Food for Thought

I had an entirely different post in mind before I wrote the one about Stefan Matschiner’s claims that he managed to get employees at several European anti-doping labs to test samples from his athletes. Matschiner says that he requested the tests so that he and the athletes could determine ways to avoid testing positive while still doping. It’s an intriguing, yet vague, story that has some pretty astounding implications — assuming that Matschiner is telling the truth and not spinning a fantastical fable. Bernhard Kohl backs up Matschiner’s story, for whatever his statements are worth. Matschiner could have told his athletes that such a scheme was taking place, and even made a show of taking samples. And he could then have pocketed the money and done nothing else. Much more needs to be discovered and told before we’ll know what the true story is.

But that’s not what I was thinking about last week. Instead, I was considering how we react to information from various sources. Consider what happens when a major doping story breaks. At this point, sports reporters are fairly skeptical of statements from athletes who claim to be innocent. That’s their job to be professional skeptics. Just because someone claims that something is true doesn’t make it so. And the reporter’s job is to seek the truth and write about it — whatever it is — as objectively as possible. No spin, no bias. Just the facts, ma’am.

But what of the other side of those stories? When a doping scandal breaks, how skeptically do sports reporters treat the anti-doping agency or whatever authority is making the claims? Or, in the case of anonymous leaks, how skeptically do reporters handle the leaked information?

There are reporters who treat both sides with the same amount of skepticism, and there are others who — perhaps even subconciously — give one side or the other more deference. Given the number of times an athlete has claimed innocence only to be pronounced guilty by an arbitration panel (or sometimes a criminal court on perjury charges), one can almost not blame those who give the ADAs a bit more deference. It’s easy to say, “We’ve seen this movie before, and we already know how it ends.” The thing is, though, that each story is different. And while many have the same or similar endings, not every story ends exactly the same way. And every once in a while, the story comes to an ending that’s not what we expect.

Given our own personal biases (and we all have them), there are some of us who will read a story — any story on any subject, but especially the more controversial ones — and assign more credibility to one side or the other even when the story is written fairly and objectively. It’s human nature. It actually takes a certain amount of (for lack of a better term) intellectual discipline to remain a bit skeptical of both sides.

That’s part of the challenge of being a reporter. It’s natural to have opinions, after all. So it’s hard to maintain the discipline to ask the kinds of questions and do the kind of digging that’s necessary to get to the bottom of a story. Doubly so if the story happens to be going in a direction that you’d rather not see it go. The good reporters manage to maintain that discipline and write the stories as they are, not as they would like them to be.

But when a controversial story appears, the author may not be the most popular person in the world. Even among people who he or she likes, or thinks of as friends, or at least friendly acquaintances who happen to participate in events or activities that the reporter covers. (That’s equally true, regardless of whether a reporter covers sports, politics, business or even the arts.)

In covering controversial stories, it’s not enough to say one side says this and the other side says that. That may suffice for the first brief news snippets, but not for in-depth coverage. If it’s right to be skeptical of an athlete’s claims of innocence, it’s also right to be skeptical of the anti-doping agency’s claims of guilt. As an example, what if a lab says athlete X tested positive for enhanceitol, which is banned. Just reporting that information may intentionally or unintentionally give the impression of guilt. But we need to know more about the lab.

For instance, have they ever had to rescind a finding? If so, under what circumstances. How often has this happened, and how often compared to other labs that do the same kind of testing? Is the science behind the testing settled? Has it been peer reviewed? Have scientists in related specialties looked at the theory/practice and agreed that it makes sense? Has the person who developed a certain scientific technique, say for forensic uses, looked at the application and determined whether it’s an appropriate use of that technique, and whether the data is capable of leading to the conclusions offered in a lab’s findings?

At the same time, we need to know more about the athlete’s claims, too. But those who cover such stories also have to be honest about where those claims come from. If a reporter tosses out a question like, “Hey, could it have been the bender you went on the night before you tested positive?” and if the athlete says, “Yeah, perhaps.” it’s not right to say the athlete claimed that his drinking was what caused the positive test. He didn’t. He answered a question which suggested that as a possibility. At the same time, seemingly ridiculous claims may actually have their basis in fact, and it’s incumbent upon the reporter to dig that up and report it. (It turns out, believe it or not, that a few athletes have been cleared of testosterone doping charges based on heavy drinking shortly before a test.)

There are many questions to delve into. In fact, to cover a doping story well, one needs to be both a sports reporter and a science reporter. Or perhaps a two-person team of reporters should cover the story, one who delves into the sports issues and procedures, and another who focuses on the more scientific aspects of the story. Of course, this can’t be done every time an athlete tests positive — most news organizations don’t have the budget for that — but it ought to be done when big-name athletes are involved in big-time scandals.

Circling back to Stefan Matschiner, Bernhard Kohl and the claims that perhaps the WADA-accredited labs in Central Europe have been corrupted. I’m not seeing much coverage of it in the English-speaking press just yet. At least not that comes up in either Google News searches or Bing searches. Cyclingnews.com did offer a bit of an update yesterday:

Günter Gmeiner, head of the Austrian Research Center, said that he could “in all conscience” deny that his staff were involved.

[…]

It would not be possible to smuggle a sample in and do an unreported test of it, Gmeiner told Austrian news service tirol-online. “In the lab we have 24 hour observation, seven days a week. That means that everyone who enters the lab is observed. Plus, all positive test results are reported in three different places and third, the WADA regularly controls the accredited labs.”

They’re also reporting that the Lausanne, Prague, Warsaw and Cologne anti-doping labs are rumored to be implicated by Matschiner. I haven’t seen any other articles that say so, but they could well have been in stories not published on the web, or that for one reason or another don’t show up in the searches I’ve done.

So far, it doesn’t seem like the story is gaining a whole lot of traction. But that could be because various organizations are still out digging around and seeing what they can find. It’s a story that cries out for more investigation, to determine whether Matschiner is telling the truth or just telling a story.

In the process of reporting and writing the story, the reporters’ challenge will be to go beyond what the authorities want us to believe (that the system is basically impenetrable) to find out what the truth actually is. Perhaps Stefan Matschiner is spinning a tall tale and nothing else. But the type of system he describes — testing to determine how far an athlete can go in doping without getting caught — is something that was used successfully for a number of years by certain East Bloc countries. So it’s not a technique that is out of the question. Quite the contrary. It’s a technique that worked in the past to beat the system.

I hope there’s a publication out there willing to put some resources behind checking Matschiner’s story out. If it’s more than just a tall tale, we need to know the extent of what happened and who was involved. And we need those people held accountable, whoever they may be and at whatever level within the labs they may work. And additional measures need to be implemented to minimize the chances of this happening in the future.

This is a chance for some enterprising reporter to become the [[Woodstein]] of the cycling press, although that might be overstating things a bit. I wonder who will rise to the occasion.