The doctors should stick those needles up their a$$es

This started as a reply to a comment on this blog before taking on a life of its own, in response to an editorial in the science journal Nature posing the possibility of doping-legal sports.

One counter-argument to the idea that sports could or should progress towards allowing "enhancements" as a modernization is that allowing "enhancements" might turn the sport into a contest of doctors rather than a contest of athletes.

Cynics have pointed out that the best-funded teams also seem to have the largest medical staffs. A friend's brother is a Euro pro and he was busted for using EPO due to high hematocrit: he couldn't microdose because he didn't have anyone to smuggle it over the border for him, let alone set up a dosing regime, so he had to use a large injection before a stage race and before the end his hematocrit had spiked. Others with more staff had help and could manage their hematocrit to be consistently in the high 40's.

(The suspension didn't do wonders for his career: his team (who had been "helpful", shall we say) canned him and he found himself persona non grata for a while. I believe he's still racing, cleanly I hope--I think he found a level he could compete at without "enhancement", but he ain't gonna be playing with the Protour boys much ever.)

Anyway, back to the doctors thing: if the biggest teams are paying for the best "medical assistance", they're not getting their money's worth: T-Mobile, Astana, and Saunier Duval have pretty big budgets (Cofidis less so) and they're the ones getting busted. Perhaps the lower expectations laid upon, say, AG2R or Francaise des Jeux or Gerolsteiner are enough to allow them to run clean(er) programs.

Is it simply a romantic notion that cycling (or any other sport) should be drug-free? I think a major difference between cycling and other professional sports is the intermingling of professional and amateur athletes: how many amateur racers have participated in a Pro/1/2(.../3... maybe /4...) race? Well, thousands. If doping is to be legal, I guess it would be legal for amateurs too, or else those Pro/1/2+ races would be silly. But that raises an even uglier spectre than the commonly held view of the present situation that there are amateur idiots already doping on the sly. Can you imagine bike conversations held post-legalization? Rather than "how often are you doing interval workouts? How hard?"*, would you want to discuss "how many injections are you doing? What dose?" Bike geek conversations are geeky enough without being medically geeky too.

Other sports, in my view, do far more to isolate their professional ranks from the amateurs--I'm not aware of too many guys playing full-contact football after college. Drug tests for any of the "Big 4" sports are a non-issue, not that I think any of them are clean (and American football, both college and pro, gets the biggest raised eyebrows from me). At first glance, I wouldn't be worried if football, or baseball, or basketball, decided that "enhacement" wasn't a problem--they're businesses, and bigger bangs, faster plays, etc. are what they're need to supply. The inevitable fallout would be the knock-on effects as the pressure to dope at the college and high school levels would be too great.

So, as romantic and impractical and backward-looking an opinion as it may be, I do not think that "enhancements" should be legalized for athletes at any level. Medicine should not concern itself with improvement of human stock; its mission is to address need, not want. I'm sure Doctors Without Borders would appreciate the donation of $50,000 that an athlete or team has paid in order to get someone across a line half a second faster and do far more to "enhance" the quality of life of many individuals. If or when doctors follow the demands of the free market and pursue "enhancement", my view is that they are no longer practicing medicine and their peers should expel them.

*haven't done an interval workout yet; clearly, not working on them very hard