15 septembre 2005

Note du webmestre : Le 13 septembre 2005, l'Association cycliste canadienne annonçait la suspension de Chris Sheppard pour dopage à l'EPO.

La réaction fut immédiate sur le Forum du site internet The Canadian Cyclist. Sous le couvert de l'anonymat, les propos condamnant ou excusant Sheppard s'y firent nombreux. Voici quelque chose de différent qui a retenu notre attention.

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It is 100% impossible to prevent athletes from doping. Period. There will always be an abuse before there will be a test. Every time a new drug comes out, it gets absorbed into the peloton. The test is developed, the less resourceful/more stupid athletes get caught and smoke screens go up. Use of the drug is decried, scape goats are named and a few people have their careers ended. Then a new one comes out and the cycle continues. As things are, THIS WILL CONTINUE FOREVER.

It was strychnine in the 40's & 50s, steroids in the 60's, 70's & 80's, EPO and growth hormone in the 90's to date. Media can go on and on about honesty and testing and losing your reputation and "dopers suck" as much they want but as long as the kid down the block can make more hitting a ball or pedaling a bike than he can doing a regular job, there's gonna be lots of motivation for him to get good at hitting that ball or riding that bike.

This is actually very related to a rather odd facet of human behavior - most people are not inherently dishonest. However, most people would commit a dishonest act to their benefit if they didn't think they would get caught (or, for all you mathematicians out there, the expected outcome of committing the dishonest act was more beneficial than either not committing the act or committing the act when compared to the probability of being caught).

Choice doesn't seem to come down to honesty, but rather to perceived outcome. As long as the perceived benefit of using drugs in sport is in excess of the costs, drug use will continue. There is no way around this : how many million dollar pay cheques did Filip Meirhaghe need to be comfortable for the rest of his life ? ONE. He took drugs probably for years, cheated, got a bunch of money and is now probably quite well off and probably will be for the rest of his life. With all that fame and glory with his racing and honesty about his drug use, at the end of the day, he'll probably go down in history as a guy people still want to be. If he dies at forty, hooked up to a kidney dialysis machine with tumors the size of watermelons where his nuts used to be, who's gonna know ?

This is where I make my point : if we let athletes dope as much as they want, for as long as they want, lets see how attractive the later lives of these people are to young athletes today. Factoring bone marrow transplants into the drug taking equation might make that downside risk look a little less attractive as would watching athletes starve for oxygen during the Olympics as their hearts explode in the 100m dash or suffer aneurisms on live TV while heaving school buses over their heads.

Why don't people do more Cocaine or Heroine or Smoke or become alcoholics ? It isn't because you get tested for drugs at work or school. It's because you know that if you start taking them the costs are higher than the benefits. You get high... and then you lose your job, society ostracises you and you become the crazy strung out bum begging for change on the church steps.

Education = Change but realization needs to happen first. Cigarettes and Cocaine were cool until people started dying (for many people and for obvious reasons much of the consequence of doping is lost in technical semantics and translation of opinion - but people understand death very well).

If athletes start dying, young athletes will see this and alter their assessment of the cost benefit relationship associated with cheating and start changing their behavior.

People will always do what they think is best for them. If something isn't the best anymore, people won't do it.

Vicvip5r

Réactions

And the solution to corporate fraud is...let them ? The solution to cheating on your taxes is...let them ? Speeding....let them ?

I do agree thought that eventually people will get it. I'm just a little worried we'll be bounced from the Olympics (see baseball) and the sport will be dead except for cage-fighting type fans in the meantime.

Gotta go ride.

Lister Farrar

Canadians do think that they are somehow immune to greed, corruption and scandal.

Admittedly, however, we can be proud of our culture and our relatively low violent crime rate and general law-abiding nature are testament to that.

While programs such as 'scared straight' have shown some effectivity with youth offenders, these are still but bandaids as they are applied to the wound after it has been inflicted. Fundamentally, we are dealing with culture. In this case culture in professional cycling. Like it or not, and let's be honest, professional cycling is one of the dirtiest sports when it comes to PED use. Chris Sheppard is barely but another name newly etched into our own Vietnam-style memorial.

Culture is one of the hardest things to change. Simple scare tactics about what sort of cancer you might contract have already been shown to be ineffective as a deterrent to teen PED use. Studies of teens have time and again shown that they would willingly take the quick gain against the risk of long-term pain.

To change behavior, it is active, self-reinforcing programs like AA that actually do work. Such programs promote constant awareness with peer-supported re-education and re-training if you will.

Moreover, examples have to be set at the top. Telling kids they can't when the adults and icons do, is duplicitous. As we should all remember, teens see right through that type of argument. It is striking (pun intended ?) that in the year (1998) after Mark McGwire hit his home run record, there was a sharp increase in steroid use by the younger teens, roughly a 50 percent increase (source: Johnston, University of Michigan).

In change management, one of the biggest levers can be a crisis. The old boiled frog joke is the classic metaphor:

Q: How do you boil a frog ?
A: Throw it into a pot of cold water and turn up the heat. If you throw it into a pot of boiling water, the frog will jump out.

We may actually have a significant crisis on our hands. Recently, there have been a number of untimely deaths in the pro peloton. If these are linked to PED use, as tragic as that may be, it may also offer enough of a crisis to galvanize action. The Festina crisis did launch WADA, but drug use actually appears to be escalating.

Fundamentally, to lick this problem, we have to come up with cultural change that is self-supporting and is attractive, rather than simply repulsive.

Let's also be honest about what we are up against. It is not just the culture of athletes that we have to be concerned about, but also the medical profession and the pharmaceutical industry.

"Our nation is in the throes of an epidemic of controlled prescription drug abuse and addiction," said Joseph A. Califano, Jr., CASA's chairman and president and former U.S. Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare. "While America has been congratulating itself in recent years on curbing increases in alcohol and illicit drug abuse, and in the decline in teen smoking, abuse of prescription drugs has been stealthily, but sharply, rising.

From 1992 to 2003, abuse of controlled prescription drugs grew at a rate twice that of marijuana abuse; five times that of cocaine abuse; 60 times that of heroin abuse."

According to CASA, the 15.1 million Americans abusing controlled prescription drugs exceed the combined number abusing cocaine (5.9 million), hallucinogens (4.0 million), inhalants (2.1 million) and heroin (.3 million).

Additionally, "Between 1991 and 2003, rates of lifetime steroid abuse among high school students increased 126 percent, with abuse among girls up by nearly 350 percent, compared to 66 percent among boys."

So what do we do ?

1. Let's first fully acknowledge the problem and stop pretending.
2. Let's be honest about the factors contributing to the problem.
3. Let's develop sustainable structures and programs that are self-reinforcing, that rely upon and encourage group/peer support, and that can create and sustain cultural change.

I firmly believe that we can accomplish #3, but have to get our heads out of the sand and see the crisis for what it is. With this forum and even the head of the UCI as examples, we are still somewhere well north of a 40% denial rate.

Dave.

I just want to say that if this is true, then as a past 7 time National MTB team member and someone who personally competed against Chris on a regular basis... I am disgusted and angry.`

Thanks (in part) to people like you, I (and many others) will never know just how far we may have gone in the sport. How does it feel to have competed for so long and devote so much of your life to a sport only to be exposed as a cheater ?

No one will truly know which of your results were clean, all your accomplishments will be tainted and forgotten. If it wasn't hard to live with then, perhaps it will be hard to live with now.

Neil Grover
Sep 19 2005

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