Originally Posted by alienator .
There are cheats in every sport and in pretty much every area of life, but legitimizing the cheats serves no purpose at all. As in cycling, there are many cheats at college and in graduate schools. Do we want to say, "Cheating in school is okay since we'll never be rid of it and can't catch them all"? Moreover, just because it's difficult to do something--catching riders who dope and the people who support and provide the means for doping--is no reason to not do that something. The sport is much better off without rampant doping, IMHO. It will of course take time to minimize doping in cycling, but it will happen as new racers enter the sport that has a different attitude toward cycling and as the cycling public has cycling under closer scrutiny.
I don't think it should be legitimized, I just think it's going to require fresh thinking. The Bio Passport is an example of a fresh way to look at the problem, but it needs to go further.
Some of that would be re-definition of cheating, but only some. As a parallel, Calculators used to be considered cheating, now they're finding out that kids who use calculators are actually better at mental arithmetic than people who rely on pencil and paper in those early years.
Extrapolating that to cycling. Let's say someone has naturally low Testosterone levels. Would taking synthetic Testosterone be acceptable if you only used it to get to normal levels? Right now I don't think it is (could be wrong on that one, but you get the idea).
Another example in this way of thinking is Hemocrit. It's capped at 50%. What if they said, who cares how you get to 50%, but at 50.1% you're banned. Now perhaps legitimate doctors work out in the open in sterile conditions rather than in hotel rooms.
Hemocrit obviously is a straw man that can easily be torn down, but I'm trying more to illustrate the type of thinking, not actual examples, so bear that in mind. I just think "test to see if you took X" isn't workable because someone will just invent Y and/or find a way to fool the test for X. It's an arms race that's almost certain to be lost since the testers don't even know what's coming till it's practically disco.
What happens when someone invents a PED that does not cause adverse health issues? Now what is the moral argument against it? It's been a while, but last I heard the jury is still out in finding any long lasting adverse effects of synthetic HGH if it's not abused (of course Ibuprophen is bad if abused, so that by itself isn't enough of an argument).
I guess in summary I think cycling needs a mixture of re-thinking a few things, and those things that aren't re-thought they need to work smarter instead of harder. And I'd also argue it's more important now than it was in Lance's day because more teams seem to be running clean, so the dopers actually have a bigger advantage since there are fewer of them.
