A good and well reasoned post. Thanks.
I think it really has to belong to the peloton. It is for the riders. To you or
me it may seem obvious that the rational games theory outcome is that the riders
agree to a drug ban. It may not be that obvious from where they sit. And the
moralistic tone of most anti-drug advocacy doesn't persuade at all.
Anyway, thanks for the thoughts.
Ryan Cousineau said:In article <[email hidden]>,
DepartFictif said:In many ways you are right. But you mustn't forget that it isn't really
that simple. Why would a rider research the products when everyone
around them is taking more than them (can't be THAT dangerouse then)
and when everyone around them tells them it's OK. Sometimes it is in
fact healthier to take some products rather than force your body into
iron defficiency, or pushing your body more that it can really handle
it.
No. If you're anemic, you can get a (permitted) prescription. Just like
Lance took EPO during cancer rehab. Some mundane and safe stuff is
actually permitted in reasonable doses (caffeine in cups-of-coffee
doses, but not in handfuls-of-pep-pills doses)
Quoted message said:As for the illegal and immoral issue, when faced with the situation it
doesn't appear either illegal or immoral, it's only from the outside
that it looks so clear cut. Riders taking products don't see it as
illegal and are not faced with a moral issue. As for the danger side,
well... not much to say there, it's a scary world.
The questions you have to ask yourself, I think, are thus:
1-Is doping dangerous?
2-Does doping improve the sport?
3-What does it do to the future of the sport?
Here's my (debatable) answers to these three questions, briefly:
1-Yes. Riders have died by the dozen from EPO experimentation, the
tell-alls on the subject routinely speak of weird reactions, et cetera.
Now, there is some credit to the idea that legal doping would increase
the medical oversight, thus reducing some of the "the horse medicine
made me sick" experiences out there. Also, some of the stuff people talk
about (maybe HGH. Maybe.) has the prospect of becoming a near-mainstream
panacea at some point. Though not now.
What worries me is that first of all, the long-term effects of most dope
are either unknown or bad, and mostly the latter. Especially in the
excitingly recreational doses current dopers are prone to, it's pretty
darned dangerous. EPO can kill you in your sleep, or maybe give you
cancer in the long term. HGH is simply an unknown, though certain big
fans of Lance here have been known to suggest that it accelerates the
growth of cancers. As for steroids, they won't kill you in your sleep,
but have just about every other imaginable side effect, including
messing up some of your more vital vitals, like the liver.
Even doctor-supervised legal doping still surely means that the riders
are limited to a set "safe" dosage, and surely one rider after another
will try to cheat the safe limits in the chase for an edge, which is
what dopers do right now. So there you are again, testing the riders,
only now you allow some dope and some suspicious Hct readings, instead
of none. And the cheaters will still try to game the system, and the
rest of the peloton will still feel pressure to keep up or give up,
admittedly at probably smaller margins than today between "clean" and
"dirty" competitors (which is to say, legally doped versus illegally
doped).
2-The races get a bit faster. But not better. The riders go further and
are stronger, so maybe the racing can be a tad more epic, but mostly
that would be likely to mean that we would have to beef up some historic
events, or perhaps return the TdF to some of its suicidal race distances
of the pre-war era. Oh yeah, and the hour records get kinda crazy.
None of that makes the racing any better. This is the NASCAR lesson:
racing which is fair and close is a big draw, even if the cars are
relatively slow. The drug-powered pack would be measurably faster, but
we're talking a few km/h at most. I will entertain theories that this
would make the racing "better", but I am _extremely_ skeptical there
would be any substantial differences. I mean, it will be the same
riders, just juiced. It's not like baseball even, where doping hitters
mean more home runs than usual.
Meanwhile, being an openly dopey sport is likely to have a few effects:
we'll be chasing down drug cheats, but just for being even more drugged
than their competitors. That's hardly an improvement. Any riders who are
currently clean will essentially have to dope, thanks to the perverse
game theory of this model. And sponsors, most likely, will flee. You
don't want to be on the same jersey as recreational steroid ads. You
don't want to be in the same sport.
3-The future. It's trite to say "think of the kids", but if I have
misgivings about encouraging any future kids of mine to take up
competitive cycling, mandatory (and as I've outlined above, I think
"legal" and "mandatory" would amount to the same thing) dope would make
me certain to drive them away from the sport.
Aside from the disturbing thought of deciding how soon to let young
riders dope, or the prospect of being the coach who has to tell their
prospective parents that little Johnny will be expected to dope next
year if he wants to make the local semi-pro team, the effect on amateur
cycling would be similarly insane. I certainly can't see any scenario
where open doping doesn't choke the life out of most junior development
programs.
Even if doping was limited to Pros only, I strongly suspect it would
spread like wildfire to the amateur ranks. The guys who already have the
be-like-Lance OCLV and the be-like-Jens Zipp 404s and the
train-like-the-pros SRM and Carmichael subscriptions will eat up the EPO
endorsed with the slogan "It's Millar Time!" Worse, to the extent that
espoir and elite amateur racing are pro-development systems, they'll
also become more dopey (and without all that doctor supervision the pros
will get). Show of hands: hundreds of new EPO deaths, or thousands? If
you're lucky, you might get mere dozens. And if you want a new-cyclist
recruiting tool, wait 20 years when the retired heroes of the sport,
instead of greeting the next generation with a handshake beside the
podium, will instead be fighting off whatever exciting long-term effects
of their favourite drug they discovered.
So there you go. Pro doping: dangerous, expensive, and destructive to
the future of the sport; we'll still have to do drug tests, and some
riders will still do stupid and reckless things that mess up their help
(viva kenacort!). But the hour record will be broken, and we'll all be
nice and honest and unhypocritical. Hypocrisy is underrated: at least
the hypocrites still know they are doing wrong. The decriminalization of
doping proposed by some here strikes me as a "harm amplification"
program, something designed to increase the amount of peloton doping.
I'd like to choose a dope-free sport. We're not there, we may not be
terribly close, and we may never get there. We'll see. But a close
second choice would be to inculcate a culture of non-doping. Let's get
some more riders out there wearing "Dopers Suck" shirts, telling young
riders "real men do it on bread and water," and generally encouraging
all involved to look down on dopers as weak, stupid, and the enemy of
cycling. More testing, better testing, and fiercer challenges to the
gaming of dope tests would all help, but the culture of cycling could go
a long way to un-screwing the sport.
On the other hand, I have a real fear that WADA and the UCI, out of a
well-meaning but overzealous desire to clean up the sport, may have gone
too far in pushing the world of drug detection beyond the science. I'm
not a well-versed statistician or medical researcher, but there's a fair
number of people here who seem to know numbers and biology and who are
skeptical that they're not pushing into career-ruining
false-positive-land.
There's no easy solution to cycling's drug problem. There may be no good
solution. But I'm pretty sure that legalized doping, at least the way
I've seen it proposed here, is about the second-worst solution possible.
Take kenacort,
