Doped Up Pros

Well, tomorrow is the BIG day. The day that we finally (hopefully?) hear all of the evidence in Floyd Landis' doping scandal. So, who cares? I do, for a number of reasons. One, I like to be able to compare myself to the pros. If I ride a mtn that they've raced on, it shows me just how good these guys are - but if they're doing it doped up, what's that telling me? Two, the impact that drugged pro athletes have on our kids is significant.

Recently on bikejournal there's been a fair bit of discussion about dopoing and how guys are doing it and how it's being tracked. I don't even pretend in my dreams to understand all of the biological information out there. I have been following this a fair bit, though, and thought it might be a good idea to put some of my thoughts in one place.

First: I am against doping. Some are calling for legalizing it - let 'em do whatever they want. I want my kids to be able to strive for better performance without thinking they need to be using something in order to get better.

I recently had this discussion with my 15 yr old son. He's a football player and a very good one at that (recently selected to the Provincial All-star game and will be playing a week from tomorrow.) I also suspect he'll be starting on his High School football team as a freshman next year. He's strong, and he's fast - and wants to improve. He was asking about performance enhancing things he could take - like steroids, etc. Fortunately, we have a pretty good relationship and we were able to discuss it and he was willing to listen to what I had to say about it.

Second: I am convinced that there will always be a new designer drug or process that is designed specifically to get around the existing tests. We've seen it in cycling for decades. A new test comes out to catch people using a particular drug, and soon there's nobody getting caught for it anymore. Not that they're not using it anymore, they've just discovered a way to get around the testing. The only way I believe you can ever be 100% sure that someone is clean is to develop a physiological profile like what Team Slipstream has put into place. Here they're not testing for specific drugs, but building a profile that if there are significant changes or deviations from trends would indicate that something is being used. Won't tell you what, will just tell you SOMETHING is going on.

When someone is busted for it drug use, then I think it should be a permanent ban. One time, no second chances. Make the penalty so severe it's not worth the risk.

WADA needs to standardize what is a positive and what is a negative. Currently every lab has their own standards of what they'd call a positive and what would be classified as a negative result. An example of this is Floyd Landis' recent results. Those exact same results (not even questioning the accuracy of the equipment used) in a California lab (which is WADA certified) would all have come out negative. Yet out of this particular French lab, there's a positive result.

The process for hearing re: drug use in sports needs to be more open and fair. Confidentiality MUST be observed by those in control of organizations (not like Dick Pound's rants.) If the structure is percieved to be biased, there's no way the public will ever trust the results. And, bottom line, it's the public, us fans, that get hurt the most when these drug scandals develop.

I have a lot more thoughts on this issue - and maybe sometime I'll go through and copy all of the posts I've made over at Bikejournal into one post here so that it's all in one place.

I HOPE Floyd is innocent. I believe that Floyd should be cut a break on this one because of all of the mistakes that have been made in the processing of his samples, but I have my doubts as to whether or not he's really clean.