Steroid Nation

New York Times writer Michael Schmidt has the dope on dopers: Exposes Ortiz, Ramirez, Sosa, and others

The huge David Ortiz, Manny Ramirez story breaking today was the work of Michael Schmidt of the New York Times.   Schmidt has recently penned stories on the juicing of Sammy Sosa, David Ortiz, and Manny Ramirez.  He appears to be on a  hot streak.  To Editor and Publisher:

Despite being only 25 and a New York Times reporter for less than two years, Michael S. Schmidt has already earned a spot as one of the paper's best sports investigators.

In June, he broke the story that slugger Sammy Sosa was on the infamous list of 100 baseball players to test positive for performance-enhancing drugs in 2003.

Today, he added two more names -- Manny Ramirez and David Ortiz -- to the list in a bombshell story that already has Boston Red Sox beat writers talking.

A former Times news clerk who first came to the paper in 2005, he freelanced for a year and returned in 2007 as an "intermediate" reporter. His beat: off-the-field news. Translated: steroids and other bad stuff.

"I had a duty to look into it," he says of his success in finding three of the biggest names on the list. "I had to at least put in the effort."

Schmidt set out with a plan to track down the 2003 list...here is one more excerpt, with the remiader on the web sire:

Schmidt says he increased his pursuit of the 2003 list after Sports Illustrated in February revealed that Alex Rodriguez was one of the names. "After that, people would always ask me 'when is the list going to come out?'" he recalls. "I never had a good answer. I started to realize there was a real  interest people had in this."

More on caffeine as performance enhancing

Well written article, originally from the New York Times, but reprinted in the Arkansas Times-Democrat on the use of caffeine as a PED.  Notable was the opening paragraph discussing an episode where 'Let's Run' founder Weldon Johnson discovered the benefits of caffeine in running.

Weldon Johnson first tried caffeine as a performance enhancer in 1998. He was not a coffee drinker but had heard that caffeine could make him run faster. So he went to a convenience store before a race and drank a cup of coffee. For the first time in his life, he ran 10 kilometers in less than 30 minutes. "I remember being really wired before the race," he said. "My body was shaking." From then on, he was a convert. Johnson, co-founder of racenews aggregator letsrun.com, would avoid caffeine, even in soft drinks, for a few weeks before he competed in a race, wanting to have the full stimulant effect. "It may have been a huge placebo effect, but I swore by it," Johnson said. "Having a cup of coffee exactly one hour before the race was part of my routine." Or maybe it wasn't a placebo effect.

Caffeine, it turns out, actually works. And it's legal, one of the few performance enhancers that is not banned by the World Anti-Doping Agency.

Is caffeine a PED?

Exercise physiologists have studied caffeine's effects in nearly every iteration: Does it help sprinters? Marathon runners? Cyclists? Rowers? Swimmers? Athletes whose sports involve stopping and starting like tennis players? The answers are yes, yes, yes and yes and yes and yes.

Caffeine is a anatagonist of adenosine A₁ and A₂ receptors and a phosphodiesterase inhibitor (we originally said xanthene oxidase inhibitor, which is incorrect; caffeine is a xanthine compound, if anyone cares about that), which acts as a mild stimulant.  And why do we remember this obscure fact from school, although we can't remember 90% of anything any more?  The compound may act on dopamine receptors to produce stimulation.

Because of the morning Red Bull.  Caffeine also affects the muscles too.

For many years, researchers thought the sole reason people could exercise harder and longer after using caffeine was that the compound helped muscles use fat as a fuel...(however) caffeine increases the power output of muscles by releasing calcium that is stored in muscle. The effect can enable athletes to keep going longer or to go faster in the same length of time. Caffeine also affects the brain's sensation of exhaustion, that feeling that it's time to stop, you can't go on any more. That may be one way it improves endurance, Tarnopolsky said.

Be careful though, too much java and you may experience negative effects.