Why Athletes Dope
Yet again, revelations about doping in sports are in the news: Manny Ramirez and David Ortiz took steroids while playing for the world champion Boston Red Sox (is that how they finally broke the curse of the Bambino and beat the Yankees?) and the 2009 Tour de France stage 16 winner Mikel Astarloza was busted for the blood booster drug EPO (long the drug of choice among professional cyclists). When that list of juicing baseball players is eventually revealed (as it will be, despite it's alleged secrecy) there's a good chance it will contain a veritable who's who in the sport.
Like most sports fans, I don't want to believe that any of these stellar athletes are guilty, and of course, each individual is innocent until proven otherwise. However, the overwhelming evidence leads me to conclude that many, perhaps most, professional athletes dope. It is time to move beyond if and ask why. The reason is threefold: (1) the drugs work, (2) the arms race between drug takers and drug testers is consistently won by the dopers, and (3) the athletes believe they have to dope to compete. Examining each of the three shows how the game matrix of sports changed from doping as cheating to doping as a rational choice.
The Drugs. Scientific studies on the effects of Performance Enhancing Drugs (PEDs) are few in number and usually conducted on non- or recreational athletes. For obvious reasons, elite athletes who dope are disinclined to disclose their data to curious scientists, but the consensus among sports physiologists I interviewed for an extensive study I conducted for Scientific American is that using EPO and other blood doping products (including injecting your own blood drawn earlier) boosts performance a minimum of 5% to 10%, and in conjunction with the brew of other PEDs (e.g., Human Growth Hormone) an additional 5% to 10% can be squeezed out of the human engine. In events decided by less than one percent differences, this is colossal.
The drug of choice for endurance athletes is recombinant Erythropoietin (r-EPO). In its natural state EPO is a glycoprotein hormone produced by the kidneys that when released into the bloodstream binds to receptors in the bone marrow to stimulate the production of red blood cells. More red blood cells translates to more oxygen carried to the muscles. r-EPO is just as effective as blood transfusions, but instead of hassling with storing bags of blood and poking long needles into a vein, the athlete can store the tiny ampoules of the drug on ice in a thermos bottle or hotel mini fridge and simply inject it subcutaneously through a tiny needle.
The Australian sports physiologist Michael Ashenden, founder of the group Science and Industry Against Blood Doping, co-authored a 2002 study on recreational athletes in which they gave them r-EPO (or a placebo) over a 12-week span, using VO2max (maximal aerobic power) as the performance measure. The r-EPO group experienced 7.7%, 9.7%, and 4.7% improvements at weeks 4, 8, and 12, significantly better than the controls. A 2007 study on non-athletes found even more spectacular results for the miracle drug, with a 12.5% and 11.6% increase in VO2max at weeks 4 and 11, again significantly better than the placebo controls. If any of the top athletes in a sport are on the juice, their erstwhile competitors cannot afford to give away such margins. This is where the game matrix kicks into defection mode.
The Arms Race. In evolution there is an arms race between predators and prey that drives both to greater levels of fitness. In sports there is an arms race between the drug takers and the drug testers, leading to more sophisticated drugs and drug tests. In my opinion, the drug testers are five years away from catching the drug takers...and always will be. The reason is threefold: (1) it takes a long time to develop tests for new drugs (the test for r-EPO is not full proof and there is no test for Human Growth Hormone or for homologous blood doping, where you withdraw your own blood and then inject it later just before competition), (2) athletes' countermeasures are as sophisticated as the drugs (using masking agents or thinning your blood after r-EPO use), (3) the takers have a much greater financial incentive to stay ahead of the testers, and in the case of Major League Baseball, they have a powerful union on their side that protects them from too much intrusion on the part of drug testers.
The Athletes. Game theory explains the psychology of doping. Game theory is the study of how players in a game choose strategies they hope will maximize their return in anticipation of the strategies chosen by the other players in the game. Research shows that when the game is played just once, or over a fixed number of rounds without the players being allowed to communicate, cheating becomes common. But when the game is played over an unknown number of rounds the most common strategy is "tit-for-tat," where you begin by cooperating and then do whatever the other player does. Even more cooperation can be induced when players are allowed to accumulate experience with the other players in order to establish trust. But once defection builds momentum there is a cascading sequence of cheating throughout the system.
In sports, the rules clearly prohibit the use of PEDs. But because the drugs are extremely effective and the payoffs for success are so high, and because most of the drugs are difficult, if not impossible, to detect, or the tests can be beat with countermeasures, or the governing body of the sport itself (as in the case of Major League Baseball) doesn't fully support a comprehensive anti-doping testing program, the incentive to dope is powerful. Once a few elite athletes in a sport defect to gain an advantage over their cooperating competitors, they too must defect (even if they only think others are cheating), leading to a cascade of defection down through the ranks. Because the rules are clear, however, a code of silence prevents any open communication and cooperation between competitors and teams in order to reverse the defection trend (and thus the "secret" list of doping baseball players must be released to break the code of silence).
Solutions. The only hope of salvaging professional sports is to change the game matrix. To that end I have five recommendations:
1. Immunity for all athletes pre-2009. Since the entire system is corrupt and most competitors have been doping, it accomplishes nothing to strip the winner of his title after the fact when it is almost certain that the runners' up were also doping. Immunity will enable retired athletes to work with governing bodies and anti-doping agencies for improving the anti-doping system.
2. Increase the number of competitors tested, in competition, out-of-competition, and especially immediately before or after a race to prevent counter-measures from being employed. Sport sanctioning bodies should create a biological baseline profile on each athlete before the season begins to allow for proper comparison of unusual spikes in performance in competition.
3. An X-Prize type reward to increase the incentive of anti-doping scientists to develop new tests for presently undetectable doping agents, in order to equalize the incentive for drug testers to that of drug takers. Money is a universal incentive.
4. Increase substantially the penalty for getting caught. A 50-game ban on Manny Ramirez is a joke. No Major League player will take that seriously as a deterrent. Professional cycling has a two-year ban, which is a good start. And yet still some cyclists are doping. So, with immunity for pre-2009 sporting events, implement starting today a new policy of one strike and you're out, forever. To protect the athlete from false positives or inept drug testers (both exist), the apparatus for arbitration and appeals must be fair and trusted by both sanctioning bodies and athletes, but once a decision is made it must be substantive and final.
5. A return of all salary paid and prize monies earned by the convicted athlete to the team and/or its sponsors and investors, and extensive team testing of their own athletes.
These recommendations may sound draconian, or perhaps utopian, but something must be done to prevent professional sports from turning into a pharmaceutical competition.
Michael Shermer is an adjunct professor at Claremont Graduate University, the publisher of Skeptic magazine and a monthly columnist for Scientific American. His latest book is The Mind of the Market. mshermer@skeptic.com
Follow Michael Shermer on Twitter: www.twitter.com/michaelshermer
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Here's how you settle it: Make performance-enhancing drugs legal. Then create a separate records catalog. If athletes become monsters, that's more entertaining for the rest of us. I'd love to see a runner shave off seconds, or a baseball travel 14 miles out of a stadium, or football players hit like trucks (which they do already).
Making it legal will also isolate the purists from the "cheaters." And then you can decide to root for one or the other, thereby making the sport more exciting via more rivalry. That is, until the monsters become so good that the purists are overlooked by owners.
Why is sports cheating with PEDs worthy of stronger punishment than, say, speeding?
Do we know tests for PEDs work reliably? With minor false-positive rates, a significant of innocents will have their reputations destroyed on evidence that would not stand up in a US court of law.
Who will pay for testing? Steroid and EPO tests can cost $500 each to run. Maybe affordable at the highest levels of pro sports, but prohibitive elsewhere. Your High School cannot afford $600,000 a year to test the football team - 60 players, 10x a year, at $1000 each for EPO and steroids.
What do we do about people who will take PEDs for the Tuesday night B-league softball, or t the 10k run-to-save-fluffy-bunnies? Amateurs do take PEDs with no incentive beyond ego.
Will we prohibit things that are medically safe and effective for non-athletes? Hormone replacement therapy can keep testosterone at normal, not elevated, levels. Another is asthma relief. A last one to consider -- hard training can be exhausting, and result in depression. Should we consider Zoloft to be performance enhancing, and ban anyone taking it from competition? Do we want people to not take it so they can compete, and emotionally take it out on themselves or their families to "be clean?"
This is an ethical swamp, and given human nature, we cannot simply drain it with platitudes and black and white thinking.
-dB
Are you kidding me? Here's the answer in one sentence:
The minimum salary for MLB is $400,000 a year.
jp
The current culture is ALL ABOUT instant gratification which is not to imply that anything has changed from 100 years ago. When a professional athlete chooses quantity for quality of life that should be an individual decision. Professional sports could, and should, test for the juiced substances in order to modify the stats to accommodate control over the flow of money. This standard, however, could not be applied to college sports unless the money compensation to athletes becomes unrestricted. Then again there would be no point of separation if that were to occur. College is to learn what one needs to know in order to succeed in life--or is it? Immediate satisfaction is all that really matters regardless of the human cost. Freedom is absolute isn't it? Politics is the pursuit and exercise of power and that is a fact which is the thread of our society. Control. Depends on who you ask.
People don't want to acknowledge, admit, or hear this...
But welcome to the Future of Sports.
Sports among the general populace has faced a more rabid fanaticism than its ever had in the last 30 years or so.
And with this, comes the idea of pushing the human body to its highest limits.
Many Sci-Fi novels have explored these human possibilities over the decades.
And it's a known fact that many governments have studied and used various "bio-techniques" to make their athletes faster and stronger.
Combine this with society's rabid addiction to winning,
And this is what we come up with.
I'm not saying it's right.
But what I am saying is that give it another couple of decade,
And things like steroids will be acceptable.
Because we are seeing a new advancement of the human body when it to sports.
For all those promoting no drug testing for athletes, then let's expand that to no drug testing for anyone. How many employers do you think would go for that?
Professional, collegiate, even high school and Olympic Sports today are a joke. I don't view them anymore, I don't aid their economies.
For those that are for legalization of doping, that is a guarantee to ruin sports forever. Imagine any of the athletes you grew up admiring. Would you be as inspired by their accomplishments if you found out they were doping? Imagine Michael Jordan on steroids.
Sports are about pushing the boundries of human achievement. It's not as impressive if someone does it by cheating. Some people look at sports as just entertainment, like watching a Michael Bay movie, and steroids is like using CGI for special effects. Sports means more than that to a true sports fan. I can't imagine that anyone that truely loves sports would condone doping in any way, shape or form
There are unions, and frankly there isn't enough fan pressure on major American sports to do anything like what you suggest. The problem is that you throw around terms like majority or almost all, and that is simply nonsense. Get into a locker room, get to know some athletes at this level. The number of people doping is high but it is like 30 percent. It isn't a majority and it isn't almost all. Here is the reality, Bud Selig blew it. You talk about real penalties? This is what he should have said in 2004 when the infamous list was compiled. "We have a ton of names on the list and this proves the problem is widespread. I have burned the list and the company that did the testing has signed a non disclosure agreement and if they leak it we'll sue them out of existence. That said, I offer, a grant of immunity for anyone doping anyone taking anything previous to the moment I end this speech. Anyone caught in a positive test for anything after I'm done here gets the gambling death penalty for Baseball. You will be banned from the Hall of Fame, banned from any ball park anywhere, banned from making your living announcing or commenting on baseball professionally. And this ban is forever. You will go down like shoeless Joe Jackson and the Black Sox. Written out of the history of the sport you love. Speech over, get caught and you are done."
Believe me, they're doing it in the colleges too. These coaches blissfully turn a blind eye and a deaf ear to win, win, win.
Someone I dearly love is feeling the pressure to succumb to this culture. I hope he gets out while he's still sane and healthy. It's not worth it.
sport is what you do, entertainment is what you watch. go ride a bike or take a walk. the record books are about entertainment, like the oscars and emmys.
when it gets dark, rent a movie. i suggest "the fan" w robert de niro...
d
Michael Shermer,
Good Post here. I didn't know you were a sports fan line myself. I thought you were just skeptical of athletes being clean in sports. I somehow have to agree with some of the five points you made in this. Manny Ramirez got off the hook easily, and David Ortiz is a hypocrite for pumping his fist for a year-long suspension when in fact he was part of the infamous 2003 anonymous list that included 103 other players. My only concern is that some PED's sort of fall in the War on Drugs; steroids, like marijuana, actually could help sick people while in pain and help get better.
Cheers,
"King" Mike McIlraith
http://kingmikeforthesakeofargument.blogspot.com
But I'm not sure whether stiffer penalties will ever deter cheating; the rewards are too great.
Look at boxing. The vast majority of pro boxers struggle for years, get their bodies chewed up, and get spat out at the end with nothing to showed and some lifelong injuries, or even acquired brain injury. The odds are appalling and the system corrupt.
But there's never been a shortage of willing, wannabee professional boxers. They know the odds will never be in their favor, but that's no deterrent, or not enough of one. Even if 99 go nowhere but Palookaville, there's always that 1...
I have a better solution. Just let everybody use whatever drugs they want. Then everyone will be on equal ground.
And kids will be graduating from High School with liver failure or shut down kidneys.
Why do we always throw "the kids" onto the train tracks for the slippery slope defense?
Why are we blowing billions on an impossible to win war on drugs? "We're keeping drugs off schoolyards! Why won't anyone think of the children??!?!?!"
Why not let people who get paid to compete in a sport use performance enhancing drugs? "The kids will start too!!! Is anyone thinking of the children?!?!?!?!"
Newsflash: ALL professional athletes are doping. So are ALL bodybuilders, and MANY amateur athletes if you include olympians. The only way they're caught is either through admission or someone connected to it gets busted and rats them out.
For a website that often extolls the futility of the war on drugs, I'm surprised to see this article. Especially for "drugs" that could not only be harmless, but beneficial to athletes and people in general if taken correctly. It's a good thing that marijuana is illegal, because how else would we maintain our current 0% usage by primary school aged children?
Rather than drawing your swords and trying to slay the dragon, who I'm sure is on a direct flight path towards "the kids", why not slap the triple whopper out of their pudgy hands, or go after the government subsidies that are encouraging the use of corn to sweeten everything the little darlings are eating, dropping test levels through the floor and making them the fattest group of human young in the history of earth?
In normal life, I am for decriminalization. But in sports, it seems to me that this would essentially force sports competitors to take drugs. Some people not might want to (I'm guessing the side effects are fairly unhealthy), some people might be allergic, and up and coming young athletes might not even be able to afford it. It seems, anyway, a sad and cynical thing to institutionalise cheating in sports. How does anyone really get a sense of achievement?
I completely agree with you. I'm also for legalization but against it in sports. BTW, to say that the side effects are "fairly unhealthy" is an understatement. The side effects are known and are very unhealthy. Someone who is doping is essentially burning up their body in order to get peak performance for a short time. They will end up with livers and kindneys that don't work, rhoid range, and many other side effects.
1. The arms race can be levelled to some extent by passing a rule which demands not only testing, but the long term storage of additional samples which many be retested at any time in the future, once word of the top secret new drug gets out and a test for it is devised. Athletes which fail such a test would be forced to return any prize money already awarded.
2. Given the near-ubiquity of cash prizes, any athlete who cheats to win that prize isn't merely cheating, he is defrauding the organisers and other the other competitors. Accepting prize money you broke the rules to win is committing a fraud. Drug cheats are thieves, period.
3. Athletes should be required to affirm in writing and under penalty of perjury that they have monitored all treatments, medication, supplements, etc., that they have received, that none of these were banned products, and that therefore they declare themselves eligible to be the winner of the competition before they can be awarded the prize or participate in a medal ceremony.
#3 is a tough one. That there are so many substances that can produce positive results (whether false or not) would be too much of a burden to place on an athlete. A pro cyclist was disqualified for a positive test result that was linked back to his eating a commercially produced energy bar. Even the officials said that he couldn't have known he was consuming a banned substance. In regards to medicine, it would require every athlete to have extensive medical and chemical knowledge to be held responsible for knowing what was administered. While I agree that athletes should be clean from performance enhancing drugs, it's gotten a little out of hand, in some cases. A pro cyclist cannot be administered an antihistamine for a bee sting, (as witnessed a few Tours de France ago when one was stung in the eye and had to drop out of the race) even by the official race doctor! The same with asthma medicine, there should be some way to medicate legitimately while still protecting from abuses.
MONEY! I find it hard to understand why you have to ask!
I find it equally hard to believe you read past the headline.
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