I never thought I’d be writing about lab science on a blog that’s supposed to be about motorcycles and pizza. But stick with me, because this one actually connects, and honestly it pissed me off enough that I had to share it.
My buddy Marco races at the amateur level, club circuit stuff, nothing glamorous. He’s the kind of guy who shows up day after day. Time after time, regardless of the weather or his own personal hardships. And let me tell you, his body has been through the wringer.
On second thought, that’s probably private stuff. But as I’ve continued to ride I’ve noticed that ageing becomes more and more on my radar. And it’s bittersweet, because on one hand I don’t like it. People start dying and my body keeps getting sore-er and sore-er. But on the other hand, its either age or die. Sorry to be blunt, but it’s literally impossible to continue on living in your early twenties indefinitely. As much as I would like to.
Last season, Marco got randomly selected for doping control. I didn’t even know amateur clubs did that, but apparently once purses got big enough, somebody decided it was worth checking whether riders were juicing their way to the podium. And here’s the part that surprised me: the lab doesn’t just run a blood panel and call it a day. A lot of what they’re screening for gets caught using elisa kits, the same enzyme-based antibody tests that show up in everything from pregnancy tests to livestock hormone screening. Turns out the science that tells a farmer whether a cow is pregnant is the same basic technology flagging riders who thought nobody would notice.
Marco came back clean, by the way. But it got me down a rabbit hole about why growth hormone specifically is such a problem in motorsport. Riders push their bodies through concussive impact, joint strain, and recovery windows that would break a normal person, and HGH promises faster healing and more muscle without the obvious tells that steroids leave behind. That’s exactly why hgh elisa kits became the standard screening tool. They’re sensitive enough to catch levels that wouldn’t show up on older tests, and cheap enough that even a mid-tier racing league can afford to run them regularly instead of only at the marquee events.
And that’s the part that stuck with me. This sport, one built on grit and grease and guys who’d rather rebuild a carburetor than talk about their feelings, still has people trying to cheat their way past their own limits. Meanwhile the rest of us are out there genuinely breaking our bodies down, rebuilding them slower, older, and somehow still showing up to race weekend with bruised ribs and a bike that barely passed tech inspection.
Marco says he doesn’t need the shortcut. He says the pizza afterward tastes better when he knows the lap times were actually his. I believe him. There’s something almost sacred about earning the ache in your shoulders honestly, and then sitting down with people who understand exactly why you’d choose that pain over the easy way out.
Anyway… Ride, eat carbs, and don’t cheat. That’s a shitty thing to do.
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