As I wrote earlier, one of the other sports I follow is also, drug-wise, historically been one of the dirtiest: professional cycling. Doping is rampant, players get transfusions of their own blood, other people’s blood, they take all kinds of crazy drugs, and competitions are battles in the long war between the sanctioning organizations and shadowy labs across the world.
Last year’s Tour de France winner tested positive for synthetic testosterone, though he says it’s a lab issue, and they’re fighting it out in court. Think about how crazy that is: we don’t know the winner of last year’s crown jewel of the sport. It’s like not knowing who won the last World Series because a home run call is tied up in court.
Recent revelations of past doping (including a Tour winner) have rocked the sport again.
And yet for all this, bicycling is one of the most aggressive sports trying to keep drugs out. Lance Armstrong, for all the allegations against him, was the most tested human on the planet. Last year’s Tour de France missed a huge chunk of the top competitors because they were potentially linked to a Spanish lab – and some were guilty, and others missed a chance to compete, in a sport where riders are really only competitive for a few years.
This is the dark side of baseball’s future: an arms race, continued suspicion, retroactive scandals, the innocent punished along with the guilty.
What’s interesting to me, though, is that bicycling, unlike the sports fans are generally more familiar with, tests for drug use in more than one way:
- Is there something weird in your blood or urine test, like a drug, or synthetic hormones, or whatnot?
- Is there too much of something to occur naturally?
It’s extremely hard to detect many of the drugs that cyclists take to increase their red blood cell count, for instance, so cycling tries to detect those but also says “If you have more than 100 cells per million in the test, you’re an alien and you can’t race.”
Naturally, they all test at 95-98… but they’re trying to define, in a way, what it means to be human.
There are interesting analogues for baseball:
- If your testosterone is over this level based on age, you’re on something
- If your blood has more HGH than you should have for your age, you’re on something
… and so on, all the way to potentially measuring performance metrics (If you can hit a ball more than 600 feet…) and now you start skirting the ridiculous.
But once you understand that it’s almost impossible to keep up with the drugs – and cycling made that realization a long time ago – you have to start looking at ways to at least limit the harm participants who do use can do, by regulating the effects of those drugs.
I wonder how long it will take baseball to look at that enforcement route, or whether they’ll be content to pursue the fight as lightly as possible, tightening controls only when change is forced on them by scandal or regulation.
5 comments ↓
Interestingly, the efforts of cyclists to increase red blood cell number actually represents a detriment to their ability to race. The oxygen carrying capacity of blood does not increase in linear progression with RBC number. Rather after a certain point, increasing cell number increases blood viscosity and decreases oxygen delivery to the tissue. Since most human males operate near the peak of the oxygen viscosity curve normally, increasing cell number probably hurts more than it helps.
This is spot on. The rules in bicycling are there not to keep it fair or preserve some human ideal but to keep people safe.
Take hemocrit level as an example. There are new enzyme tests that can find other peoples blood in you (just ask Hamilton) or synthetic EPO, however, there is just no way to distringuish your own blood from a transfusion or the better brands of EPO. So the rules get rules written to protect the rider not stop the cheating. In the 80s plenty of racers died of dehydration or of low heart rates. Now there’s the hemocrit level and, well, I’ll be damned everyone’s natural level is *just* south of the limit. Through a sensible application of the rules the sport is more competive and safer at the same time — a remarkable combination when you think about it.
Joel (clever nickname btw for a discussion on biking, German for “rider”),
while I have not looked into the history, I am not sure that the hemocrit level limit was introduced for the reasons you suggest. I thought it was more about defining a level above which there’s sufficient reason to assume that a rider is using EPO.
The problem with these sorts of standards is that when someone comes along who naturally exceeds them, he’s not allowed to compete, and that could plausibly be described as unfair.
I’m not advocating the use of steroids by any means, but, when should a substance be banned, only when it works?
For example, everyone uses Gatorade, but if it really improved your performance like the advertisements imply, would it then be banned? Truth is, Gatorade quenches your thirst, nothing more, so it’s allowed. What if they find that if they add more electrolytes to the drink it increased endurance. Would it then be banned?
I’m just curious where the line is drawn, and who determines it.