In article <
[email protected]>,
[email protected] wrote:
> On Jun 5, 2:38 am, Ryan Cousineau <[email protected]> wrote:
> > But I dislike doping in cycling for the same reason I dislike
> > bear-baiting: it's not seemly for our entertainment to cross such lines,
> > in this case of becoming a sport where one flirts with death in ways
> > that have nothing to do with the nature of the sport.
>
> Then regulate safety, not doping (this is consistent with my position
> that bike safety should be regulated, not bike weight). An example is
> the hematocrit standard. You have to sit down if your HCT is unusually
> high, no matter how it got there.
There's merit to this idea, but then you get forced into the corner of
potentially being forced to prove things are unsafe before you ban them.
Tom's probably right that the long-term perils of EPO aren't that bad,
but it will be a while before we really know.
> [NASCAR safety argument snipped]
>
> So you agree that safety should be the focus, not doping. Here's a
> question for you: if HCT limits are in place, what's the safety
> argument against autologous blood transfusions?
The greatest merit of this argument is that it forces me to say things
like "but autologous blood transfusions are just creepy!" And indeed,
that's the gist of the current argument against. Then we have treatments
like laser eye surgery, which in its most baroque current forms is
performance-enhancing in a great many sports (possibly including
cycling, but I suspect the advantage would be hard to measure)
> > But again, I look to the children
>
> What is this thing you have about looking at children? Brrrr.
"To," not "at." You're out of practice with this English thing, Chung.
But really, there's so many great jokes I could put here (eg, "I don't
look at them, I just wait until they turn 18 and then send them
flirtatious text messages,") but they would all be very creepy and
unseemly, and ruin my future political aspirations. Couldn't have that.
> As I've said, my plan only works if people think doping in sports is
> important and it's not. But if you were somehow misguided enough to
> think it was, you've got to create enough incentive on the riders and
> the teams to do this. Existing mechanisms don't appear to do this
> well, so you need a different mechanism.
>
> So, everyone from the same team pees into the same cup. Mix it up,
> test the team pee. You don't care about individual pee. If the team
> pee shows abnormalities, penalize every rider on the team some number
> of seconds on the next stage or the next race. Repeated offenses
> increase the penalties. You can get creative about when to apply the
> time penalty. Under the red kite might work.
Collective punishment! It makes each team responsible for the actions of
their least competent doper! Nice.
Being utterly non-sarcastic, I think this is a great idea. I think the
creation of a clean culture in cycling could easily begin at the team
level, since the teams have an incentive to sell themselves as clean to
sponsors. Already, I think there have been some real attempts to create
clean teams, though the problem is that if you really want to create a
clean-team, you likely spend a few years looking really dirty, since you
keep finding and purging your dirty riders! Meanwhile, the more
permissive teams look oh so clean...
And that's the time of negative incentive that it would be nice to
remove from the sport. I have a natural sense (as you do, by your
excellent game-theory-influenced idea) that slight changes to the
inherent incentives of pro cycling could cause big changes in the amount
of doping in the sport and the sense that it is a social norm.
Heck, this is already a sport that has well-codified social norms about
working in breaks and opportunistic attacks! I think it might manage to
incorporate a truce on drugs.
I'll fall back on a tertiary argument besides "think of the children"
and "think of the health of the racers," and that's "think of the large
corporations."
They, after all, are the sponsors of cycling, except when they stay away
because they don't want to have a drug scandal named after their company
(was the Festina incident a net benefit because of the name recognition,
or a net detriment because of the implicit association with doping?)
Cycling is arguably an under-sponsored sport, considering its inherent
attractiveness and its large audience in Europe. This may not matter to
us fans, but it should matter to the teams, the organizers, and even the
racers, whose salaries are so dependent on sponsorship levels.
I suspect this even affects the quality of competition to a certain
extent: if you were a triple-threat athlete, would you go into football,
football, or cycling?
Heck, we'd probably get better riders with more and deeper sponsorship.
--
Ryan Cousineau
[email protected] http://www.wiredcola.com/
"I don't want kids who are thinking about going into mathematics
to think that they have to take drugs to succeed." -Paul Erdos
