Everything Bad is Good for You

One of my understandings about doping at the pro level is that, to some unspecified but for sure critical degree, racers who do it are responding somewhat reasonably to what in TV and radio interviews I’ve called the speed-limit syndrome. This is the rationale we all use, consciously or not, for exceeding the lawful speed when we drive on highways: Everyone else is doing it, the law isn’t really practical, and, anyway, the chances of getting caught are extremely low...This real-world conundrum (that many of us who swear we’d never dope no matter the circumstance feel free to routinely break a law when it benefits us without much risk of punishment) is one of the reasons I’ve never been able to regard doping in a way that lets me condemn the people who do it as wholly immoral or dishonest beyond empathy.

Bill Strickland¹ has some pretty cogent thoughts about the recent spate of doping in high-level amateur masters cycling, but also encapsulates some of what I've always thought about doping.

1: Bill Strickland : The American cycling world :: What you wish Rick Reilly was : The general American sports world.

Doping in the 90′s was like cocaine on the set of a John Hughes movie. Those involved in the sport knew of its widespread use while we “regular” consumers got to sit back and naively reap the rewards. It was a different era of doping because of what became possible to witness. EPO was introduced and with it racing was changed forever. By increasing the red blood cell count in athletes EPO made it possible to literally ride people to hell. Water bottles filled with ice and syringes were passed around race starts and jumping jacks became the new jogging in order to keep the sludge that was riders blood from coagulating in their veins at night. Despite the health risks and clandestine practices the racing was unrivaled.

Doping was a scourge in cycling the same way steroids were in baseball, but its effects were arguably cooler. In baseball, the home run knob² was turned to eleven by 'roids, with the rest of the game at least seeming the same. In cycling, racers became supermen. The baseball analog would be if PEDs had also turned fielders into Willie Mays upgrades, and the 90s had been spent watching batters hit lasers which were caught by fielders who covered ungodly amounts of ground to make the play³. Pasquale Ragazzo digs into the illicit thrills of that besmirched era over at the Ritte van Vlaanderen company blog in a piece worth your time. Watch this video of Lance Armstrong on the Sestriere in '99. Yes, what he did wasn't natural or moral. I'm glad the sport has taken serious measures to clean itself up. But it is stunning to behold this attack, and much of 90s racing, for just those reasons. He flies up that hill like it's the most natural thing in the world, and demolishes the field utterly.

2: Also the Barry Bonds's head knob.

3: This might be the least graceful analogy I've ever written. You're welcome?

Known Unknowns at GNC and NBA

Keep your eyes on this space for some noise on Lance Armstrong¹ in the next few days. In the meantime, I have a guest post up at Free Darko today talking about what we can and can't take away from the OJ Mayo suspension and what the broader NBA PED picture looks like.

1: I know, I know, it's the last thing we need. Bear with me, I promise I'll make a point worth consideration.

Both Sides of the Coin

On Some Faraway Beach: Ryan Lochte's Quiet Dominance

“I love him who desires the impossible.”
—Goethe, Faust

Nobody but swimmers pays attention to swimming when the Summer Olympics aren’t happening. As with many Olympic sports, it’s compelling enough when it’s on NBC amid the din and pageantry and Costasification, but it slips easily off the radar when the volume gets turned back down. There’s no external history to the sport for us, no obvious route to fandom. Competitive swimmers are dedicated athletes who battle for glory, but they’re also pale people who live their lives swimming endless laps in artificially-lit pools and know more about chlorine's effects on hair and skin than you or I would care to think about.

We’ve more or less reached cultural sports saturation. The big three rule the airwaves and bandwidth, and hockey, NASCAR and MMA all vie to join the club. Soccer is the wild card, combining massive global success with stop-and-start domestic attention. Anything else is a niche interest. Michael Phelps is a star, but in the Lance Armstrong way where he transcends the limitations of his sport’s appeal. He's context-free, famous for being a winner, not a swimmer.

I’m totally fine with that. As a dedicated sidestroke man, competitive swimming was never my game and I therefore wouldn’t know how to follow it if I wanted to. I imagine, however, that the sport’s grappling with technological advances in swimsuits is fascinating if you have all of the facts. Remember that during the Olympics there was a lot of hullabaloo about swimsuit technology, nearly as much as there was about swimmers. New advances in computer design and materials let Speedo et al. make a suit that slipped through the water and forced the swimmer’s body into ideal hydrodynamic position while giving muscles compression. Just like when speed skating saw the clap skate’s introduction, the record books were rewritten over the course of a year or two. The marks of old champions fell not just to superior talent and modern conditioning¹ but also to a technological advantage modern swimmers enjoyed. A lesser swimmer could post a better time than, say, 1990’s best breaststroker² purely because of what he or she was wearing.

1: And, if we're being honest, modern drugs in some instances.

2: I will never be mature enough to not snicker at some things...

Unlike speed skating, the powers that be in swimming decided this was a bad thing. They were smart enough not to tamper with the record books and disallow the new records, but high-tech bodysuits were illegal in races starting this year. Predictably, the onslaught of new swimming world records stopped pretty much overnight.

Except for Ryan Lochte. Lochte, whom you may remember as the Scottie Pippen to Michael Phelps’s Jordan in the 2008 Olympics, or maybe Drysdale to his Koufax, has apparently been on a tear. He has set two world records this year, both in individual medleys. This wouldn’t be noteworthy were it not for the fact that no other swimmer has broken a single one.

The swimsuit era is apparently competitive swimming’s version of baseball’s Steroid Era, when world records fell left and right because of an unnatural competitive advantage over history. Credit the sport’s organizers with deciding to put a stop to it all, rather than sit back and enjoy records falling as engineers built faster suits, an Enlightenment ideal of sporting progress.³ Lochte isn’t getting much press about the accomplishment, probably in part because of media desensitization to broken world records. Still, if he keeps performing at this level he should be able to win enough gold medals to have NBC produce soft-focus human interest clips and get his face plastered on all the Wheaties boxes he could want. In the meantime, we’d do well to take a second and appreciate someone not just beating his competitors but also overcoming a systematic handicap to set world records. He swam those two individual medleys faster than anyone else ever, including previous record-holders who enjoyed a virtual head start. If swimming were on Sportscenter, he would be LeBron James or Michael Vick. That's not going to happen, but he deserves more than nothing.

3: There will of course still be a swimsuit technology arms race, but within set limits, much like UCI regulation of bicycles.

You Don't Miss Your Water 'Til Your Well Runs Dry: Floyd Landis Bottoms Out

“What is left is the other side of the Faustian bargain: To live all one’s days never able to recapture the feeling of those few years of intensified youth. In a way it is the fate of a warrior class to receive rewards, plaudits, and exhilaration simultaneously with the means of self-destruction.”
– Bill Bradley, Life on the Run

I doubt you noticed, because it’s depressing and not that meaningful by itself, but it came out a few days ago that Floyd Landis wore a wire for federal agents last spring to help gather evidence against Michael Ball, who ran a low-level pro team. Landis, whom we last heard making pointed accusations⁴ about Lance Armstrong/US Postal Service Team doping, seems to be doing everything he can to destroy anyone he can in cycling. If you’re virulently anti-doping, maybe that makes him a hero for doing the ugly right thing. If you stake out any other position, he’s a flawed man striking those he can to get even. Maybe he’s trying to prove a larger point, but if so any message he’s trying to convey is lost in the mess of it all.

4: Accusations which, it should be said, are equally plausible and unproven.

His is no righteous cause. If you believe the urine tests, he won the Tour de France by doping and was rightfully stripped of the illegally-gained title. If you believe his statements, he’s innocent of those charges but guilty of systematically doping throughout his career. He’s hardly the lone doper in cycling, but that doesn’t excuse anything. Even if this Michael Ball wire business is part of a Justice Department attempt to entangle former USPS riders into a case they can then roll up the food chain to Lance, it’s also biting the hand of a man who tried hard to get Floyd a job when almost no one else was interested in his comeback. That’s pretty cold, especially for a guy who needs all the friends he can find.

And yet I find myself feeling for the guy. I’m not trying to excuse him, necessarily. I don’t know enough about what he’s doing or why he’s doing it to really construct an informed opinion about where to place him on my personal good guy/bad guy spectrum. Either way, it’s pretty hard to imagine things going worse for a pro athlete who is still healthy (in a non-professional sense) and didn’t murder anyone.

His high-water mark was winning the 2006 Tour de France, a victory born of one of the greatest one-day rides pro cycling has ever seen. After performing so badly in the race’s 16th stage that he was written off as a contender, he responded by destroying the field in the 17th, beating the second-place finisher by nearly six minutes, a margin rarely seen in the pros. It looked like he had picked up the mantle of Great American Cyclist that Armstrong had abdicated, third in a line that started with Greg LeMond. If he could build on that victory, he could grow the sport further in the States while basking in adulation and endorsement dollars. But then it all went wrong.

The specifics are up for debate, but no one now claims he didn’t dope. Cycling is a sport rife with doping, so to be stripped of a Tour victory for it has to feel somewhat unfair to the caught rider. If half the peloton is doing it, getting singled out can’t seem fair, even if the punishment is the law. If he’s right about Armstrong’s doping history, it must be galling to have served as lieutenant for a serial offender who walked off a legend and then to go down in flames for the same crime. Examples must be made if the sport is going to get cleaned up⁵ but you can't fault the examples will feel singled out if doping is as pervasive as some claim. Add to that the possibility that he got caught for a drug he might not have taken and things get even murkier.

5: Whatever that means.

But fine, he doped and got caught for doping. That’s the system working. Others getting off scot-free doesn't excuse the crimes of those caught. Trumpeting his innocence, he raised around one million dollars from fans to fund his court defense, but he lost, was suspended for two year, and his legal bill was at least twice what he raised. He won the Tour, but that blew up in his face before he had the chance to cash in on the victory. Financially, he’s ruined.

His honesty, if that’s what it is, in admitting his own doping while fingering Lance bolsters his credibility as an accuser, but it also lays bare the duplicity of soliciting money from fans to clear his name. Whatever loyalists remained after years of court motions and underwhelming comeback were surely jettisoned then. Any sympathy he earned when he was running those Ride With Floyd events was gone in a flash of hypocrisy. “They all did it too!” is a way shittier justification than “I’m innocent!”

His career is over. Since his suspension ended Landis has been an unremarkable domestic racer. His sole international race was the 2009 New Zealand Tour of Southland, where he finished 17th of 95 racers in a race that has only ever been won by Kiwis, Aussies, and a lone unheralded American—hardly a springboard back into European racing. He last competed in the Cascade Cycling Classic in Oregon without a team, so it’s fair to say he’s done as a professional cyclist. Given how thoroughly he’s burned his bridges in the sport, I don’t see how he could forge a career in management, media or with a company in the industry.

The personal picture seems no better. In 2006, his close friend, ex-roommate, and father-in-law committed suicide, something Landis has admitted is almost certainly related to his doping conviction. His wife left him in 2009. He has never had a close relationship with the Mennonite parents who disapproved of his cycling when it was just a childhood hobby. It’s hard to imagine he has any strong roots after living the nomadic life of a peloton rider. He’s working with/for the Feds these days but there’s no future in that once Lance Armstrong is either caught or slips their snare.⁶ After that, what does he have left? Cycling is done with him, whether or not he’s done with it. He has no background in anything else or education beyond high school. I don’t know anything specific about his finances, but there’s no way he’s rich after his legal battles (and maybe divorce settlement). His family has fallen apart. He is the shell of what he was, defined by the career that was ripped from him. He hasn’t really been a pro cyclist for five years, but he’s a 35-year-old with no other obvious options. He's a man who has outlived his self-definition, and there's nothing sadder in sports. I'm not saying he didn't get what he deserves, but I can't help but feel sorry for him.

6: If the feds couldn't get Barry Bonds for his ties to an organization as flagrant as BALCO, I have my doubts about their ability to nail Armstrong. He's well-connected and powerful in his sport, the American public loves him as a champion and cancer crusader and if he did dope, it surely happened largely in Europe, at least on an organizational level.

The Contador Uncertainty Principle

“The significance of this mass ceremony…is paradoxical. It is preformed in silent privacy, in the lair of the skull. Yet each communicant is well aware that the ceremony he performs is being replicated simultaneously by thousands (or millions) of others of whose existence he is confident, yet of whose identity he has not the slightest notion.” – Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities

The problem with Alberto Contador isn’t that he’s a doper who got caught red-handed. The problem with Alberto Contador isn’t that he, cycling’s reigning champ, got blown up by a false positive, either. The problem is that he’s a mystery we’ll probably never have the facts to solve, and that he’s more harbinger than aberration. Maybe he did it, maybe he didn’t, but the whole culture has to move forward without any sort of closure. It looks like he’ll face some punishment from the UCI, he may follow through on his threat to retire, but, barring a revelation as shocking as it is unexpected, opinions will have to be formed without proof.

Here are the facts: Contador has been largely unstoppable in the grand tours since Lance Armstrong retired. He won the Tour de France in 2007, 2009 and 2010, and didn’t in 2006 and 2008 because he didn’t take part. He made up for his tour absence in 2008 by winning both the Giro d’Italia and the Vuelta a España. His teams weren’t included in the 2006 and 2008 tours because of doping investigations, but he was never individually implicated. Word came out this fall that he failed a doping control on the final rest day in the 2010 TdF, testing positive for clenbuterol, a drug that builds lean muscle. Then we learned that a urine sample from the day before that rest day tested positive for plasticizers, indicating an illegal blood transfusion or infusion.

Contador’s team claims he ate some contaminated meat gifted to him by Spanish friends during that rest day. This incensed the Spanish meat industry, which swore it was clean, and experts ruled that explanation both plausible and somewhat unlikely. (The store from whence the meat came has now been tested and shown no hint of clenbuterol, for whatever that's worth.) The plasticizer test has not been validated for anti-doping use, a fact that doesn’t impugn its accuracy but does allow anyone so inclined to cast aspersions. Complicating everything, clebuterol is sometimes present in livestock and plasticizers are environmentally present in modern life. (Remember the BPA/water bottle kerfuffle?) I’m no doctor/biochemist, but my impression is that the charges here are pretty damning, but not quite open-and-shut. Making any judgment of guilt or innocence depends at least partially on your reading of Contador’s character, motives and veracity, not simply the facts.

But, of course, the UCI can’t just let this hang over the sport like a chemical sword of Damocles. It has instructed the Spanish Federation to open hearings. What exactly will happen isn’t clear, but it’s instructive to note that a rider by the name of Fuyu Li tested positive for clebuterol last spring, and it looks like he’ll be banned for two years for his transgression. It’s one thing to offer up plausible excuses, but UCI’s doping regulations don’t care about intent. The important thing here isn’t how the clenbuterol got there, but that it was present. Contador has threatened to retire if a ban is handed down, but it’s not clear how that could be avoided if he can’t work up a little more concrete defense.


The point for me isn’t that cycling has another doping black eye. That’s pretty clear-cut. No matter how this plays out, it’s another headline where a top name is tied to drugs. The connection is always going to be louder than the details. The point is that we’ve reached the synthesis of the dialectic of doping. Unless someone does something truly stupid¹, black and white are gone forever from our drugs in sports discourse. Gone are the days when our stars were demigods, protected by their press to fit into neat (and contrived) narrative arcs, but gone also are the days when doping first barged into our collective consciousness and users were exposed simply because the authorities were now looking. In the modern cat-and-mouse arms race of doping, rumors and hints have become damning because hard facts are nearly impossible to come by.

1: People will of course do stupid things, sure as the sun rises, but the bigger the player, the more money will be spent to make the crimes smart.

As I’ve said before, I am spectacularly uninterested in vilifying individual dopers. Don’t misunderstand, I think in many ways we’re underestimating how pervasive PEDs are in sports, but I can’t get my hackles up when an athlete makes a decision that I consider regrettable but totally human. This is a problem that needs to be attacked at a sport-wide level. I’m glad that the UCI is taking doping seriously. I know that randomized doping controls are an intrusive fact of life in the peloton, but I’ll take that over unchecked cheating. But I’m not so naïve as to think that testing eliminates doping, either, or catches all dopers. It shifts it from something that is talked about in some corners of locker rooms to a furtive secret between a private trainer and athlete. If even a system as comprehensive as the UCI’s biological passport, which establishes baselines for all sorts of things I don't understand in each individual athlete and checks their tests not just for abnormal levels relative to human norms but also to all of their prior levels, can be circumvented or flawed, then there is no fail-safe test.

Which leaves those of us who are spectators, fans and media both, watching the sport with a kind of jaundiced ignorance. American fans have already seen this play out with Tyler Hamilton’s vanishing twin argument and Floyd Landis’s fan-funded defense. Anyone could be doping, because getting to the top of the heap is always going to be worth more for some athletes than moral rectitude or respecting the threat of banishment. Various figures make statements about how getting tough on doping has cleaned the sport up, but there’s no real way to evaluate the truth of such claims. How much of the peloton is doping? How much of the peloton used to be doping? If the riders don’t know, and beyond their own bodies and maybe those of their closest confidants, they don’t, how exactly are we supposed to judge at all?²

2: This is why I could never take Jose Canseco's claims about X percent of major leaguers using steroids seriously. He never gave me reason to think that he was smart enough to look beyond his own confirmation biases. (Given that he's bankrupt and tweeting about his lost chandeliers and young, hot girlfriend, he hasn't exactly forced me to reevaluate my position since.)

So what to do about this onlooker limbo? If one is properly disgusted, swearing off the sport is an option, but it’s not like it’s an isolated phenomenon. Baseball has doping, football does too, though no one cares³, I assume it’s something that goes on in hockey, and you’re just playing naïve if you think that soccer and basketball, two sports that prize athleticism and stamina, don’t have at least small portions of their players on drugs too. The edges given by chemistry are too real to ignore, and the financial rewards for success are too big for many to turn down. As long as sports are played by competitive people who are payed to succeed, athletes will dope. Sadly, it’s that simple. And in a modern world of computer-aided chemistry, there will always be a new drug that the tests don’t know about yet, but are trying to find. I’m not trying to be a downer here, but I don’t see any way that isn’t true.

3: Joe Posnanski has said that he thinks the public doesn't care about steroids in football because there's no statistic like home runs to fixate on. I think it's more that baseball is a game of individual numbers that tie the modern game seamlessly to its past, while football is a game of teams filled with masked, numbered men following coaches' orders. Player performance is too context-dependent to compare outside the player's era. The only numbers that matter are wins and losses, and the game has changed too much too quickly to ground it historically. Jimmy Foxx would still be a pretty good first baseman, it seems clear, but what would Bronco Nagurski do in the NFL today? No one could begin to guess.

Several decades (or centuries, depending on how you keep score) into the acceleration of modern communication and hence media, we’ve already endured the slow erosion of the athletes-as-role-model archetype. Penis photos make the rounds on Deadspin for those who care, and the rest of us just try to ignore it. Think of the trouble Joe Namath would have gotten into off of the field these days. Doping is the worst crime an athlete can commit against his or her sport and against our trust, but more and more we’ll have to weigh individual guilt of that crime through the lens of our opinion of the individual.


The aesthetic perfection of some sporting moments and the arbitrary nature of victory in sports often lends itself to our imbuing of sports with a false, or at least overblown, morality. Fair play transcends not breaking the rules to be a mindset and a worldview. I’m not saying that there is no value in that; parents should still tell their kids to play the game the right way. But ever since radio and then television got into pro sports and players started making real money, the love of the game for them is ancillary to the economic benefits of success. The two can compliment each other, but to expect a pro to put aside success and money to play the game “the right way” when they don't is foolish. We’ve come to terms with athletes being people, warts and all, though specific failures still disappoint us. We need to stop thinking about doping as a moral absolute and shift it into that category too, of being just one more piece of information about a person.

It’s one thing when David Millar gets caught with EPO or Ben Johnson tests positive for steroids. But those days are gone. What are we to do with Alberto Contador or the next MLB player to fail a test based what he claims is a “unauthorized ingredient in a supplement”? At least some of the time, isn’t that guy going to be telling the truth? I think it’s correct that punishment depends solely on a banned substance’s presence in a test, but we as fans and media need to come to a place where, when definitive proof can’t be found, we can figure out what to do with a professional’s reputation. If the game is now run in such a way where some significant portion of the dopers won’t get caught⁴, how is it fair to pillory those that do, especially if occasional false positives are inevitable? Hand down stiff punishments, let those who can prove innocence/guilt do so, but in the court of public opinion, let’s stop treating doping like a witchhunt and deal with the facts as they are, not as we wish they were.

4: There's a non-zero chance that Lance Armstrong, America's golden god of cycling and post-cancer heroism, doped throughout his run of dominance. He didn't get caught, so we all have to go with our gut feelings on that one, and on a lot of his rivals.