Last week I received an email from a radio station out west interested in doing a show on doping in sports, and more specifically why cyclists seem “susceptible” to doping. Interesting idea for a discussion. The show didn’t happen, but why let a good topic go to waste.
If I understood the premise right, the discussion was to focus on the question of why doping seems to be endemic in the world of cycling, and not, say, in the world of (American) professional football or baseball or basketball or other big-time sports. While we certainly see the occasional doping scandal in those sports (think BALCO, Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, for example), those scandals seem to be less frequent than the constant parade of stories about yet another cyclist caught imbibing one form of rocket fuel or another.
Even just the stories where someone accuses a cyclist of doping seem to be more common than similar stories in other sports. Or are they? At first blush, it certainly seems that way. Although, if one were to count up all the stories related to BALCO and compared the number to all the stories about Floyd Landis or Tyler Hamilton or even allegations about Lance Armstrong, I wonder which would come up with the bigger number.
I’m guessing BALCO, though that might seem counter-intuitive. With BALCO and its progeny, there have been allegations against not just major league baseball players, but also track stars, and even a few in other sports. On the subject of BALCO, cyclist Tammy Thomas was found guilty of perjury in 2008 for lying about steroids use.
And then there’s the question of Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa, both of whom were using performance-enhancing substances during their home-run shoot out back in the late 1990s. While the supplements they were using weren’t specifically banned by major league baseball at the time, they were clearly searching for a certain type of edge. The same search that’s common to all high-level athletes (and not a few lesser athletes, too). Some do it within the rules, some skate as close to the line as they can without going over the edge, and some will cross over and break the rules.
More common in cycling? No, I don’t think so. What’s different, though, is the amount of testing that goes on in professional cycling. Professional baseball and football players can count on being tested a few times during the season. Cyclists (and track athletes and a number of other sports subject to WADA rules) can depend on being tested any time, anywhere, in season and out of season, in competition and out of competition.
And the more you test, the more you find. Yes, doping in cycling is an almost time-honored tradition, but don’t for a minute think it’s any less of a tradition in other sports. It’s human nature for athletes to be seeking methods to gain an advantage on their competition, whether that’s through training, nutrition, sleeping in altitude chambers, using various electrolyte replacement drinks during and after competition, and even though chemical means — both licit and illicit.
Steroids have been a part of professional football for almost 50 years now, and part of baseball for at least 40 years. Before that, athletes in both sports used amphetamines. Back in the late 50s, a doctor in New York sparked one of the very first serious investigations into performance-enhancing drugs by claiming that the four-minute mile couldn’t be broken without using amphetamines. The result of that study (which looked at running, swimming and cycling) did find a small performance benefit from using amphetamines, enough to make a difference between winning and not. At about the same time stories appeared that alleged that several Australian swimmers used amphetamines at the 1956 Summer Olympics.
With the advent of blood doping in the 1970s, and later on synthetic EPO around 1990, endurance athletes (and even some non-endurance athletes) have taken to using this newer form of performance enhancement. With EPO, cyclists and others were already using the drugs before they actually came on the market, having somehow managed to divert drugs for clinical trials to their own use.
Yes, a large number of suspicious deaths occurred in the early 1990s among professional cyclists, who had not yet learned how to use EPO safely. But others were using the drugs, too, and have been since. Cross-country skiers, biathletes and track athletes, among others.
So why do we hear so much about doping in cycling? As I said above, the more you test, the more you find. Perhaps it’s the nature of all endurance sports that athletes will try whatever drugs can give them a performance boost, especially those that can increase their endurance — like EPO, as well as old-fashioned homologous and autologous blood doping.
Cycling, in some ways, is an extreme sport. Professional cyclists at the top of the sport can expect to be racing for up to 6 or 7 hours at a stretch, going long distances, day in and day out. (Side note, Paul Sherwen mentioned during this year’s Tour that back in the 1980s when he raced the Tour, some stages took up to 10 hours.) The demands of other sports are different. Football, baseball, and — to some extent, basketball — are more about explosive power, short bursts of speed, and strength. The drugs might be different, but there are definitely athletes using. They just aren’t being tested as much, so they’re not caught as much.
Heck, there are stories of high school athletes using steroids, although you don’t often hear of juniors in the cycling world being busted for doping. What does that prove? Nothing, except that drug use in high school sports is occurring to some extent. And given that cycling isn’t a varsity sport in most high schools, one could argue that the doping problem is worse in football than it is in cycling just because of how young the players start using drugs.
So, why are cyclists more “susceptible” to doping? They aren’t. But because cyclists are tested more often, it stands to reason that they’re caught more often. And that’s why it appears that cyclists dope more. Best guess: They probably don’t dope in greater percentages than any other sport. Appearances, as the old saying goes, can be deceiving.
Tonight’s parting shot
Someone at a certain Fox News affiliate must be a bit thick in the head, having republished an article about Lance Armstrong that appeared on The Onion’s web site earlier today. I’m not sure if the Fox News affiliate is trying to add a humor section to their web site or whether they just didn’t get the joke. My guess is that someone didn’t realize it was a joke. All of a sudden, even fake news can become real.
Then again, as Tom Fine points out in a comment, it could well be that the Fox web site was hacked. A hacker with a sense of humor, to be sure.
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