Doping In Sports

(c) Paolo Lombardi

Last week, Danilo Di Luca, runner up in this year’s Giro d’Italia and the most aggressive rider in that race, came up positive for CERA, a blood-boosting derivative of the much ballyhooed EPO, at a doping control from the Giro.  Even as anti-doping measures and penalties have ramped up, Di Luca joins a long list of riders that have been suspended for using CERA – Riccardo Rico, Leonardo Piepoli, Davide Rebellin, and Stefan Schumacher come to mind – and an even longer list banned for doping offenses in general (most recently, think Tyler Hamilton, Thomas Dekker, Alejandro Valverde.)  In addition to the fact that doping isn’t going away,  it has become clear that the draconian control and punishment system in place today simply doesn’t work.

Beyond that, there is also the question of why we care so much, of why there is so much public outrage when a “cheat” is caught.  The two prevailing arguments for doping controls are that doping is cheating and that anti-doping measures make it safer for the athletes.  Yet, neither of those arguments is remotely close to accurate.  Doping is not cheating.  Not anymore so than wind-tunnel testing or bike modifications.  And as far as safety, let’s ask the relatives of any of the thirteen cyclists, average age under 30, who died of heart failure either at rest or in their sleep between 2003 and 2006 how much safer sport is.

Anti-Doping Doesn’t Work
Doping is in no way limited to cycling.  For a long time, if you cared to look, it has been easy to see that athletes in all sports have been taking banned substances to ride faster, jump higher and hit a ball farther.   Pick a sport, any sport, and you will find performance enhancing drugs.   The response by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) along with the various sport governing bodies is to continue to “fight the good fight” by developing more sophisticated tests and by imposing harsher and harsher penalties – two-year bans, eight-year bans, lifetime bans and the like.  Yet, based on anecdotal evidence, some studies estimate between 75% and 95% of athletes take banned substances.   That an athlete tests positive every now and then has more to do with a screw up, the wrong dosage, a mistimed cycle, a forgotten masking agent, than it does with more sophisticated testing methods.  The fact that positives still turn up shows that the punishments simply do not deter the athletes.  And why would they?  If we can’t control drug use in the most tightly secured population, prisoners in the federal and state penitentiary system, in which most estimates put drug use at over 50%, how can we possibly expect to control drugs in sport?  It’s as impossible as it is arrogant, and yet we still try.

The Level Playing Field Myth
One of the chief arguments for anti-doping controls is that taking performance enhancing drugs is cheating in that it creates an unlevel playing field.  News alert: there’s never been a level playing field.  Money equals access; access to better equipment, better training facilities and programs, better coaches, better talent to surround yourself with and, yes, better drugs as well.  The more money you have the better access you have the better your chances of winning.  Look at the US Postal Teams during Lance Armstrong’s run, where they bought up anyone who remotely smelled like a rival.  Roberto Heras ring a bell?  Ivan Basso ring a bell?  The Olympics offer the best of example of the sheer folly of the notion of a level playing field.  An underfunded, undermanned, undertrained team, let’s take the Angolan basketball team, can get trounced by the DreamTeam, the Redeem Team (pick one it happened in 1992 and in 2008), and that’s all within our realm of fair play despite the considerable advantages afforded the Americans.  Yet we routinely draw a big fat line in the sand at the use of performance enhancing drugs.  Doping enters the picture and suddenly the playing field is unfairly tipped in one direction, when in fact, there was never a level playing field in the first place.

Doping Controls Do Nothing to Prevent Harm
The other big argument is that by reducing the use of performance enhancing drug, anti-doping measures are making sport safer.  That might be the case if they were actually reducing the use of performance enhancing drugs.  Instead, the controls only make it more dangerous as they serve to push doping even further underground, to push the envelope further as to what athletes will put in their bodies.  As the tests become harder to beat, athletes start to take substances that are more and more dangerous, sometimes with fatal results as we’ve seen.

What Can Be Done
The best way to control the use of performance enhancing drugs and to reduce the harm associated with them is to legalize them and bring their use under medical supervision.  Educating athletes about how to safely use performance enhancing drugs surely will do more to save lives than a two-year competition ban ever could.  Athletes might still push the envelope to get an advantage, but in the same way that today new tests are develop, new protocols to ensure safer usage can be drawn up and at a fraction of the cost of developing a test, performing thousands of tests on athletes and prosecuting cases and appeal after appeal.  You’re never going to control it, but it can be a whole lot safer for everyone if you supervise it.  And if everyone is taking the same drugs, wouldn’t that level the playing field, at least within the narrow definition we’ve set for what goes for fair play.

Many thanks to my good friend Pat, who, over three years and countless miles of riding together in Italy, helped me come to my views on doping in sports.  Many of Pat’s thoughts and actual words are contained above.

That’s today’s view from the back.

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