of disappointing. cycling, in particular, hardly even seems like a sport anymore. basically a decades worth of TDF winners have been outed as cheaters.

tennis still involves a lot of skill, but i think it would be more tempting to use PED's for improved performances than a sport like baseball.

like i mentioned, i'm sure my age has something to do with why i feel this way.

oh well, excited to watch the joker tonight. PED's or not i can appreciate a well oiled machine

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The reason that I don't give a shite whether Djokovic, Nadal, Federer, Murray, etc. are or have been on PEDs is that, in tennis, the only thing the PEDs are going to do is increase stamina...and maybe movement to a small degree. But really stamina and recovery time is where it would be helpful.

I'll use last year's Aussie Open final as an example of why I don't care. Let's assume for the sake of argument that both Nadal and Djoker were on some variety of PEDs. Those guys put on one of the best displays of tennis skill that I've ever seen. Both guys were turning defense into offense from unimaginable positions. Both guys -- because both of them are so ridiculously fast -- were forced to basically hit lines to get a winner...and so that's what they did. I mean, there were 30 shot rallies with both guys being pulled from side to side to get every single ball and sending powerful, precise shots on a dead sprint while sliding to a stop to get back in position to run to the other side of the court and do the same thing.

Now they did this for nearly six hours. The PEDs didn't allow them to put on such a dispaly of tennis. Their respective level of skill did. Now perhaps PEDs allowed them to do it for six hours. But, you know what, I enjoyed those six hours. That was some of the best tennis I've ever seen and was just an athletic display by both guys. So I'm cool with it.