A Steroids-Only Sports League

And An Unanticipated Side Conversation Nobody Asked For

I am an athlete.

It’s true! It still sounds weird to say it, but the evidence is ample: I’ve “done a sport” consistently for 25 years, even participating in some high-level tournaments open to international competitors (I even won a few!), and I continue to prioritize physical fitness on a personal level.

All this to say: I understand what it means to compete against other athletes in a sport better than most. In jiu jitsu, steroid testing is notoriously lax; it is often joked that everyone who has ever won a medal in the adult division at a major international jiu jitsu tournament is on the juice. This is hyperbolic, but there’s not a complete absence of truth here either.

Steroids allow a jiu jitsu practitioner to train hard multiple times in a day. Normal people need time to recover from BJJ training, and most folks can really only train hard once a day, and maybe drill or do technique another time. Over time, these meaningful technical gains add up, as do the incremental physical ga…