Dope free and doping

[Assassin]

I remember the 100 metre final at the 1988 Seoul Olympics. Itremains one of the most infamous and fascinating moments in the games' history. The race was won in a world record time by the Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson. But he was stripped of his medal and record because of drug use.

I also remember thinking at the time. If people want to dope why not just let them. Then have two types of sporting events. One dope free and the other use what you want.

Thoughts?

[Gibbo]

Hello and welcome to the cheating olympics.

[Kenneth]

People would die trying to maximise performance through drugs. Not a good idea imo. Think of the kids man.

[Assassin]

People would die trying to maximise performance through drugs. Not a good idea imo. Think of the kids man.

It happens when it is not permissible, so what is the difference?

[Kenneth]

numbers I guess.

[Assassin]

Not so sure.

The flip side, nobody would need to cheat. Like would be up against like

[BobTheCharmer]

Who wouldn't like to see a man run 100 metres in 3 seconds?

[baitman]

the drugs they test for are the ones they know to test for. the game [for the drug cheat athlete/competitor] has been to find a performance enhancer that is not on the list of things they test for. like the new version of a steroid, or epo, etc.

its kind of like only having a vaccine made once they know what the disease is. you never have a cure before you know what the problem is.

the drug cheats are always one step ahead. also bribed officials/testers, replacement samples, etc...

[Neil Young]

If we're going to learn from cycling's mistakes, as this article argues (convincingly IMO), it's that legalised doping makes things worse.

Doping, cycling and the 'level playing field' fallacy

The idea that simply allowing athletes to take whatever drugs they want would make sport fairer is a dangerous illusion

Matt Seaton
guardian.co.uk, Saturday 13 October 2012 16.23 BST



Seven-time Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong: at the centre of 'the most sophisticated, professionalised and successful doping programme that sport has ever seen'. Photograph: Mike Hutchings/Reuters

In the wake of this week's revelations in the Usada "Reasoned Decision" report into how Lance Armstrong's USPS/Discovery teams ran "the most sophisticated, professionalised and successful doping programme that sport has ever seen", I have seen the argument from several intelligent people (no names, but here and here) that perhaps, since they all seem to be at it anyway, the best thing would be to let them take drugs. Then, at least, the view goes, we would have a level playing field in the sport.

Libertarian arguments often have some superficial seductions for big intellects, but ending anti-doping regulation in sport would not "level the playing field". It would, in fact, simply tip it further in favour of the cheats. The short explanation for this: money.

Money, it is true, is always a distorting factor in sport. In the British football premier league, success breeds success and the table is usually topped by the richest teams – and sometimes, a major investor (a Russian oligarch or Malaysian magnate) comes along and pours millions into a club and makes it a major player almost overnight. In cycling, too, money buys results. Team Sky currently has one of the biggest budgets in pro cycling: that pays for the best riders, the best equipment, coaching, nutrition and so on. And all that undoubtedly helped Bradley Wiggins win the 2012 Tour de France.

But this kind of investment is relatively transparent: we can all see how it works plainly enough. And money doesn't buy total dominance. No one expects Bradley Wiggins to win the next six Tours. At the 2012 Tour of Britain, for example, the winner, Jonathan Tiernan-Locke, came not from Team Sky, but the tiny Endura Racing squad, with a fraction of Sky's resources.

But if you add money to legalised doping in sport, Goliath will always kill David. We know because we tried this. Legalised doping was effectively where cycling was at when Lance Armstrong won his first Tour de France in 1999. There was no test, then, for EPO, the performance-enhancing drug which had already been poisoning the sport for nearly a decade.

In the absence of a reliable test, the governing body, the UCI, set blood parameters permitting a haematocrit of 50%. EPO works by stimulating the bone marrow to produce more red blood cells and thus increase the body's oxygen-carrying capacity (extremely useful in an endurance sport like cycling). A normal haematocrit value in a trained athlete would be somewhere in the 40s, with a wide degree of natural variation. By setting an arbitrary "safe" level of 50%, the sport was saying, in effect, "we know you're going to cheat and we can't stop you, so we're going to have [yes!] a level playing field that at least stops you overdosing."

But EPO is expensive. And to get as close as you can to that 50% level without straying above it and getting disqualified, you need an expert clinician, blood lab centrifuges and all sorts. So teams put doctors on the payroll: doctors they could trust to help them cheat and stay shtum, which doesn't come cheap. And some of those doctors also supplied testosterone, human growth hormone, cortisone, Activogen, etc – depending on what the budget was. We know from the Usada report that Lance Armstrong spent more than $1m on the services of one single doctor, Michele Ferrari; and that almost certainly did not account for all his drug supplies.

Thanks to the Usada report, we know what the best doping programme money can buy looks like. And thanks to the 1998 Festina scandal, we also know what the cheap and desperate version looks like: a random cocktail of drugs stashed in the back of a car driven by a soigneur who was high himself, paid for by an impoverished French team from pooling the winnings of their meagre results.

Legalising this situation would only rubber-stamp what was already happening: a pharmacological arms race that ensured dominance for the best-funded, most professionally managed doping scheme (USPS/Discovery's), but which was a game of Russian roulette with their health for the sport's poor relations (teams like Festina). No one in their right mind wants to go back there.

Cycling is still not clean, and never will be. The financial rewards involved in the sport always create a temptation to cheat. But thanks to the anti-doping agencies (like Wada and its affiliates such as Usada), it is cleaner than it has been for decades. Thanks, too, to outspoken anti-doping advocates like David Millar and Jonathan Vaughters – who have seen the damage done to the sport by their own and others' doping experiences – the image of the sport has changed, and with it, the attitude of sponsors. The smart money in cycling now favours clean teams.

The virtuous cycle is every bit as easy to undo as the vicious cycle the sport got itself into during Lance Armstrong's tenure at the top was hard to undo. Which is what makes careless calls for a level playing field of free-for-all doping so irresponsible.

In the end, the choice is a simple one. Who would you prefer to see winning the Tour de France: the greatest cyclist in the world or the dope-cheat with the biggest budget?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisf...-field-fallacy

[redstaralex]

there was a programme about the Seoul 88 final a while ago, they were pretty much all taking something, Linford Christie laughs about it, Carl Lewis actually failed a random test not long before the Olympics but he told the US Olympic committee that his dog ate his homework and it wasn't his fault so he was allowed to compete as he would have been clear by then

the best bit of all was the guy who collected the samples for all the finalists said that he still has all of the samples but doesn't want to test them for fear of what he might find