The guy who earns my scorn is the ass who tries to disguise his drooping belly with a baggy t-shirt and pushes his chest out whenever a girl walks by because he has convinced himself he's “not like the rest.” He's the guy who offers free advice about training just because he's one step ahead of the poor guy who has to listen. And the most annoying pricks are the ones who say, “I've tried to get that ripped (muscular, lean, fit, fast, whatever) and I can't do it so it's impossible that anyone else can do it without chemicals.” Those who aren't the real thing always find an excuse for their failings when confronted by the real thing. Or they cast the accomplishments of anyone further up the food chain as having been achieved by cheating.

Even in the small world of mountain climbing a few guys were convinced that their betters were using EPO, “because there's no way they could be that much faster than me.” Ski mountaineering racing is the same. Cycling is the same; the best guy in the country goes to an international level race, finishes below the 50th percentile and before checking into his own training/diet/recovery/stress-management/genetics/etc the ego goes into self-preservation overdrive and imagines all sorts of doping practices to be responsible. This is a natural consequence of having been told from childhood, “you are a unique snowflake.”

If however, you think you've done enough or you decide you have “arrived” then you'll stay in the small pond and stagnate. And when the rot is complete you'll be just a little bit better than those around you – your initial example will have driven them to reach higher levels of performance – and there you'll sit, an intellectually bloated, pontificating fuck who once had the juice to work hard but having done so feels entitled to coast on past success all the way to the grave. That's when you'll start offering opinions based on the certainty of your own short-lived, amateur experience.