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.

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.

Intentional Fallacies

There has been a lot of brouhaha in the NBA media and online world about KG’s “cancer” trash-talking to Charlie Villanueva, some of it insightful and interesting and some of it not. Jay Kaspian King posted a take at FreeDarko of the event as illustrative of what’s wrong with KG that has gotten under my skin, and I’ve been trying to figure out just what about it I react to so violently.

He starts the piece out musing about the Giants recent World Series victory as affirmation of the social transcendence sports occasionally offers, but then contrasts that to his Red Sox fandom. He moves from watching the 2004 World Series to his disaffection with the 2007 Sox and discovery of liberated fandom, of viewing sports as existing in an “aesthetic realm, where players exist as performers”.¹

1: I love me some FreeDarko, but I’ve never been able to get on board fully with liberated fandom. I take some umbrage at the term, at the implication that my loyalty to my favorite teams is some kind of cage I need to escape to fully appreciate other players. I’ve never felt a conflict between the knot in my stomach as the clock ticks down on a Celtics overtime game and the elation I feel when Chris Paul solves the geometry of the halfcourt set in a way I never would have imagined. They are very different things, but both are essential to what I love in sport. Both are part of what Angell calls the “business of caring” that grounds my love of sport.² I have no problem with the FD idea that you should care about players, not teams, but that decision has always seemed to me like a false dichotomy that would rob me of a lot of the pleasures of my fandom.] But I think his take on this realm is flawed. He’s right that there’s an unspoken line athletes get crucified when they cross, but it’s not when they “remind us that the scope of their lives is larger than ours.” If that were it, things like the DRose Fast Don’t Lie commercial would infuriate the public, not sell shoes. The line is that athletes can’t let us know that their investment in the game is different from ours. Fans, collectively, care about their teams with a nigh-religious sort of fervor. Athletes care about the game and winning, but that’s on a personal level. The team itself is their employer. Maybe one they love, maybe one they hate, but their relationship there can never be the same as the fan’s purely emotional one. LeBron James infuriated the sports media/public not because he called an unseemly amount of attention to a change in employers, but because he did so in a way that callously disregarded the emotions of Cavs fans. We don’t want LeBron to act like switching teams is like us switching employers, we want him to take our feelings into account, to gracefully account for the fans whose lives he is affecting. I don’t really care if a player is the “sort of guy…we can have a beer with”, and I don’t think most other fans really do either, we care if a player acts in a way that disrupts our fandom.

2: King partially dismisses that Angell quotation in his piece, which I find funny precisely because Angell’s point is that his love is sentimental, but that doesn’t make it ridiculous, exactly the linkage King casually makes. Here’s the whole thing:

“What I do know is that this belonging and caring is what our games are all about; this is what we come for. It is foolish and childish, on the face of it, to affiliate ourselves with anything so insignificant and patently contrived and commercially exploitative as a professional sports team, and the amused superiority and icy scorn that the non-fan directs at the sports nut (I know this look—I know it by heart) is understandable and almost unanswerable. Almost. What is left out of this calculation, it seems to me, is the business of caring—caring deeply and passionately, really caring—which is a capacity or an emotion that has almost gone out of our lives. And so it seems possible that we have come to a time when it no longer matters so much what the caring is about, how frail or foolish is the object of that concern, as long as the feeling itself can be saved. Naïveté—the infantile and ignoble joy that sends a grown man or woman to dancing and shouting with joy in the middle of the night over the haphazardous flight of a distant ball—seems a small price to pay for such a gift.”

But on to KG.

“With Garnett, there’s always a sense of insecure theater, of a man who hasn’t quite convinced himself of the virtues and authenticity of his passions.”

This is the polar opposite of how I read the man’s excesses. To me, it has always seemed like the fire that burns within Kevin Garnett, the intensity that fuels him to be the defensive force he is comes with this. His intensity and buy-in transformed Paul Pierce and Ray Allen into 40% of one of the best defensive NBA teams ever. I’ve never seen him play with anything but full effort, and to maintain that kind of drive all of the time would seem to me to necessitate walking the thin line between zealot and lunatic. If you find that distasteful, fine, but even his oddest moments, the barking like a dog, the clapping in a guard’s face, seem to be born of an inability to escape the outer reaches of a genuine drive, not some sort of performative enactment of a role he thinks he should be playing. I’ll gladly concede that other interpretations here are totally valid, but that specific and damning a reading of the man’s actions to me demands some sort of proof. King seems to think that the lack of “Isiah’s grim determination…Rodman’s ‘fuck it, we’re winning’ mentality” is some sort of fundamental flaw, that his lack of Jordan’s “impenetrability of the mask” or Kobe’s “visible intelligence” (what?) is what’s wrong with him. But those are all projections, rather than character traits. King reads KG as a bully, while Jordan, who is universally acknowledged as a huge bully gets off the hook because he was “impenetrable”? If we’re talking presentation, maybe, but King is trying to make a more sweeping claim than that.

Rewatch that John Thompson interview. That has always seemed to me to the at the core of Garnett's appeal. Sure he's crazy and does weird things sometimes. But look at that interview. Thompson wants to talk about the numbers KG is putting up, but KG won't let him. He's unwilling to talk about individual success in the face of team failure. Commenter Ben calls the interview a man "grappling with the deconstruction of his identity" as a winner. That rings far truer to me than King's dismissal of it as "Jimmy Swaggert style...wild theatrics". If he's putting on a show, wouldn't he want the cameras to stay on? It's a plausible explanation, I suppose, but requires a fundamental mistrust of Garnett above and beyond the grain of salt all such interviews need to be taken with.

“And while I’m not so naïve as to say that Garnett’s comments marked some unbreached depth of trash-talking, I don’t find it instructive or even interesting, really, to argue whether or not this is in or out of character for him, specifically, or for NBA players, at large.”

“The moment Garnett was traded to the Celtics, he ruined yet another one of my childhood teams.”

“Any rational fan, really, anyone who doesn’t salivate at the thought of jumping strangers, should feel their stomach turn whenever they watch one of these encounters.”

Listen, I’m as interested as anyone in plumbing the performative aspects of professional sports. The idea of persona is fascinating to me, the construction of identity in the press and through televised action, but the risk is mistaking your reading of someone’s persona as indicative of who they are as a person. King throws away any notions of contextualizing trash-talking in that first quote, and then gleefully blurs the line between persona and person in what reads as a very personal takedown trying to tell me how to think about Kevin Garnett. I have no idea what gets said on the court at NBA games, but it’s hard to evaluate the “cancer patient” line without context. If Villanueva is tweeting it it clearly got under his skin, but that doesn’t mean it’s head-and-shoulders worse than what other players are doing. Maybe it is, but the fact that other players aren’t jumping on KG seems to imply to me that it’s at least within the ballpark.

Nobody is obligated to like Kevin Garnett. There doesn’t even have to be a reason for the dislike. I certainly have players who I don’t like for no reason I can identify, and there are plenty whose demeanor puts me off. But that doesn’t mean I get to run around saying they’re bad people.

“Why can’t we call an asshole an asshole every time he acts like an asshole?”

Because being an asshole is context-dependent. If KG brought his act to a pick-up game near me, he’d be the biggest dick around. But he’s paid millions of dollars to win, not to make friends, and getting into opponents' heads is part of that. If Michael Jordan played in your rec league, you wouldn’t want anything to do with him. But he brought his pathological competitiveness to the NBA, where it was appropriate. Garnett had the misfortune of being a dick to someone with a twitter account, but don’t mistake that for making him qualitatively different from the other shit-talkers who came before and after him. If you can prove he is, cool, go for it, but that’s the thing, you have to prove it.

"What the fuck do we owe Kevin Garnett?"

You owe the man a fair assessment. You can think he's a dick, you can think his act is a show, but if you're going to call him out on it, you have to show me something to back it up. You have to show me some proof that he's different from those around him and that his earnestness is a put-on. Otherwise, I’m sorry you dislike him enough that he ended your fandom of the Celtics, but please don’t couch yourself in liberated fandom so you can throw stones at a picture of who he is that you painted. Attacking strawmen makes you the asshole.

Theodicy and Saint Jeter

“When we explain action in terms of desires and beliefs we are not putting forward any explanatory theory to account for action. It is true that desires and beliefs explain action; but the explanation is not of any causal hypothetical form. It is not as if the actions of human beings constitute a set of raw data – actions identifiable on their faces as the kinds of actions they are – for which we may seek an explanatory hypothesis. On the contrary, many human actions are not identifiable as actions of a particular kind unless they are already seen and interpreted as proceeding from a particular set of desires and beliefs.”
— Anthony Kenny : Free Will and Responsibility

If you pay any attention at all to baseball, you must have heard the squawking the other day when Derek Jeter acted like a pitch that hit his bat hit his hand well enough to fool the home plate umpire. Joe Posnanski had a good take on it over at his blog. I agreed with a lot of what he said. "I save my deep admiration for people who choose fair play over a momentary advantage," in particular is a notion that resonates pretty deeply for me. Posnanski turns Jeter into a bit of a parable, as is sometimes his wont¹, but in doing so conflates Derek Jeter the man and Derek Jeter the media construct in a way that isn't really fair.

1: I think the reason Posnanski is way up on my current mental list of sportswriters is how he doesn't shy away from turning a yarn into a parable but does so in a way that sidesteps the pat pieties of the Rick Reillys of the world.

"I don't think what Jeter did was wrong, not at all, not in baseball terms. So what was my reaction? Well, I think what Jeter did was kind of ... sad. Has he become so impotent as a hitter -- do you realize the guy now has an 86 OPS+? -- that now he's willing to hop around and have trainers look at his forearm when the ball clearly did not hit him? That's what Derek Jeter has become? And then afterward, he's sheepishly defending the move by saying it's his job to get on base, well, is that what's behind the Derek Jeter aura? Is that what he has stood for all these years?"

Look at what he does there. He's making two points here about how Derek Jeter let him/us down. The first is that Jeter, who is having a pretty bad year and looking more mortal than he ever has before, has now crossed over the line between young and great and old and hanging on, and that's why he did what he did. This may be true, but for that to be the case we'd need to know what's going on inside Jeter's head, or at least that he wouldn't have tried this earlier in his career. Neither is knowable, it seems to me. I agree that playacting is a cheap move, but I don't know how we can claim with any certainty that this is something that he wouldn't have tried a decade ago.

But fine, some license here isn't a huge deal. It's undeniable that Jeter is in his decline, and he needs every break in a way he never has before. I think the point Posnanski makes about aging and cheating is valid, just maybe not as applicable here as he thinks. But look at the second thing he does: "That's what Jeter has become...is that what's behind the Derek Jeter aura? Is that what he stood for all these years?" As a Red Sox fan, the media trope of Derek Jeter as all that is good and just in baseball has driven me crazy, at least partially because he's never really offered a chink in his armor². But what Posnanski does there is to subtly hold Jeter the man hostage to Jeter the media narrative.

2: Other than his crappy defense, of course, but now I'm just being petty.

There was a bit of an internet scuffle about how we should view Kevin Durant after the FIBA championships. By all reports, Durant is a kind, mature young man who lives and breathes basketball and is working hard to max out his talent. But that's the thing, "by all reports". Very few of us know the man at all, and the media we rely on to tell us about him only sees him in his professional context. The upshot was an interesting debate about whether it's fair or a good idea to hold Kevin Durant up as an ideal(ized) player³, and if to do so is simply setting him up to be turned on by the same media that would do the building up.

3: The tweets from Nate Jones are also very worth looking at, but hard to link to. You can find the links in the Bethlehem Shoals article I linked first up there.

I don't think Posnanski is trying to be unfair to Jeter here, but that doesn't mean he isn't. Derek Jeter never told us he was perfect. He certainly never gave us a Barkleyesque disavowal, but who is going to argue with media coverage presenting him or herself as representing truth, justice and apple pie? I'm sure he made a lot of money in his career by being the face of the Yankee Way, but it's a position to which he was voted by others, not one for which he volunteered. "Is that what he stood for all these years?" Maybe that's what Derek Jeter^TM stood for, but that's because the media decided he did. Faking his way into a HBP wasn't a betrayal of anything, it just serves as a warning not to trust the media when it holds anyone up as a symbol of capitalized values. Derek Jeter, like Kevin Durant, LeBron James and any other athlete you choose to look at, is a man, not a myth. We do the athletes and ourselves a disservice any time we lose sight of that fact.

The Burdens of Respect

The practice of the world goes farther in teaching us the degrees of our duty, than the subtlest philosophy, which was ever yet invented.
— David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature

How to Shoot Somebody Who Can Outdraw You: Tom Boonen

“In fact one is tempted to ask whether there is a single man left ready, for once, to commit an outrageous folly.” – Søren Kierkegaard, The Present Age

In (team) sports, as in all human interaction, respect is one of the basic forms of currency. Any time cooperation is necessary or impediment is an option, respect gets factored into the strategic calculus. Football schemes, how much of the plate a pitcher is willing to hit, who gets double-teamed when they get the ball, whether a rider gets help on a breakaway or just drafted, all are at least partly functions of respect. The same is true of our appreciation of athletes: A-Rod and Barry Bonds¹, for example, will never have their staggering achievements fully lauded because they have never quite earned the public’s respect. What athletes have the opportunity to accomplish on the field and the ramifications of such accomplishments hinge to a large degree on respect.

1: I’ve always thought it’s a shame that Barry Bonds is held in universally low respect because, before he was forever tarnished by the BALCO revelations, he had the misfortune/bad judgment to be a surly black man in a largely white game. (Sure, he was an asshole too, but still.) Go look at his numbers in his prime in San Francisco. Yes, he absolutely was using steroids, but so was a significant segment of the league, and he had four straight years with an on-base percentage over .500 while slugging .749 or better. That’s not even possible, but he was never quite recognized enough as he should have been.

In the springtime, cycle racing has its Classics season. In contrast to the grand tours, the weeks-long races where the winner is the man who grinds his opponents away through carefully-laid plans, strategic attacks, team strength and attrition, the Classics are one-day races which are won by the man willing to go hardest at the front with the best legs that day. They are full-bore, chaotic affairs in which a single misstep or mishap² can end a rider's chances of victory. You need a strong team to put you in position to win a classic, but you can't just rely on your team like you do in a tour. By the end of the day, the front of the race is a select few riders, all trying to win, and cooperation is often key in putting yourself in a position to contend.

2: If you want misfortune, ask George Hincapie about Paris-Roubaix…

In this year's Paris-Roubaix, in some corners considered the crown jewel of the classics season, Tom Boonen fell victim to the respect in which he was held by his peers. One of the world's finest sprinters, Boonen has the power to ride away from others on a flat course like Paris-Roubaix, and as a three time former winner was one of the heavy prerace favorites. As a Belgian sprinter in a race that is a Belgian monument, he was born and built for this. His race was going as planned with about fifty kilometers left: he was in a small group of elite riders at the front of the race. Barring the truly unexpected, the winner of the race would come from the group, and Boonen was right where he needed to be.

Until he wasn't. Fabian Cancellara, a Swiss rider who is the reigning world time trial champion, attacked when Boonen was at the back of the group. He quickly gapped the group, and powered away on a long solo attack. No one else went with him, and by the time Boonen saw what was happening, Cancellara was too far gone to cross the gap.³

3: It’s worth recognizing what a ballsy move this was by Cancellara. He had faith in his ability to beat that strong group of riders over 50 km even if they took up pursuit the way Boonen wanted them to. It may have been a lapse for Boonen to be in the back of the pack, but that’s a boldly early time to launch your attack.

A quick digression on the mechanics of bicycle racing (if you're more than passingly familiar with the sport, feel free to skip this paragraph): at its physical center, bike racing is governed by two factors, aerobic capacity⁴ and aerodynamic drag. A rider can go as fast as his legs and lungs can propel him, but if he has no one ahead of him, he has to punch through the air ahead of him. With a rider directly before him, he can use the slipstream that rider leaves in his wake to significantly reduce how much work he has to do to travel at that speed. All cycling tactics revolve around the interplay of these two things. This is why, despite its individual prizes, cycling is a team sport.

4: This disregards the anaerobic work of sprinting, of course, but that would really be getting pedantic, wouldn’t it?

By attacking alone with fifty kilometers left in the race, then, Cancellara was taking a risk. He would have to be faster than a group of riders, taking turns pulling at the front of a paceline to spread the hard work between them, for about an hour. If any man can do it, Cancellara is that man, given the course-he is monstrously strong, and as a time trial specialist he excels at the specific agony of the discipline-but success was by no means certain. If the group he had left behind gave its all chasing him, they could well catch him.

But they didn't. They didn't catch him because they didn't try. Not because they were throwing the race, not because they didn't think they could catch him, but because of their respect for Tom Boonen. Boonen immediately began trying to organize pursuit of Cancellara, but no one would work with him. Once Cancellara attacked, Boonen needed help. As much as a group chasing Cancellara would gain from taking turns exposed to full drag, a solo pursuer, no matter how fast or fit, would have little hope of catching him after spotting him a head start. I have no idea what was said on the course, but nothing Boonen said or tried did was to any avail, and because this was a classics race he had no teammates with him to help. Every rider in that group was there because they were in a position to do well in the race; no one was riding altruistically.

So why, then, concede victory to Cancellara? Such a move only makes sense if you're terrified of Tom Boonen. The only reason you would refuse to form a chase group is if you're certain that all you'd be doing was working hard enough to hand the strongest rider in the group a victory over the others. If you don't think you can beat Boonen after a hard chase for Cancellara, whether or not you catch him, then you're only going to get second, or third if you can't catch Cancellara. If you don't chase, you may be able to beat Boonen in a field sprint, especially if he works harder than everyone else in vain hope of reeling in the attack. You won't win, but you could take second.

In other words, your respect for the abilities of Tom Boonen overrides your competitive instincts. Despite the fact that winning Paris-Roubaix would either make or burnish the career of every single rider in the group far more than a fourth would Boonen's, collectively they decided that they would rather drag race for second than turn themselves inside out for a chance to win. I'm sure it's small comfort to the man denied a chance at the win he clearly wanted badly, but it says something that professional racers in their prime quailed at facing Boonen without his making any sort of move. Any strategic decision in such a situation has to consider what all opponents might do, but to give up hope for victory without any fight at all because of what the man next to you could do speaks volumes about the esteem in which he is held. It may well have been the optimal decision for their race results, but it's competitive cowardice. At least in that race, had he been respected less by his peers, he would have had a chance to win. It's not a trap he had any way to avoid, but he was hamstrung by being so respected.


Why Don’t You Love Me Anymore: Alexandre Vinokourov

As I see it, the whole point of pragmatism is to insist that we human beings are answerable only to one another. We are answerable only to those who answer to us – only to conversation partners. We are not responsible either to the atoms or to God, at least not until they start conversing with us.
— Richard Rorty, Comments on Jeffrey Stout’s Democracy and Tradition

During a sporting event, respect matters mostly between competitors. Spectators can and do cheer and boo, but they don't tend to have too large an effect on competitive balance. After the results are in, however, imbuing them with meaning falls to the audience. Athletes decide what happens during the contest (often with an assist from chance or officiating) but the viewing public imbues these results with meaning. Consider some still consider Hank Aaron to be the baseball's home run king, or why Duke basketball (for example) is despised in so many corners. There is no such thing as an objectively meaningful result; narrative importance is constructed after the fact, consciously and not, to fit what has just happened into the framework of our fandom, biases and to connect it to history.

About a month ago, Alexandre Vinokourov won Liége-Bastone-Liége. What is remarkable about this victory is that Vino has recently returned from a two-year suspension for PEDs and seems to have not lost much riding ability at all. Where previously most suspended riders return quietly, if at all, taking their place as a diminished figure, or as part of a narrative of change/redemption a la David Millar. What sets Vino apart is that he seems to have returned to the sport at roughly the performance level he left and has never directly addressed the cause of his suspension. Any question about his reception was answered when he crossed the finish line at L-B-L victorious and was met with a chorus of boos from the fans at the finish.⁵

5: I wasn’t there, and I got the impression that it was a smattering of boos and no real cheering, not an overwhelming salvo of derision, but even that is a staggering reaction for a crowd at such an important race.

Vinokourov has single-handedly, in the explosive manner of all in his career, blown open the debate about the role a no-longer suspended racer can and should play in the pro peloton. He has sat out the past two years, as the rules mandate. Legally, he is once again fully qualified as a racer, but how should we, the public, feel about him? The ex-dopers who tend to get a pass are those, the David Millars of the world, who show genuine repentence for their transgression(s) and express a desire to use the rest of their career to prove what they can do clean. That seems like the natural path for someone caught in such an act: confess to the crime for which you've already been caught, and salvage what you can. I don't mean to seem overly calculating, but the zeal of the convert seems to be the sensible path for a pro who thinks they have something left and don't want to be left out as a pariah. Vino has the advantage of not having to worry about sponsorship-Astana was built for him by hometown Kazakhs, so they'll (presumably) stick with him through thick and thin. Given his secure position, he spent his time off concerned primarily with not losing his form.

By the letter of the law, he has done his time off, fulfilling his punishment and clearing his name to race. As he said in his post-race press conference, "We are here to talk about my victory. I paid two years and now I want to show I can win without doping." Absent a seemingly perfunctory "I condemn doping" at the beginning of his remarks, Vino seems to feel that, those two years being over⁶, he is here to talk about the present.

6: Given the career length of the world-class athlete, a two year suspension must be an unbearable eternity for the athlete to live, bereft of professional meaning.

So the question is how those external to Vinokourov react. No man believes himself to be the villain; it is the masses who condemn or exonerate. So far as I could tell, the responses to the whole brouhaha were split between outrage that such a man would be allowed to win, or at least that such a man would have the gall to be outraged at boos and mixed emotions. No one seemed interested in a full-throated defense of a man who presumably has followed all of the rules save the one he was punished for breaking. He is a man who has lost the respect he used to hold in the eyes of the amorphous audience that his peers, fans and media followers constitute.

The wrench in the works here is the impossibility of certainty regarding both the guilt for doping and repentence of the caught doper. When I say that the natural path for the caught doper is an energetic contrition, this is partially because it doesn't necessarily matter how earnest about it the player is. So long as he plays to the cameras when he returns to the public eye, avoids obviously suspicious behavior and generally keeps a low profile as a good citizen, past transgressions will be some combination of forgiven and forgotten. Vino has chosen the harder road of acting as if he has nothing left to prove after his suspension. As a result, he is stuck. As he is performing at roughly the same level he was before his suspension, the reasonable conclusion appears to be that either a) his doping didn’t help him overmuch or b) he is still doping. To view his current results as anything but suspicious requires a pretty generous interpretation of the facts we have and few onlookers seem to be so inclined. We don’t (and can’t) know what exactly he did or didn’t do and what he is or isn’t doing, so his reputation is at the mercy of collective opinion based partially on speculation.

The collective disdain of the public has no mechanism to affect competitive results, but the wisdom of the crowd does have the power to undercut a title by not considering it cleanly won. If it is decided that Vino's victory is fatally flawed because of who he is and what he represents, then there is little he can do to salvage it. He may be able to affect some degree of character rehabilitation moving forward, but it may be that,


Minerva’s Owl Flies at Dusk: Floyd Landis

“The only facts which seem genuinely independent of any scientific theory are those of the present experiences of touch, taste, smell, hearing and sight that each individual scientist is currently experiencing. But such facts are not, of course, public facts, they are private to each individual. So we have the dilemma that, if facts are truly independent of theory they are private and do not form part of the public domain of knowledge; if they are public facts they are affected by all sorts of influences particularly from previous knowledge and upon which their exact form and our confidence in them depend. At least for science, there are no brute facts.”
— Rom Harré, Philosophies of Science

When I started it, this post centered on Boonen and Vinokourov and the role respect plays in their current situations. Earlier this week, however, American pro cycling’s current prodigal sun Floyd Landis set off another earthquake when he (sort of) reversed the defiant position he’s fought for the past four years. Briefly, Landis, who has spent his time since 2006 trying to clear his name after having his Tour de France title stripped for a positive synthetic testosterone test, owned up to using EPO throughout his career and fingered pretty much every current major American cyclist for the same. Lance Armstrong’s Team Radioshack camp has responded by making public emails from Landis they say undermine his credibility, while the cycling press generally has had to come to terms with how much they believe all the parts of Landis’s confession/accusations.

Landis hasn’t truly been relevant to pro cycling since his suspension, but being an American cycling fan has required forming an opinion on his innocence/guilt. At least initially, there were enough discrepancies about his positive test that his protestations of innocence were plausible, and his dogged pursuit of a cleared name helped his case if you were inclined to believe him. He was a sympathetic enough figure that much of the money he spent chasing what he called justice in court was donated by fans.⁷ He was a good man wronged if you believed him or a cheater trying to game the system if you didn’t. After that, the LeMond debacle and his inability to return to professional relevancy undermined a lot of his appeal.

7: He truly was a sympathetic figure for a while: Mennonite boy grows up to become mountain bike racer through practicing against his father’s wishes, then switches to road racing and is the third American to win the Tour de France. It wasn’t too hard to want to believe him when he claimed he was the victim of a false positive.

So Landis’s new remarks are something of a neon example of the trouble that comes with any such revelations about drugs in sports. The source is a man who is about as discredited as you can be. He is not only a convicted doper and at least tacitly complicit in a blackmail attempt, but if you believe him now, he has spent years of his life in the legal pursuit of a lie. Charitably viewed, he could be a man who, after spending years under the shadow of a lie born of self-preservation, has embraced searing honesty to move forward with his life. If you don’t want to give him the benefit of the doubt, here is someone who, after years of ebbing credibility and relevance, lashes out the only way he still can, soiling names of his enemies and maybe trying to blackmail the Armstrong camp.

Landis is lying about all, some or none of this. The VeloNews summary of events, while totally accurate in its treatment of the facts, misses entirely with its conclusion. The whole point, to me, is that these accusations involve what happened seven or so years ago. I don’t see how an investigation would turn up anything new from that period now, especially not something like a positive EPO test. The scrutiny that Armstrong especially has lived under for the past decade makes it vanishingly unlikely that there is damning evidence under some unturned rock. Like any doping accusation that doesn’t revolve around a solid scientific test, there is no way to elevate the charge above hearsay. The only court that will be able to judge here is the court of public opinion.

Whatever his goals and motivations are and were, Floyd Landis is in a position where even his apologists, however many remain, will be hard-pressed to imbue his statements with much sense of credibility. If he’s telling the truth now, he’s been living a lie since 2006. It’s not knowable for those of us who weren’t on the Postal Service squad at the time just how much veracity there is in his accusations, but it’s quite certain that he has lost the respect of just about everyone in the cycling world. For the sake of Landis the man, I hope that he is now committed to being honest, no matter what, but I’m not sure there’s a road here for him to salvage any sort of good name in cycling for himself. He’s too compromised at this point, his actions are too rife with possible ulterior motives, to be trusted. He has lost the respect of his peers, the media and the fans, so unless he can produce some sort of overwhelming evidence of these salacious claims his word will never be trusted.


So What

Respect is one of the main currencies of sports.⁹ Wins and money are the scoreboard statistics, the concrete facts that can be gathered to settle arguments: Bill Russell is a winner because of his eleven championships; Nolan Ryan is the best strikeout pitcher ever to walk the earth. But beyond the accretion of those two things, respect is the most important thing athletes can win or lose. In competition, the respect (or lack thereof) of teammates and opponents dictates strategy, and therefore wins and losses, in games. Its impact is greater, however, outside the lines of competition. The meaning of a victory or championship is not intrinsic, but contingent on society valuing it. Lance Armstrong is a marketing force not because he won seven bike races in France, but because American sports culture, having been told that that was a (italics)big thing(/italics), respected that fact. Sports being, like any part of society, at its base a social construct, the respect of others is what drives recognition. Alexandre Vinokourov may yet earn back his good name, but only if he can succeed and keep his nose clean long enough to shift the narrative of his career arc away from its current focus on his drug suspension. Floyd Landis seems unlikely to ever find the redemption that clearly still means so much to him. Respect plays a role in who wins and who loses, but it has everything to do with whom we think of as winners and losers.

9: All right, of human society in general, but of sports no less for being a part of that.

Aesthetics And/Or Justice

"I fear indeed that we shall never rid ourselves of God, since we still believe in grammar." -Nietzsche, The Twilight of the Idols

"The first umpire said, 'There's balls and there's strikes, and I calls 'em like they is.'
The second umpire said, 'Well, I think it's a bit more complicated than that. There's balls and there's strikes, and I calls 'em as I sees 'em.'
The third umpire smiled. 'Well, there's balls. And there's strikes. But they ain't nothing until I calls 'em.'" -Allegorical

In a recent post, The Run of Play's Brian Phillips discusses the structural role of blown calls. His defense of bad calls is beautiful: whereas if a sport's¹ meaning exists in terms of its skeleton of rules, any flaw in enforcement necessarily undermines the sport, "[i]f soccer is a story... the narrative can take in anything and... its aesthetic greatness doesn’t depend on the sympathy between actions and the rules. You wouldn’t stop Macbeth from killing the king, because then you wouldn’t have Macbeth."

1: Run of Play is going steady with soccer, but the issues at hand are obviously more universal. I'm not gonna bother mangling quotes in the name of semantic consistency or avoid relevant non-soccer examples.

The post's paradigmatic example is Maradona's Hand of God goal. In Phillips' exegesis, "the Hand of God was too great and all-comprehending a moment for the rules to have created it: it was a total summation—of Maradona’s character, of the nature of that rivalry, of everything on up to the international climate in the years after Falklands War and arguably the entire 1980s—that couldn’t possibly have existed if it weren’t at a slant to the rules. Lose that and you’re left with a fair, pure, antiseptic match that fulfills the ideal of the sport but sacrifices almost all its truest and deepest significance."

But that presupposes that narrative power is somehow endemic to the moment; or that it occurs in a vacuum; or that, depending on circumstances, it happens or it doesn't. Narrative is constructed retrospectively, though, making that counter-factual sort of glib. Had the Hand of God been called in strict, omniscient compliance with the rules, you're left with an intensely competitive World Cup quarter final featuring "The Goal of the Century", charged with all the baggage of the Faulklands War and ending regulation in a 1-1 tie. Fair, sure. But pure and antiseptic? The hypothetical match might not match the historical match's depth of significance, but there would be no sacrifice, no lack of truth: it would be a different game, signifying differently. But the point remains that la mano de Dios did happen, and it was a pure, searing Moment that transcended its match and struck hard at some supposed locus of truth and justice.


So we're left with the moment as it really happened, to interpret how we will. Analyzing this choice, Phillips offers up a dichotomy that I can't quite get behind. On one hand, there is "the game", a stern, legalistic endeavor seeking only to operate within its parameters. On the other is "the story", casting wide its net without judgement so much as interpretation. For one, there is no good and bad; for the other, no right and wrong². But that formulation both limits the aesthetic possibilities of sports and ignores the very real link between game and story. To my mind, the proper analogy is the relationship between grammar and literature. Language, like sport, is a consummately human realm, with its formal rules and suggestions and exceptions, susceptible of a whole slew of teleological and aesthetic significances. There is value in both Wittgenstein and Gertrude Stein. And just like in sports, the rules and the beauty of language overlap imperfectly.

2: This is, of course, a huge oversimplification, and just like in real life, something is lost when you boil things down this much. Demi-glace this ain't.

A bigger problem is how Phillips tries to reconcile his ideal of soccer's philosophical acceptance of bad calls with the governance of the sport, what he calls the "'game as a story/save the Hand of God' line... as an argument for design". He fully recognizes that premeditated bad calls are a hopeless cause, but totally misses why: "There’s no doubt that a certain amount of bad refereeing enhances the narrative of the game, but that isn’t FIFA’s angle, and in any case giving match officials a certain quota of blown calls to reach would just trade epic accidents for bureaucratic stupidities. The Hand of God wouldn’t mean anything if it had resulted from discretionary refereeing choice built into the rules of the game, because you can’t program spontaneous mysticism."


What's really missing here is the recognition that a blown call is not merely an error or an aberration, it is a failure. To ignore that is to reduce the referees to automatons, to deny them their dignity, agency, and yes, their narrative and tragic power. The NBA has reached the point where referees have name recognition and individual reputations³ for fairness, bias, or incompetence. This is fine grist for the narratively-inclined, but the uncertain ground from which it springs doesn't simply reduce out. It's a necessary part of the game as it is played, by athletes and referees alike, because the parameters are fluid. There is a long history of diegetic whistle-swallowing⁴ in basketball, especially come playoff time. Fundamentally, refereeing is a human endeavor, fluid and rife with contingency.

3: In more concrete analysis, there's some fascinating work going on collecting referee stats.
4: To say nothing of "star calls". Really, let's say nothing about them.

So to say "human error is part of the game" is a lame excuse only holds water if you reduce the game to its rules or reduce the referees to an abstraction. Phillips claims, "The wider the circle within which you’re willing to see the game as aesthetic, in other words, the more you wind up relying on chance and accident," but I don't think that's it at all; the wider the circle within which you're willing to see the game as aesthetic, the more you wind up relying on people.

Draw Up a Morality Play on the Clipboard

“A work of art is useless as a flower is useless. A flower blossoms for its own joy. We gain a moment of joy by looking at it. That is all that is to be said about our relations to flowers. Of course man may sell the flower, and so make it useful to him, but this has nothing to do with the flower. It is not part of its essence. It is accidental. It is a misuse.” – Oscar Wilde

Sport is an arena populated by human beings. Human beings are, by nature, given to success and failure, kindness and pettiness, acts of grace and acts of violence. Their actions result from the best of intentions, the worst and every shade of grey in between. This is, of course, true both on and off the field of play. None of that is news; we all know it, and yet so much of the conversation about sports seems to be dedicated to ignoring that fact. Moral outrage is the currency for transgression; the dialogue demands its pound of flesh from anyone “caught” at anything it is publicly decided they shouldn’t have been doing.

The problem, it seems to me, stems from our inability to reconcile the human actors in sports with the transcendence our following of said sports sometimes provides us, what Oil Can called applied aesthetic immanence. Moments of perfection, both big and small, get under our skin. A pitcher setting a batter up and then striking him out with a perfect changeup. Your favorite team winning the championship. A guard breaking his defender’s ankles. A breakaway holding off the peloton to win the day. We all have self-constructed buttons our fandom positions us to occasionally have pushed.¹ The moments when you jump out of your seat, unable to keep from shouting and the quiet instants of knowing are what keep us coming back, keep us hooked to the games/matches/races. There is a purity at the core of this feeling, an unalloyed joy seldom allowed us anywhere else in life. Inside the moment(s) of immanence, context and contingency are swept away, unimportant, as we soak in all that we can.

1: The rarer it is that any given button gets pushed, the more import it gets. A thunderous dunk jolts you; a championship moves you. Cf. the graph in this post.

It is a betrayal of this feeling when we are reminded that the purity of an action is no guarantor of the purity of the actor. Even though the private lives and decisions of the moving parts in the setpieces of our transcendence are not our business and wholly unrelated to why and how we know them, we can’t help but care. Every morsel we learn about them informs a facet of their picture, making us feel like we have a more perfect knowledge of them and their game; when what we learn doesn’t square with the perfection of the moments we hold closest it’s easy to hold that against the athlete. If a player drives drunk or assaults someone, it has absolutely nothing to do with his game and skill on the court. There is no direct connection, but most of us nonetheless can’t shake the emotional connection we’ve constructed.

With our wall-to-wall media coverage of the famous, gotcha press tenor and the lifestyle afforded our stars by the money we indirectly pay them, the trap is continually set. Athletes will keep getting caught sleeping around on their wives, driving drunk, making poor decisions with firearms and violence and doing all of the petty, shortsighted and small things that humans as a data set will do. The same is true of any other profession, be it teachers/executives/postmen/etc, especially the rich. Any failings pros might have are compounded by a living in a bubble where every wheel is greased by money and/or fame. As Tiger Woods recently demonstrated so pyrotechnically, everything is for the taking at the top, right up until the instant it blows up in your face, be it because you went a step too far, made a stupid choice or just got unlucky. But for every guy whose cover gets blown, there are countless more who count their blessings it wasn’t their spot that got blown up.


Constructing an Echo Chamber

“In ‘punishing’ the debtor, the creditor participates in a right of the masters: at last he, too, may experience for once the exalted sensation of being allowed to despise and mistreat someone as ‘beneath him’—or at least, if the actual power and administration of punishment has already passed to the ‘authorities,’ to see him despised and mistreated. The compensation, consists in a warrant for and title to cruelty.” – Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals

The sports media is responsible for public outrage. Everybody calibrates his or her own personal response, but we don’t get the luxury of doing it in a vacuum. When you read on the ESPN info scroll that someone is in trouble for something, you get to decide, consciously or not, whether that sets off any of your personal alarms. But to even get to that point, the story has already made it through the filter as newsworthy. If something happens and doesn’t get picked up, we don’t have a chance to get worked up about it. It’s the tree falling in the forest.

Once a story gets reported, it can vanish the next day or it can get shouted about for weeks. The gravity of the offense is certainly one of the factors here, but hardly the only one. Does it seem juicy? How famous is the player? What kind of relationship does the culprit have with the media?² How does the transgression square up with the star’s public persona? What race is he?

2: Barry Bonds is by nearly all reports a world-class ass and would have people on his case no matter what, but don’t you think he would have gotten a bit more slack if he’d been a little friendlier in the locker room throughout his career? Contrast him to Tony La Russa, who was caught dead drunk and asleep in his car at an intersection, but who got off with a misdemeanor and an apology and whose story vanished from the news cycle. (Barry's trouble, of course, also stemmed from being an angry black man, not just one unfriendly to the media, and it sure didn't hurt Tony that he was a middle-aged white dude...)

The point is that the public reacts to what they’re told, how often they’re told it and how loudly it’s told. The sporting media is not even close to impartial, but its biases don’t seem to get taken into account when they tell us to get mad about something. We don’t seem to have any critical distance from the feedback loop of noise and outrage.

Now think about team and league responses. Players get fined/suspended and pr statements are put out variously supporting and damning players. Sometimes we’re asked to respect a man/family’s privacy in a time of personal trouble, sometimes the culprit is thrown under a bus. It would be nice if the calculus were that of guilt, severity and mitigating factors, but the truth is that the only calculations are money and public relations (also known as future money). The more a player is worth, the more everyone has their back. The more they’re a burden, the faster they get thrown to the wolves. If they’re unimportant, they either are made an example of or get no words at all. Why do you think Arenas is suspended right now for finger guns and Javaris Crittenton isn’t for chambering a round?


Signal and Noise



I have no outrage in me for the private failings of sports stars. If they break the law, I want them to face whatever punishment our legal system decrees fitting. If they break a league rule, I want them to be penalized as appropriate.³ Beyond that, I don’t care. Outrage is in vogue culturally at the moment, and this is no less true in sports than elsewhere. ESPN plays to this because people pay attention. Any time a player gets targeted for anything less than a monstrous act, though, I just end up feeling sorry for the player. Sure, Mark McGwire used steroids, and I’m all for rigorous testing, but so did 20-50% of baseball (roughly), so how is it fair to hold it against only him? Clean up the system, but don’t arbitrarily crucify anyone. All right, Tiger Woods slept around on his wife, but that’s not illegal, it’s just sleazy, and how is it our business? Gilbert Arenas is going to have to deal with his guilty plea; I don’t see how punishment beyond that is fair or should be up to us.

3: This is only really true as relates to competitive fairness. I wish players weren’t muzzled by the threat of fines when talking to the media. It would be a far more interesting sports world if players could always speak their minds.

The bottom line, for me, is this: I want my sports stars to play sports. What they do with their lives beyond that simply isn’t my business. If they do something with repercussions in sports, either because it physically gets in the way of them playing or because legal ramifications impede their career, that’s germane to my fandom and I’ll pay attention. But outside of that narrow window, I’d prefer to respect their privacy rather than play the morality police. It’s just not my damn business.