Category: Doping

Doping Update

I’ve been chewing on this Velonews Article about the toll of doping, and thinking about it in terms of economics (darned education – I cannot help but avoid looking at everything as either an engineering problem or via business terms). The problem, as The Doctor lead to, is one of incentives – the biggest incentives come with winning races. Doping comes with both health and potential loss of income incentives (or disincentives), but not doping also comes with the disincentive of not winning races.

And now, after coming clean about attempted doping, the UCI is recommending a 2 year suspension for Ivan Basso.

Let’s see, now – if Basso actually had popped positive, what would he have gotten? 2 years suspension, just like Tyler Hamilton, probably. And then, if the Hamilton model holds true, it’s going to be nearly impossible for Basso to come back.

(as background, Hamilton’s just completed his 2 year suspension. However, as he’s implicated in the Spanish doping investigation, Operacion Puerto, for evidience that he was doping at about the same time he got busted at the Vuelta Espana, he can’t get work with a top-level team. Meaning, even if you serve your time, you’re screwed)

So, let’s examine a couple of scenarios:

1. If Basso hadn’t confessed, he’d still be riding right now – the lack of positive tests in or out of competition, and the glacial process of the Spanish investigation haven’t provided any evidence on which to hang him.
2. The current one, in which Basso confessed, and is looking to get screwed.
3. The scenario in which he stops doping activities quietly. The risk of positive tests in competition is mitigated, but he’s still got his past hanging over his head, and hasn’t done anything to change the climate.

Is it time for a “Truth and Reconciliation” commission in cycling? An opportunity for dopers to confess, get clean, and resume competing with little or no sanction? As it stands, any confession or attempt to get help gets the rider nailed, so, from a rider’s point of view, why quit?

Update

Basso got whacked for two years, retroactive to late last year when the charges against him were identified.

Basso’s 29. He’ll be 30 when he’s allowed to come back, unless he gets whacked again like Hamilton. Neca’s right – there needs to be a better solution

More thoughts on Doping and Jan

So, Neca got me thinking with this comment:

I don’t think the Tour will ever be quite the same for me. Not just because of his retirement (which saddens me), but all these rumors and accusations have gone a long way to ruining the sport for me.

Yep – the first week of August 2006 kind of soured me, too.

In a way, it would have been much easier to take if Landis were definitively positive, and if Puerto had conclusively taken down Basso, Ullrich, etc. The sport would have shown effective policing, and we could have moved on from the “Era of Doping”.

Instead, there’s serious questions about Landis’ test (which, coincidentally is the same lab that hung Hamilton out to dry, leading folks to wonder if maybe the Man from Marblehead was screwed, too), nothing substantial from the Spaniards, and a sense that the UCI and WADA are out of control, trying to get the peleton to look like they want it to. Woe be unto Levi Leipheimer if things continue as they are.

The amount of good will towards pro cycling that’s been burned with the fiascos of the last two years is incalculable. If the regulators had been able to control leaks, provide airtight cases against dopers (or at least plausible), and acted swiftly rather than dragging procedures on and on and on, there wouldn’t be much sympathy for the accused.

Instead, it’s March, and Landis won’t have a hearing in front of the USADA until mid-May, more than 9 months after his alleged positive test. For a career that might last all of 10 years, that’s an eternity.

Is doping an offense against sport? Most assuredly.

But a larger offense is when the folks who are supposed to be leveling the playing field use the rules to arbitrarily knock out competitors they don’t like.

More Dick Pound

From a 2004 Velonews Interview:

(T)he whole thing got its start with the Festina scandal. During the Tour de France (Samaranch) is there in his room in Lausanne watching it on television and he says something to the effect that “To me this is not doping. The IOC list is too long.”

He had apparently forgotten that he had some reporter with him – following the IOC president around to see how hard he was working, that sort of thing – sitting right there in the room. The guy was unable to believe what he was hearing. So out it came in the paper the next day and there was a firestorm that descended on Samaranch over this.

It was the sort of thing where people said “See? It’s just as we always suspected… the IOC is soft on doping.. and blah, blah, blah.”

It got to the point where we had to call an emergency meeting of the executive board of the IOC in August. Samaranch looks at all of us and asks “What are we going to do about this?”

Good stuff. Freakin’ dopers.

Forgot to mention earlier that the money quote from Fresh Air is Pound calling dopers “sociopaths”.

Dick Pound on Fresh Air

So, I’m leaving Boston Monday afternoon, and I find “Fresh Air” on the radio. The main guest was Dick Pound, the man with the name that’ll get any site that tries to discuss doping, etc, blocked on every elementary school computer in the world. The interview’s here.

I really, really enjoyed the bit. Dick’s clearly committed to fighting doping. But he’s been tagged as a bit of a facist for wanting harsh penalties for folks caught doping.

One of the bits that really resonated with me was that, under the current system, the only folks who really get punished for doping are the atheletes. Known “bad” coaches and other facilitators can usually skate. Which is wrong, IMO.

Dick also relayed a bit about Juan Antonio Samuranch’s (then director of the IOC, the head of the Olympics) reaction to the 1998 Festina Affair at the Tour de France that made my blood run cold, and put Pound’s perceived excesses into perspective.

As background, in 1998, the Festina cycling team was caught by the French police with industrial quantities of doping agents. Pretty much the entire team, from the director sportif and the cyclists on down to the kid who fills the water bottles was involved and charged. Big deal.

Samuranch’s reaction? Something along the lines of “To me, this is not doping.”

Anyway, check out the audio. Good stuff. Dick was on to pimp his new book, Inside Dope. Haven’t read it, but might have to after I get done with “Foucault’s Pendulum”. Umberto Eco absolutely rocks.