trailgumby wrote:Alex Simmons/RST wrote:It's a bit like tax. You do everything within the rules to minimise tax you have to pay (mad if you don't as Kerry Packer used to say). Sometimes those methods might seem wrong, but if them's the rules it's hard to complain about people working within them.
The distinction that seems to be missing from this argument is that the reason we battle sports doping is the impact on athletes' health.
There were a lot of deaths linked to EPO use where the cyclist's otherwise healthy hearts just stopped in their sleep, and there has been a long trail of death and damaged health from doping going back to the 1880s, using substances that were widely and legally available at the time, and even earlier with the ultra-distance running mania that preceded the cycling boom, through to the last few decades
Just because it isn't on the WADA's list of banned substances and methods doesn't mean its use or abuse is risk free.
Largely I agree with you Alex, however I'd encourage you to cast your net wider when considering the risks and ethics of supplementation.
You know, so far no one has actually produced any documented evidence of all these supposed deaths being directly attributed to the misuse of EPO. Not that I'm saying we should be using it or that it's not dangerous, but running a line devoid of evidence/facts does not help the cause IMO.
I'm not arguing that protecting health is not a sound rationale for anti-doping but it is most certainly not it's only rationale.
But let's for a moment consider health being a key thing to protect and as a rationale for prohibiting a substance or method. Does anyone think that what an elite athlete does is healthy (and think not only of cycling but of a myriad of sports where bodies are put through all sorts of hell for years on end, often from a very young age)? Elite athletes constantly push their bodies to and beyond breaking point, not to mention the psychological health issues and a lot get spat out along the way (e.g. look at Michael Gallagher's example of the pressure and expectations leading to mental health issues and a contributing factor in succumbing to doping).
You have to wonder if sometimes strategic, well founded and properly supervised use of
some currently prohibited treatments might actually be a way to protect an athlete's health.
Again I'm
not advocating such an approach since all that will happen is a bit like the speed limit on a highway. When it's 100, people tend to do a little over that. When it's 110, well they tend to do just a over that. Unless they see a policeman and then people slow down. Where they get caught is when they don't realise they are being monitored.
Anti-doping rules sort of work the same way, and act as a speed limit which people bump up against or go over at times, and work out how to game the way the "police" patrol the doping highway. The only thing that will limit doping is the certainty of being caught. At present the risk of being caught (if you are not an idiot) is still very low. And if athletes are doing no more than what the rules permit, well it's hard to slam them for that, they have a highly competitive job to do.
In terms of whether something is to be prohibited, being a health risk is one rationale, but it's not a necessary one for a substance to be prohibited. There are many non-prohibited substance which are equally dangerous if not used with due care.
One of the rationale's for anti-doping is PR - to give sport the
appearance of being clean, much more than it's about making it
actually clean. That's quite obvious when you see how inadequate anti-doping action really is. The combined annual budgets of the world's anti doping agencies is less than what many individual sports stars earn. There is very little political will for doing much more.