Cycling media response to doping.

2»

Comments

  • John Stevenson
    John Stevenson Posts: 962
    Top_Bhoy wrote:
    Taking drugs is simply wrong.

    On what grounds? You can't have an ethical statement like that without a philosophical framework to support it. Why is it wrong? Whom does it harm?
    Kléber wrote:
    Comparing recreational/addictive drugs to doping is a red herring thanks to the word "drugs".

    On the contrary, they are both widespread behaviours that society tries and fails to stop.
    Kléber wrote:
    Crack or heroin abuse can't be stopped but it affects a tiny minority of the population and aside from second-order criminality, if someone takes heroin, they don't harm me.

    The second-order criminality is a problem that stems directly from the prohibition of, say, heroin. Prohibition drives up the prices of a substance that's insanely cheap to make and forces users into the criminal underground to obtain it. The UK used to successfully stabilise addicts on prescribed heroin until the war on drugs made that unacceptable. Never mind that it worked.

    And that second order criminality IS the problem with drugs in society as a whole. In Sydney at least, most of the minor property crime is heroin (more recently methamphetamine) addicts stealing DVD players to fund their next hit.

    And that does affect everyone, at least insofar as it pushes up our insurance premiums and the money spent on policing.

    Beyond that, the use of other recreational drugs is hardly a tiny minority. MDMA and marijuana are extremely widely used.

    But unless you're a clean pro athlete at the very top level, then someone taking drugs in sport is not harming you. It's getting hard to believe that there are any athletes capable of winning at the very top level who are not doping.
    John Stevenson
  • John Stevenson
    John Stevenson Posts: 962
    slojo wrote:
    If, by 'levelling the playing field' and 'stopping people harming themselves' you mean allowing some form of medically supervised doping, then what makes you think people will stick to those rules anymore than they stick to the rules at the moment?

    I don't "mean" anything and I'll thank you for not putting words into my mouth.

    However, I do suspect that medically supervised doping is exactly what we have now, and it's clearly what the 50 percent haematocrit limit was intended to create.

    If the rule amounts to "don't take so much of this stuff that you die" I think spotting infarctions will be fairly easy and will have the kind of auto-sanctioning mechanism that rabid anti-dopers will thoroughly approve of. That should please everyone.
    John Stevenson
  • slojo
    slojo Posts: 56
    But unless you're a clean pro athlete at the very top level, then someone taking drugs in sport is not harming you

    Oh really?
    Know where Conte got the BALCO growth hormone from?
    He bought it from dying AIDS patients in San Francisco.
    Poor, vulnerable, terribly sick people who sold their medication on a black market created by doping athletes.
  • Kléber
    Kléber Posts: 6,842
    The same goes for EPO, much of the consumption in Italy and elsewhere has been provided by the mafia. Clinics and pharmacies have been burgled, a hospital in Romania was ransacked by an armed gang which stole the supply of Eprex, leaving kidney, bone marrow and chemo patients to wilt. Why do you think the drugs were stolen? Presumably to sell on the black market to dodgy footballers, runners and cyclists...
  • Noodley
    Noodley Posts: 1,725
    John Stevenson wrote:
    Noodley wrote:
    In the OP I did not state "campaign against" but asked what, if anything, the media could do to "combat" doping.

    Not the same thing.

    How can publications combat doping except by campaigning against it?

    So is that your answer to the OP? The only way to combat it is to campaign against it?

    I had hoped there may be scope to combat it by factual reporting of circumstances, highlighting the issues involved and not getting all defensive. And not falling into the trap of "getting uppity" and saying "it's not my job". Oh well, I guess journalists maybe don't see they can influence much. As long as that is straight. That being the case why do journalists bother writing?

    Pedantic it may seem to you, but there is certainly a difference, a subtle difference maybe but a difference nonetheless. Subtle. Now there's something that may be worth consdideration when writing about doping in cycling - a degree of subtlety, not being drawn into the emotive "rights and wrongs" drum banging.
  • John Stevenson
    John Stevenson Posts: 962
    Noodley wrote:
    I had hoped there may be scope to combat it by factual reporting of circumstances, highlighting the issues involved

    Reporting the facts is our job, and we strive to do it as well as we are able.

    Combating something requires adopting a position or agenda. That's incompatible with straight factual reporting. For example, what if it turns out that there's absolutely no evidence that a particular banned substance or method does harm? (That's one of the three requirements of which two must be met for something to constitute doping, the other being it must be performance-enhancing or 'contrary to the spirit of sport', whatever that means). Are we then combating doping if we report that?
    John Stevenson
  • Noodley
    Noodley Posts: 1,725
    John Stevenson wrote:
    Noodley wrote:
    Are we then combating doping if we report that?

    Give it a go and see what happens :wink:

Categories