Pete Singer on cycling and doping

vermooten

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story ... 20,00.html

He's a good chap who's paid to think things through for a living. I read his Animal Rights as a philosophy student [clears throat] years ago. Legalise PEDs only insasfar as they don't cause a health problem or words to that effect. Your thoughts?

Andy

top_bhoy

I don't agree with it. It has the potential to open up the whole doping problem to a far greater extent than that currently being witnessed.

What is Pete Singers qualifications and experience in the field of medecine and sports science and does he have a passion in these areas or is he just yet another 'name' throwing straw in the wind to keep his name known for public consumption? This is a general article which IMO, brings no additional information or debate to the situation.

LangerDan

Maybe they should allow the use of PEDs in the study of Bioethics!

I have no issue with the discussion being raised and Pete Singer may be very good at "thinking things through" but that appears to be a very poor article. He doesn't even make much of a case for his proposition himself, but relies heavily on Savelescu. Apart from anything else , the whole concept of letting sportspeople take whatever they want isn't some recent, radical proposition of Savelescu's. Its an idea that probably originated at the same time as the banning of PEDS.

I particularly like the proposition that PEDs should be allowed as long as they are safe. The reason most PEDs are banned in the first place is that they are unsafe and / or untested for use by athletes. Many medicines have side-effects that are deemed acceptable when seen against the background of the patients illness. For example, if a therapy is likely to be very effective against agressive, fatal cancers but have the risk of reducing a patients natural lifespan by 5 years, most would feel it is worth the risk and a product will be deemed "safe". Companies and regulatory agencies are not going to spend time and money assessing the potential health risks to somone taking the product for what is in effect "recreational" purposes.

In any case, how would Singer propose to monitor that athletes are only taking the drugs and dosages that are believed "safe". My guess is that the only way of doing that is regulation and testing - in other words, exactly the same approach with exactly the same sorts of issues as we have now, except more people would probably die.

Finally, and I accept that I do bang on about it, having a drug-fuelled class means that there has to be a point where is acceptable for an athlete to change from drug-free sport to drug-using category. Where and when is to occur - how can you ensure that, say, a junior rider doesn't "go to the well" a year earlier than his peers in an attempt to get a pro contract.

Keeping drugs out of sport is difficult at best and probably impossible but I don't believe that means we shouldn't try.

John Stevenson

In New Scientist last week Don Catlin suggested an alternative to drug detection testing - biological parameter monitoring.

In effect that's what Singer is suggesting. For red cells, for example, you set a safe limit and stop athletes from racing if they exceed it. Oddly, this is exactly the situation we have now. Go over 50 percent haematocrit and you can't race.

"Keeping drugs out of sport is difficult at best and probably impossible but I don't believe that means we shouldn't try."

This is an anti-doping attitude that perplexes me. The war on drugs in sport is doomed to fail. You only have to look at the total failure of the war on drugs in society as a whole. My usual line: if you can't stop people taking drugs for fun, how do you hope to stop them taking them for money and fame?

If something's impossible, reasonable people look for alternatives. Saying that stopping drug use in sport is impossible but we should try anyway is like saying that flying by waving your arms is impossible but we should try anyway. The result is the same: the trier ends up looking daft.

I increasingly believe the answer is medical supervision of athletes to make sure they are not doing themselves harm. Yes, there are flaws in that idea, but it would be a damn sight less broken than the current system which seems to involve stealth medical supervision combined with vast amounts of lying, hypocrisy and sanctimony.

RichN95.

To quote Tom Simpson - "If it takes ten to kill you, I'll take nine"

In the mid 90s cyclists were willing to risk death with EPO - even since the 50% limit was imposed, they still find ways to deceive it.

If you let people take potentialy damaing drugs 'in moderation' then you just drive the cheats to push on that little bit harder.

skavanagh.bikeradar

I'm with John, cycling authorities should setup a commission with a range of experts in sports science and start testing for safe levels of performance enhancing products. Fuentes and his ilk have something to contribute to this debate I'm sure, and it'd be better to take their experience and put it to use in defining acceptable levels of doping than continue this expensive and pointless 'war on drugs'. I know that I'd rather watch sport safe in the knowledge that nobody is hurting themselves too much in order to win. The same commission could be put to work on an ongoing basis to identify the next generation of doping products and ensure they come to the market 'safe' to start with, perhaps using the Pro-Continental level as a proving ground. It'd also remove the blackmarket, under-the-counter nature of the current situation too. And save on police time.

You could argue that elite sport is different to amateur sport, just as business leaders stand out from the ordinary man in the street, and for this reason it seems daft to limit them with ethical debate or restrictive regulations about what they can and can't do. Let them get on with it and we can all enjoy the spectacle once more. I look forward to a giant pair of genetically modified thighs powering up the Galibier in 2022.

Salsiccia

john_stevenson wrote:

I increasingly believe the answer is medical supervision of athletes to make sure they are not doing themselves harm. Yes, there are flaws in that idea, but it would be a damn sight less broken than the current system which seems to involve stealth medical supervision combined with vast amounts of lying, hypocrisy and sanctimony.

I'm sorry, but I can't get along with that. What about amateurs? Juniors? By tolerating PEDs in pro/elite cycling, it will just open it up to all levels. And how many juniors and amateurs will be able to access proper medical supervision?

What we will end up with is what we had in the 90's - not who the strongest rider is, but who's body responds to EPO better being the most successful. And for the amateur who is looking to improve his 10 mile TT time, instead of spending his time getting miles in and spending money on a disc wheel/whatever, he will just spend his time and his money looking for the best substance to help him.

Sport SHOULD be about strength of character and body, both in competition AND in preparation. If we just allow PEDs to run riot then it stops being sport and becomes meaningless.

Hudster

I think this article is wrong where is makes such a distinction between Elite sports and Amateur sports. Allowing drug taking at the Elite level will just encourage drug taking at the Amateur level (which is perhaps much higher than people think/realise) and there will not be proper medical supervision.

I know of many gym people who take all sorts of stuff just to get there muscles bigger. And they don't compete in body building or lifting or anything like that - it's just to feel good about themselves (and they perhaps think it'll help them pull at the weekend!) If people take stuff just for something as trivial as that, I'm certain that more and more amateur racers will start taking PEDs if it's allowed at the elite level. And I'm sure this will cause more and more people to damage themselves...

Still, I can see the arguement both ways..

Kléber

I don't get this. Riders are not doping today to top up their hormone levels back to healthy levels, their consuming vast amounts of medicines to get unhealthy performance advantages.

Saying a PED should be allowed is fine, but who sets the dosage level? You can't say take n units of EPO because the current problem suggests that plenty of riders will take n+1 units. Surely supervising riders to dope up to a level implies that you can set the level and then determine who is above or below this level?

Once you start letting riders take a cocktail of PEDs legally, you're giving them the green light to consume vast quantities of masking agents and to continue with their bad ways by loading up on dangerous substances.

Prohibition doesn't work but as I've posted before, that's because it's a farce. In the classic example of failed prohibition, the alcohol ban in 1920s America, people found ways to get around it and enforcing something like this across a huge population was impossible, the ratio of police to citizens was low and the police were busy with other crime too. But here we're not trying to apply a ban on alcohol across the population, we're just trying to control 400 cyclists.

So far the UCI hasn't been serious about drug testing, it's been too busy promoting the sport with its ProTour scheme. Like it or not, the UCI has been incentivised not to detect doping, to sweep everything under the carpet as it collects money from TV rights and ProTour licences. There are plenty of moves to catch the cheats but they're not being used:
- start line blood tests
- publish the riders' hormonal and blood values online
- install a proper out of competition testing regime and reporting system
- test more riders more often
- make a legally binding version of the UCI charter so riders lose their salary if they're guilty
- get WADA to work more closely with the big pharma companies
- hire private detectives to monitor suspect cases

These are just a few ideas from the top of my head but it shows that the UCI hasn't been serious about dope testing. Just look at the Tour de France, excluding the early morning "Vampire" farce, only five riders get tested a day after the stage, that's nothing. If the world's biggest, richest, most important bike race can only afford this degree of testing, no wonder...

iainf72

Kléber wrote:

These are just a few ideas from the top of my head but it shows that the UCI hasn't been serious about dope testing. Just look at the Tour de France, excluding the early morning "Vampire" farce, only five riders get tested a day after the stage, that's nothing. If the world's biggest, richest, most important bike race can only afford this degree of testing, no wonder...

Indeed.

What a found interesting in ProCycling this month was the interview with the blood doping expert. I didn't realise they knew, pretty much, when someone was using EPO but still couldn't call it a positive. Looking for trends / signs etc is the way to go. And don't ban them or sanction them, just don't allow them to race until it's back to normal. A pro who can't race is of no use to anyone.

But it must be done at the top, invdividual teams doing it is pointless.

skavanagh.bikeradar

Once more I agree with Iain. My earlier post was tongue in cheek.

LangerDan

skavanagh.bikeradar wrote:

I'm with John, cycling authorities should setup a commission with a range of experts in sports science and start testing for safe levels of performance enhancing products.
quote]

As I mentioned earlier, one of the big problems is that the only way you can establish "safe" levels of PEDs is to carry out clinical trials. The trials that are carried out before a drug achieves FDA or similar approvals are generally based on the administration of the drug to people suffering from the illness concerned. There is a certain degree of testing on "healthy" volunteers but this is normally done under controlled conditions and the volunteer certainly isn't horsing a bike up a Col somewhere.

Additionally, the drugs are tested to achieve a response far below what would be normally accpetable. Administration of EPO is used to bring haemoglobin levels up to about 12 g/dL - the FDA have recently advised doctors that it is unsafe ("Increased risk of death" to use the FDA text) to use it to bring levels above this value. A patient on EPO would be taken off the drug at a level that is deemed anemic for "normal patients" An athlete would be using EPO to achieve levels of around 17 g/dL or greater. As far as I'm aware no significant testing has been done on the short or long -term health effects of a) elevated EPO levels in sportepeople and b) forcing up haemoglobin levels above what is normal for an individual.

Coming up with safe levels of common PEDs for sporting use will cost many tens , if not hundreds, of millions and is still no guarantee that athletes will not try to cheat.

skavanagh.bikeradar

Quite right, as I say I was only kidding in my earlier post - frankly wot I wrote was cobblers for the reasons stated by subsequent posters including yours Dan.

John Stevenson

Salsiccia wrote:

What about amateurs? Juniors?

That horse is gone. Juniors and amateurs are already juicing.

My wife teaches PE in a school in Sydney. She's certain that kids on junior development programs in some sports are using steroids to build themselves up. Does prohibition prevent this? No, it just scares kids into not talking about it and not seeking advice on how to avoid harm, except from the kind of locker-room expert who posted a totally nonsensical 'recipe' for EPO in the Pharmacy forum here a few weeks ago.

Salsiccia wrote:

What we will end up with is what we had in the 90's - not who the strongest rider is, but who's body responds to EPO better being the most successful.

We had? What we have is that, with an extra layer: whose teams have the best concealment systems. Hardly an improvement is it?

Salsiccia wrote:

Sport SHOULD be about strength of character and body, both in competition AND in preparation. If we just allow PEDs to run riot then it stops being sport and becomes meaningless.

I guess where we really differ is I don't have any strong views on the philosophy of elite competitive sport, aside from considering it a bit of a circus of genetic freaks and bizarre extreme personality types.

But these people are running the risk of harm because of the current system of prohibition. Does anyone seriously think riders would be messing about with transfusion blood doping if EPO were still undetectable? EPO is risky stuff to be messing with, unarguably, though the 50 percent limit seems to have mitigated the risk to long-term problems rather than immediate risk of death. But get a bag of the wrong blood from the fridge and you have a high risk of being dead before your soigneur can get you to hospital.

So, if pro athletes are going to mess with drugs for, in effect, our entertainment, we have a responsibility to find a less risky framework for them to do it in.

Kléber wrote:

Surely supervising riders to dope up to a level implies that you can set the level

Exactly what happened with the 50 percent haematocrit level, the one example we have of de facto sanctioned medical supervision of doping. The objective was to stop riders dying. It seems to have worked.

Kléber wrote:

we're just trying to control 400 cyclists

More like 3-4000, if we're counting just pro riders on UCI-licensed teams and the very highest level amateurs.

And they're scattered in a population of a billion people. The tracking regime necessary to keep tabs on them to the extent you seem to be suggesting sounds like Stasi-controlled east Germany. All this is worthwhile to preserve the philosophy of sport?

Titanium

John, I gotta say I don't understand why anyone is in favour of controlling this in the way you describe. It's like letting shop employees have a share of the cash register everynight, just so they don't tempted to boost the contents.

Say you allow medics to dispense EPO, who tells them when to stop? It's not like Dr Ferrari can work out how to get your haematocrit to a safe 49.9% instead of an unsafe 50.1%.

I know banning drugs is pushing even kids to turn to bad sources, old soigneurs are dealers, injecting medicines when they're not even licenced to sell Anvil. But this comes down to more education, teach kids the risks and raise the chances of getting caught.

If your wife is sure she should start telling people so they can investigate, this is the health of kids we're talking about. Think about it, these kids are boosting heart disease and cancer chances too, are you and your wife just going to sit there?

We've got plenty of rules but the authorities are not applying them. Guys are walking round saying "I'm the most tested rider" but no one is testing them properly, there was no EPO test when the guys were juicing on it, blood doping is big today but like it's pointed above, who's pricking the riders for a haemo count 5 minutes before the start gun for each race? Green light for autologous transfusions.

You say 4000 riders are doping - go to Italy and I reckon you can add a zero to that - but it is at the top that you gotta concentrate for the incentives to dope are bigger. Even if you win a UCI U23 race, prize money is small and do it on dope, the pro contracts aren't going to come so easily. The pro tour has the money to fund the program. It's the window for our sport, if some junior wants to cheat, he's letting himself and maybe his team down. When Vino gets exposed, even the humblest road rider has to put up with colleagues, friends and families slamming the sport he loves, it's as if his Saturday ride to the coffeeshop is tainted by association.

Last up, you are a journalist. Maybe this doesn't count for you but the cycling media needs some critical distance between them and the riders. For years I got tired of telling people that many pros dope but they didn't want to know their heroes weren't perfect, too many think a fine rider is a fine citizen, that a palmares is the same as honor. It felt like telling kids Santa Claus don't exist. But now it kinda feels like more people are open to what's been going on and I reckon the terms have shifted, you/colleagues need to ask hard question and tell us when a rider gives a weak answer.

top_bhoy

john_stevenson wrote:

So, if pro athletes are going to mess with drugs for, in effect, our entertainment, we have a responsibility to find a less risky framework for them to do it in.

I definitely disagree with this statement!! I, and many others have never asked these pro athletes to mess about with drugs for our entertainment, in fact, I wish they didn't take them. It only detracts from my entertainment. Athough the death of someone is a sad occassion, if a pro athlete takes drugs and dies or has long term disadvantages, I won't feel any personal responsibility for this happening - that has been their choice to cheat, fully aware of the possible consequences.

ricadus

Top_Bhoy wrote:

I don't agree with it. It has the potential to open up the whole doping problem to a far greater extent than that currently being witnessed.

Exactly. Not just in amateur sports – where people may feel tempted by being time-pressured by work/family commitments to put in they consider adequate training time – but also it is the thin end of the wedge: drugs companies would love to have sport promote a drug-fueled performance-enhanced lifestyle for people, like the way F1 and WRC showcase fast driving.

One day it's sports, the next it is over-worked & under-paid wage slaves perking them selves up to do overtime and compete for productivity-based bonuses and promotion.

Kléber

By all means take vitamins but the moment someone takes PEDs, it no longer becomes sport. It'll end up like Formula 1, you need a good driver/rider but the car/PED supply is crucial. As a the editor of a bike website, do you really want to see our sport go this way?

ricadus wrote:

drugs companies would love to have sport promote a drug-fueled performance-enhanced lifestyle for people, like the way F1 and WRC showcase fast driving

Out of interest, why don't pharma companies produce more than medicines. Would it not be legal for them to manufacture and market small stimulants and other "lifestyle" medicines which offer more than vitamins. This probably falls into the camp of "if you think of a good idea, someone's probably thought of it before".

Titanium wrote:

For years I got tired of telling people that many pros dope but they didn't want to know their heroes weren't perfect... ...It felt like telling kids Santa Claus don't exist.

Great quote.

iainf72

Titanium wrote:

John, I gotta say I don't understand why anyone is in favour of controlling this in the way you describe. It's like letting shop employees have a share of the cash register everynight, just so they don't tempted to boost the contents.

Nice to see a post from you Titanium.

Wondered where you'd got to a while ago.

Niland

I'm against it, but for a different reason: doping costs money.