I Am Shocked, Shocked!

Large, if not at all surprising, news out of the Tour de France today, as everyone's second-favorite Kazakh, Alexandre Vinokourov, tests positive for doping. In this case, it appears that he received a blood transfusion from a second person, as he showed evidence of two different kinds of blood in his sytem. Which is, not to put too fine a point on it, kinda gross.

For a long time, I've felt that the quest for doping-free sports is absolutely quixotic, for a simple reason. If I were Dr. Von Dopenheimer, and had come up with a new method of doping which was undetectable by current testing, I would have two options. 1) Go to the head trainer of, say, Team Discovery Channel and offer to sell it to them for 3 million dollars, or 2) Go to the World Anti-Doping Agency and tell them about it, at which point presumably they say 'great, thanks, Good Samaritan; now we'll go figure out a test for it.'

The decision is obvious; you sell to the highest bidder. So the testing will always be well behind the training.

I am reminded of a typically excellent piece written several years back by Malcolm Gladwell about doping in sports. I really like his proposed solution, which is that you don't outlaw the concept of doping. After all, pretty much all of the drugs used now don't leave a telltale signature in the bloodstream or urine. Instead, you are left testing for things like the ratio of testosterone to epitestosterone. The solution, then, is to set an upper limit to this ratio, which is higher than naturally occurs in any people, but low enough to guarantee safety for the athletes involved. It may mean that you are implicitly encouraging some level of doping, whatever brings you near but not over that level.

But who cares? Should we really just declare that someone born with a natural T:E ration of 4 to 1 ought to have a better chance of winning the Tour de France, just by luck of the genetic draw? Especially since you are never going to actually win these battles, the sensible option is to limit the damage, make sure that the athletes aren't doing anything detrimental to their health, make sure everyone is competing on a level playing field, then throw your hands up and say 'well, that's all we can do!'