Soccerball and Golf forced to face their own doping demons

Oh it’s totally educational. You hear about a drug in cycling and eventually – sometimes within a few months, more usually within a few years – it’ll crop up in other sports and you cam amaze and impress your friends by being ahead of the curve with your knowledge of it.

There are of course exceptions to this rule, such as that Serbian with the placenta hocus-pocus that seems to be the in thing in soccerball these days, which is a yeugh too far even for cyclists, it seems. Calf’s blood? Yeah, I’ll risk CJD. Placenta extract? Yeugh, no thanks!

Goof points thebongolian. A couple of responses.

The placebo effect thing. One thing I didn’t try to squeeze in above the line is why Actovegin seems to have been so popular within the peloton for so long (it’s a decade now since it appeared). The main reason is that I don’t actually know. For every report I found citing a sports scientist offering an explantion, I seemed to find another offering an entirely different explanation.

Some say it has general oxygen-carrying properties, a la EPO (which ties in with the uptake in its use co-inciding with Sydeny). Some say those properties are only local (justifying its use for road-rash say, in that it supposedly speeds revovery). Some say it has an insulin-like effect, aiding glycogen take-up (hence its diabetes association). And some say that WADA (and the list-makers before them) have it right – it is neither performance enhancing (what enhancement it offers is, as you suggest, due to the placebo effect) nor dangerous (if we were to judge it dangerous solely based on the evidence of the Manzano case we might also have to judge caffeine dangerous, as that too was part of his cocktail – and what an appalling vista that would be).

One use positied that struck me was as a masking agent. Earlier this week, CN had an Anne Gripper interview, supporting recent comments from Jacques Rogge to the effect that we’re winning the war on doping. In the CN piece it was stated that

One other aspect Gripper points to is the deterrence or fear of being caught that has spread though the peloton. Hypothetical perhaps, but Gripper insists there’s evidence to back her up, with fewer riders who have abnormal reticulocyte values – something that can indicate EPO use.

According to Gripper:

“It’s much harder for them to manage their reticulocytes than the haemoglobin. So it would be hard to say that they’re manipulating that. We need to also think that this has been an important element of the passport. We hear from riders that not knowing when the knock on the door will come has changed the balance between risk and benefit. They now know that the risks are significantly higher.”

But some have said that this is precisely what Actovegin can do. With micro-dosing of EPO thought to have replaced main-lining the stuff and the regular vampire checks called for by the biological passport, maybe this is a use for Actovegin that we ought learn more about.

(On a side not to that though – and take this with a pinch of salt as my knowledge of sports medicine is dodgy at best – I would have thought that Actovegin (which is after all calf’s blood) would show up as part of the homologous blood test. It is after all (isn’t it?) foreign blood being introduced to the body. If they can spot traces of Tyler Hamilton’s disappearing twin surely a little bit of bovine blood ought show up too? Maybe someone who knows more aboutt his could explain why I’m wrong with that thought.)

The other point is to do with morality.

We like to think there are hard and fast rules with regarding doping, that it’s a black and white binary world. Mostly though I see it as being much more morally ambiguous. Some sports ethicists suggest that this is actually a valid approach for explaining why doping is wrong and what amounts to doping – that we, as fans of sport, have an internal moral compass and just know when things are wrong. That a democratic approach is needed to dealing with doping. There are many flaws with implenting this approach, but they’re for another day – the basic point though holds water – that, more often that not, we do actually know when something in the sport is not the way we want the sport to be. We

do

Before Puerto helped open a few minds and convinced most sane people that Verbruggen was telling us porkies when he said the sport had cleaned up after Festina – back when I was begining to try an get my head around the fact that I hated the level of doping within the sport but still loved cycling – I wrote a piece about doping in the sport that suggested this:

It would be nice if, the next time a rider was asked the simple question of whether he has ever used drugs in his cycling career, he told the truth and listed all the drugs – the legal and the illegal – he has used and left the fans to decide for themselves how clean that makes him, instead of persisting with the myth of a clean sport.

This is something I’d still like to see. And maybe one day one of the Team Cleans will see some PR value in doping it. In the years since, in some ways, my view has only hardened even more. Legalised doping has been allowed enter the sport through the back door. There has been a phenomeonal level of abuse of the TUE system (which allegedly, WADA is now dealing with). As well as the TUEs we had the fifty-percent rule, which was permissiont o dope up to a certain level. Now we have the passport, which some say is no better. The size of the mobile pharmacies following the major races – the ones carrying legally declared drugs, not the cars of wives and fathers and associated hangers on – has become astonishing and leads you to wonder if the pleoton isn’t filled with a bunch of hypochondriacs. Either that or, for a sport we claim is the toughest in the world, cycling isn’t being played out by the most infirm athletes on the planet.

To some extent we seem to have stopped trying to kick out doping but rather to control it. Which makes me wonder sometimes whether our alleged victories in the war on doping – according to Rogge and Gripper – are worth it, or if we won’t wake up one day and, like good old King Pyrrhus, and wonder how many more victories will it be before we are totally ruined.

Conspiracy theories at UEFA Chris? Perish the thought. Go and wash your mind out with carbolic soap. And stopping reading Chomsky.

as they got the almighty…..Sevilla……oh.

No coughmobcough there