Doping in Pro Cycling

I find it terribly difficult to work up the enthusiasm to criticize Floyd Landis, Ivan Basso, Jan Ullrich, Tyler Hamilton, et al for their alleged roles in the recent doping scandals. It would seem a simple matter to say, "doping is cheating, the rules are fair, the controls work, they got caught by the controls, ergo: they are cheaters and should be banned, shunned, heaped with approbation. QED." But I just can't adopt this attitude. Based on the commentary I see in the cycling press and as well as on my club's web site, I'm pretty sure I'm not exceptional in this regard.

Why? Well, aside from the fact that it's difficult to idolize the same person one day as an heroic role model, and suddenly switch to denigrating them the next, I think many of us are simply uncomfortable with the whole zero tolerance, ban-on-doping thing.

I don't know if this is morally right or wrong, but I believe that one day, our current doping scandals will be viewed the same way we now view the "money under the table" scandals from the old days of "amateur" cycling, tennis, and golf, when it was illegal to get paid as an athlete. Those days ended as recently as 1969 for tennis. One of the most famous images of Suzanne Lenglen, the great French tennis star of the 1920's, is actually an unflattering cartoon showing her smiling ingenuously as she collects money, over the caption, "pour le sport" (i.e., "for the love of sport"). It's hard today to understand what the cartoonist was on about. So Suzanne, the greatest female player of the decade, got paid to play. So what? The anti-doping cartoons that now appear in VeloNews may one day be viewed with similar dismay.

The problem then was the now-seemingly-bizarre moral code of the day, which proclaimed that you couldn't earn a living from something most people treated as a hobby. Why not, was never explained. Or, to be more precise, there was an incongruence between the moral code and reality. The moral code said you couldn't accept money for doing something "trivial" like hitting a little white ball with a stick. Reality was that people were willing to pay quite a lot to see other people do exactly that.

The problem today is that there's an incongruence between our moral code, and the risks the racers themselves are willing to accept. The moral code says you can't take risks beyond what society has set as acceptable, or in certain areas that society has deemed unacceptable. The reality is that many people-- everyone, really-- takes equivalent risks all the time. The only real moral problem arises when other folks are put at risk, too (e.g., as with reckless driving) but that's certainly not the case with drug use for athletic purposes. Effectively we're telling the riders "you can't do that because it's bad for you."

Sure, taking drugs is risky. So is descending a twisting mountain road at 55 mph.

But the athletes themselves don't understand the risks fully, you protest. So? Do you? Does anyone? I'm pretty sure I don't. I do lots of things that are risky-- like riding my bike in traffic-- but I'm not going to stop, because they're just part of how I live. (Other things might be less risky, but I won't do them, because they're unfamiliar to me: ice-climbing, for example. Cyclocross, for another ; )

Another frequently-cited argument against doping is that it turns athletic events into a "freak show". My personal take on this is that it's *already* a freak show, that, in fact, essentially all high-level athletic endeavors are freakish in nature. This is a totally

So, in short, we just don't like drugs, because we a) associate drugs of any kind with addiction, antisocial behavior, and crime b) like to prescribe to everyone, athletes included, what level of risk they may assume in their personal and professional lives, and c) view certain substances as "drugs" and therefore bad, whereas others are (rather arbitrarily) not so viewed. I won't get into the details of the argument on (c), but it's a slippery slope. God created little green apples; he also created coca leaves and opium poppies.

I believe that one day, it will be entirely up to the athletes and their trainers what risks they take, and they'll be free to say "yes, I use EPO, but I'm not giving you the details, because it's proprietary team info." If some guy wants to race without so-called performance enhancing drugs, then fine, maybe we could have a special jersey for that-- I propose beige. It could be called "le maillot naturel". (Of course, we'd have to check him for drugs, which means doping tests, which means... aw, heck, forget it.)

We tried a prohibition on alcohol; it didn't work. (To put it mildly-- the major result was that it fueled the rise of organized crime in the US.) In sports, we tried a prohibition on being professional; it didn't work. We're now struggling with a prohibition on drugs, both in sports and society at large. Is it working? Well? Is it?

Toyota Prius Hybrid Review

Just drove a Toyota Prius for the first time today, so here is a road test review for anyone considering buying:

Keyword here is: "smooth". Everything in this car is smooth-- acceleration, braking, cornering. No shifting, which adds to the feeling of smoothness. Feels more like riding in a train than driving a car. The whole gestalt of this car seems to forfend reckless or even aggressive driving, which is probably a good thing.

Driving it, surrounded by conventional automobiles, you feel like an early mammal surrounded by dinosaurs. "Hah! They think I'm weird now, but soon, they'll all be extinct!" A calm, deliberate mammal, though. Those dinosaurs all seem skittish and jumpy by comparison.

It's weird to think, as you drive it, that by stepping on the gas pedal-- uh, I mean, the accelerator pedal-- you're doing something completely different from the norm. That is, the accelerator pedal does NOT have an direct mechanical linkage to a fuel valve. What you're doing, when you "step on it" is sending an electronic message to the car's mammalian brain, which the car then processes, and uses to determine the correct proportion of... oh, never mind, it's all very electronic and complicated.

Unfortunately, in my view, Toyota opted to emphasize the electronic nature of the beast by doing away with the conventional dashboard instruments, and replacing them with a purely digital readout. The readout is positioned way, *way* forward in the cab, several feet further away from your nose than you're used to, which makes it hard to read in my humble opinion. The scant information on this display (MPH, fuel gauge) is supplemented by a little screen on the right, which controls just about everything (radio, air conditioning, etc.). If you wear polarized sunglasses, or if the sun is beating in through the windows just so, you can't read either of these displays worth a damn, which leaves you completely information-free and feels sorta like driving at night with the lights off.

For me, the ideal vehicle would be a car that looks and drives like a Mini Cooper, with a Mini's stylish and functional interior, but the brains and drivetrain of a Prius. Should be available in a couple of years; just wait.

Oh, one more thing about Priuses: they're awfully quiet when the gas motor shuts down, which it does quite often in city driving. This could have some unintended consequences: as a pedestrian, it throws you off, because you can't hear them coming. I'm wondering if they shouldn't install some artificial noisemaker to warn pedestrians away-- sorta like the ultra-sonic sirens some folks use to scare away deer on rural routes.