In article <[email hidden]>,
benjo maso said:"h squared" <[email hidden]> wrote in message
news:[email hidden]...Quoted message said:benjo maso said:(and by the way, the health of the athletes is more an excuse than a
justification of the anti-doping policy,the link to this article was posted before, but i still like the following
bit, concerning "the health of the athletes" (i have no idea if it's
factually correct, sorry):"To be banned by WADA, a drug has to meet at least two of three criteria:
it must enhance performance, be harmful to health and (a very Victorian
touch) be against the spirit of sport. Clearly, this would allow a drug to
be banned if it had no adverse health effects but was, even so, ruled
contrary to whatever is deemed to be the spirit of sport. Mr Pound, for
one, seems to regard any use of a drug to enhance performance as against
that spirit: it is, quite simply, cheating.A fierce critic of this approach to drugs in sport is Norman Fost,
director of the medical-ethics programme at the University of Wisconsin.
He calls the claims made about the harmful effects of steroids “incoherent
and flat-out wrong”. Mostly, they have small, temporary side-effects, he
says, not life-threatening ones. Indeed, the risks are much smaller than
those routinely taken by athletes. A man who plays American football
professionally for three years has a 90% chance of suffering a permanent
physical injury.
I'm deferring to Steven Bornfeld's assessment that steroids are more
harmful than Mr. Fost asserts. Let's wait for the evidence, but they're
really powerful drugs. People taking them for purely therapeutic reasons
are often leery of the exciting and varied side-effects.
Quoted message said:Quoted message said:If health is the chief concern, surely certain sports should be banned
entirely—and athletes should not be allowed to smoke or drink, activities
that do far more harm than taking steroids. As for enhancing performance,
that is not seen as cheating if it is done by, say, training at high
altitude or in a sealed space that simulates high altitude, says Dr Fost,
though such training would have exactly the same effect—an increase in
oxygen-carrying red blood cells—as the banned steroid EPO, which is
especially popular with cyclists." (economist, august 5, 2004)
The interesting thing about EPO is that it pretty much gets better and
better at improving your performance right up to the point where your
heart stops. There are natural risks in cycling that are similar (the
fastest guy down the mountain is the one who comes closest to sliding
off the mountain without actually doing so), but while very few races
are won by being the fastest descender, what EPO boosts is pretty much
the definition of a race-winning physiology.
If an athlete smokes or drinks, his choice doesn't force other athletes
to take new, very real risks with his health. Dose-response, if you know
the term, is a big concern for me, as may be evident from my posts.
My layman's understanding of dose-response is essentially this: for most
drugs, the more you take the more they do of whatever it is they are
supposed to do. This tends to include both good and bad effects.
To pick on steroids again, the more you take, the more rapidly and
powerfully you can recover/build muscle/train harder. But also the more
you experience all the side effects, which vary from steroid to steroid,
but include fun things like testicular shrinkage, kidney damage, and
other things.
When we use drugs therapeutically, we use them in doses that try to push
the patient back to something approximating normal, be they SSRIs, EPO,
or steroids. Even at that, side effects often have to be considered, and
may prevent a treatment as potent as the doctor could hope (or side
effects may be mitigated with other drugs, or drug substitutions happen
to minimize side-effects and maximize therapy for a particular patient).
Performance use isn't like that. With "normalcy" as a goal out the
window, the user is pushing for some peak response that tends to arrive
at higher doses, up where there is also maximum risk of harm.
Maybe we have to balance these relative risks. But you know, I bet those
cyclists who died in the 90s of EPO failure were going really fast the
week before their hearts stopped beating.
All this is pointing to one thing: many medical performance enhancements
work their best right before they start doing maximum damage. So free
use of dope to the limits of the riders' willingness to dope is likely
to push most or all riders to the limits of doping. And it only takes a
small cadre of pro-level riders doing maximal doping to force all riders
to decide between competitiveness and safe (or no) doping.
Quoted message said:The point is of course that the arguments against the use of certain
products is very shaky indeed. "The spirit of sport" must be something
between "participating is more important than winning" and "sport is war",
as Rinus Michels, a famous Dutch soccer coach, used to say. "Harmful to
health" - well, a Dutch doctor argued not so long ago that the health of a
rider parycipating to the Tour would certainly benefit from a certain amount
of epo. Concerning "enhance performance" - Norman Fost is quite right. The
point is that the anti-doping idea is based on the traditional idea that men
must compete in their "natural" state. That was the reason why Pierre de
Coubertin, the fouding father of the Olympic Games, said once that training
several hours a day was as much "cheating" as using drugs. Therefore the
paradox Dr Fost is pointing out. Meanwhile training is accepted, using
certain products not - or rather, not yet.
People started to get really picky about using certain products right
after Tommy Simpson died. There were probably previous incidents of one
type or another that turned people to thinking about cleaning dope out
of the sport, but that one was sort of the key, much in the way Kvilev's
death was the turning-point for mandatory helmets in the pro peloton.
The Hct 50% limit came about after riders started dropping dead in their
sleep in suspicious numbers.
People do get hurt and die in sport. A local road race used to be named
for the Cat 3 who died in a sprint crash in the race a few years ago.
But we do try to limit the dangers so that no sport is truly a
bloodsport, and nowadays most sportsmen retire and grow old.
I think one of the confusions is that we can actually test against most
of the common drug practices out there. Protocols (steroids) that are
widespread in other sports would never be contemplated in pro cycling,
not because they don't work, but because the rider would test positive
almost instantly. What this means is that much of the harm that riders
could do to themselves (and each other, as I have explained, for
prisoner's dilemma reasons) is mitigated right there.
--
Ryan Cousineau [email hidden] http://www.wiredcola.com/
"I don't want kids who are thinking about going into mathematics
to think that they have to take drugs to succeed." -Paul Erdos