---Perhaps it would be too scary; they all would look like monsters on steroids on their bicycles.
No, enhanced drugs, any type of fake hormones, unnatural substances have no place in natural sports. Methinks. ...Is that what we want from our children? ...Boost them with drugs?
If you want FAKE, fabricated, go to those wrestling sports. That's for entertainment, and money.
But keep them separated from what should be fair, pure, natural, smart, and in true spirit of the human body & mind.
That perception is unfortunately a combination of myth and inaccuracies.
To begin with, a "big" muscle is not a "strong" muscle. That's because in your mind unfortunately, you associate strength with big, bulky bodybuilders. Bodybuilders are far from the strongest. Muscles (of course we can't neglect bioenergetics either) respond to stress in many ways; three of them that are germane to the discussion are endurance (building of enzymes, esp. in the mitochondria, that help the muscle function for prolonged periods), hypertrophy (increases in the size of the muscle cells and related to the amount of stress eg. sets in the 8-12 rep range) and sacroplasmic hypertrophy (increase in the number of myofibrils insides the cells responsible for contraction and occurring in the heavy load, low rep range). So obviously you need all three biomotor qualities during the many stages (say climbing or time trials) of the TdF.
Interestingly, the TdF is so grueling that these extremely well conditioned athletes (Armstrong was reported to have a resting heart rate of 34) are by the end of the race, barely able to beat a average rider. Hence the need for drugs to slow the degradation in performance.
Two, as we say for runners, swimmers and cyclists, etc., size induces air or water resistance and slows them up actually. So a huge swimmer has a lot more drag as does a cyclist.
Three, again for these athletes, anything that doesn't propel you forward is extraneous.
Lastly, the use of drugs is not just about strength but probably moreso recovery between the workouts. You're able to do more training/workouts within given time compared to the athlete who doesn't use drugs resulting in much quicker results. Prolonged use of PEDs did, as the Russians among others found out, actually resulted in more injuries. So they [Russians] changed their tactics and only used steroids (if you believe it and I do have my doubts) in the beginning training cycles of the season where a high volume of training was/is the norm.
Another lesser talked about effect of steroids that I've found in my reading are their effects upon the nervous system. We have two ways of controlling the threshold for nerve firing; the first is ligand gated and the second is ion gate channels. It turns out in a few papers that I've read that steroids bind to the ligand gated ion channels of a nerve, reducing the threshold for firing and speeding up the ability of our body to move. I think that's part of the reason that baseball players hit more HRs since it's really bat speed that controls their ability to hit a pitched ball.
