It would kill the sport…that’s for sure…as much as I love my sport I wouldn’t watch it anymore …then it would truly be like pro wrestling…riders would still up the ante on levels of doping deemed legal to get an edge of course…besides, racing, after a ten year hiatus, has finally become exciting again…anyone wonder why differ folks are winning differ races this year? Watching a guy like Gerrans take a big stage as he did yesterday wouldn’t be happening…if you are going to allow doping just go whole hog…put the cyclists on steroids, then put horses on them, throw in a couple of junked up cheetas and crystal methed out camels and have a Dr. Doolittle style super inter-breed race for the mega stash at the end of the hallucinatory rainbow…ratings would certainly go up…

There’s “legalized” and there’s “legalized.” Tolerating some things does not mean tolerating everything, just as having ultra-light, ultra strong carbon composites doesn’t mean that there’s not restrictions on what you can and cannot do in building your bike.

What bothers me in all of the anti-doping regulation and enforcement is that it’s a top-down enforcement model seems to be flawed. It doesn’t work, and I doubt very much that the calls for more testing, for greater and greater burden of proof on the athletes to demonstrate they’re ‘clean’ will do anything more than escalate the arms race between testers and the tested. Whether legalized, or regulated at some level, what seems lost is that an essentially outside organization (e.g. WADA) has a top down prohibition model that puts them as separate from the athletes. It very much comes across as a “we know what’s best and we can do what we want to make you prove that you’re doing what we know is best.” I suspect that it sets up a fundamentally adversarial relationship between the overseers and competitors and that sort of situation does not have a stable equilibrium. Upping the number of blood draws and cups pissed into and creating ‘biological passports’ changes this.

It’s a guess, but I suspect that those presently cheating, in no small part see themselves as against something other than their actual competitors. (I have always found it interesting that professional golfers have been known to turn themselves in for rules violations.) Trying to put one over on the old men with funny hats who have dictated the rules to you likely seems different to competitors than violating something that their fellow athletes have come to consensus on what constitutes fair play. And athletes are, I suspect, much more in tune with who is and isn’t playing fairly and it fosters more of a community where playing fairly is important because you’re no longer ‘cheating WADA’ but cheating your fellow riders.

Will there be cheaters? Probably (though I suspect that there will be less). Will their be things that would be ‘legal’ that presently aren’t? Probably. Is some of it going to be more dangerous than abiding by strict prohibition? Maybe (but there’s inherent risk in most sport anyhow). But I would rather those taking the risks could talk about and decide for themselves where those lines should be drawn and be given the power to figure out how those lines would be enforced.

At any level of tolerance in the gray zone (and it is a gray zone—I do no think that there’s any standard logic that dictates what gets written down as ‘cheating’ and what doesn’t) I would much rather turning over the enforcement and overseeing to the athletes.

If the choice is the sport continuing as it is, or legalising doping, then I think I’d have to favour legalising doping. The sport is in a horrible situation, and if pretty much everyone good is doping anyway, we might as well bring it above board and stop banning all the stars.

The possibility that exists, that makes the current disasterous situation worth enduring, is that the testing might be starting to work and the peloton may be getting cleaner. I’d like to believe this is so, and I certainly don’t want to give up now.

But in 10 years, if nothing has changed, we still have to treat brilliant performances as evidence against the rider who achieves them, and half the stars are all banned, then it’ll be time to start thinking seriously about throwing in the towel and just letting the riders, and the doctors, just get on with it.