The most common form of PED cheating in biking is EPO, which works by artificially increasing your red blood cell production. That makes your oxygen-intake system more efficient—obviously a benefit in long-distance endurance events—but it’s dangerous, as shown by a rash of deaths in the cycling world. The thought, at least on the website I checked, was that adding too many red blood cells can make the blood too thick, particularly when you add in dehydration from long-term activity.

Here, you’re doing the same thing, but mechanically not chemically. Your body naturally makes red blood cells. If you take some out, run them through a low-speed centrifuge to distill them, and then put them back in right before you race (or go to play in the Superbowl as it were), you’ll effectively up your ability to handle oxygen-debt and therefore recover faster by preventing the onset of lactic acid build-up.

At any rate, blood-doping, which is taking out blood, freezing it, and then re-injecting it right before an event, was a kind of low-risk (i.e. difficult to catch) form of cheating that I remember hearing about in the Olympics a few years ago. As I remember, it was banned, and in fact, several folks were caught cheating, but I’ve no idea what happened after that.

instead of red blood cells injected back to the body like in cycling, they instead inject concentrated platelets (your blood without red blood cells) which is the part of the blood that promotes clotting.

And it seems they only inject a teaspoon of it directly on the injured part. How they prevent the platelets to clot? I have no idea.

The issue is a question of when use becomes abuse, and more to the point, what’s dangerous. As I’ve said here before, if these things are allowed in the pros, then they will very quickly trickle down to the elite ranks in high schools everywhere.

Look, the mother that will spend $300 on a swimsuit for her daughter’s monthly age-group swim meets because it’s the same one Michael Phelps wore in Beijing, that’s the same mother that will encourage her kids to take stuff that the pros take, too. Hell, I can remember my own mother trying to get me to use caffeine stimulants before races (stupid idea, BTW). It happens, and it happens much, much younger than you’d think. Because college tuition is expensive. When you’re talking about getting a scholarship, you’re talking real money, even for folks who will never compete for any professional money at all.

So, bottom line, there probably are some cases where some of this stuff is permissible, but the unintended consequences of overly permissive policy can be very significant to a great number of basically innocent, well-meaning people.