Doping

Do we care about doping anymore? We talk about it a lot less. Personally, I like talking about it a lot less, but I also wonder if that’s an indication that we have, by and large, just accepted that it’s going on, and that on some level, as long as the athletes aren’t shoving it in our faces (a la Lance, et. al.) we don’t mind that much.

The agency tasked with policing sports, the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) has been roiled by controversy after controversy. The US pulled funding earlier in the year in protest after WADA allowed 23 Chinese swimmers to compete in the Olympics despite testing positive for a banned drug. As with all human organizations, WADA has proven vulnerable to the influences of money and power.

And wasn’t that really the lesson of the blood-doping era?

When there’s money or power (which are really two forms of the same thing) at stake, humans behave poorly. And of course, it really only takes one athlete or team to drag a whole sport down. Even well-intentioned participants will feel a strong pressure to cheat both to validate all the hard work they’ve put into reaching the top level, AND to protect their livelihoods.

And that’s where doping gets really insidious, at the inflection point at which innocent athletes have to make a lose/lose decision, to follow their moral compass and abandon their career, or to compromise themselves and become part of the problem.

There was a time, in cycling, when pros would regularly make oblique references to their doping practices. In 2000, Richard Virenque said, “You can’t race on just bread and water.” It was a way of saying the sport is just too hard not to make the benefits of performance-enhancing drugs extremely appealing and/or necessary to compete. I think it’s an attitude that garners a lot of sympathy. A sport that demands so much suffering will always push its riders to seek relief.

And then of course, you have the wrong-headed attitude that as long as their all taking drugs, then the playing field is still level. The simple problem with that idea is that different bodies gain different advantages from the drugs of the moment. Also, that different teams have different access to the drugs in the first place. Doping never creates a level playing field. It only distorts.

Today we see quite extraordinary performances in the pro peloton, riders smashing climbing speed records set more than a decade ago by riders we know were doped. They say that nutrition, bike tech, and training techniques have evolved enough to make these performances possible.

I doubt it.

What I think is that we all got very, very tired of talking about doping instead of racing. In fact, legions of fans, particularly American fans, just stopped paying attention to pro racing altogether. The subject of doping still comes up, and the top racers still get asked whether their performances are legitimate, but what are they going to say? It feels to me like we’ve all just come to a tacit agreement. If the riders behave themselves, if they maintain a veneer of humility and decency, then we won’t scrutinize them too much. We’ll just watch the races and enjoy them the best we can, all the while knowing they’re not everything they seem to be.

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