Technological, pharmaceutical and behavioural doping?

Daz555

Rick Chasey wrote:

It's pretty basic.

Sport has some pretty well defined rules on what you're allowed to do and what you're not.

So doing stuff you're not allowed to do is cheating.

+1 EPO enhanced potato.

inseine

t's pretty basic.

Sport has some pretty well defined rules on what you're allowed to do and what you're not.

So doing stuff you're not allowed to do is cheating.

That's what i said. I'm not really so convinced there are many grey areas. To call what British Cycling do cheating is ignorant.

TheBigBean

Did Moser cheat in 1984 when he broke the hour record?

GeorgeShaw

skylla wrote:

here's inrng's thoughts on hypoxic tents:

http://inrng.com/2012/06/the-altitude-tent/

PS: he also likes to talk in terms of law whether or not their use is 'legal' !

Thanks for that link, because it confirms what I thought - that the tents were illegal in Italy. I'd been thinking about that since I heard that Farah and training colleague had been using a depleted-oxygen house in the US.

Anonymous

What about this?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-19325756

interested article - although actually against the rules.

frenchfighter

Good thread and contributions PBB.

Will have a read of this all later.

From what I read so far, I can see where you are coming from and understand your points. Maybe a little on the extreme side of interpretation but they are fair points. It gets a little philosophical though as one would need to consider the whole issue of how we determine what is acceptable or not, which is mostly created by man and thus subjective. Laws in society, rules in sport, code of conduct - all could be questioned and criticised, yet their creation and application are supposed to be for the greater good in most cases.

I dislike Sky for exactly reasons you mention, among others. I have said it before and I will say it again, there is a difference between God given talent and developed talent.

frenchfighter

GeorgeShaw wrote:

skylla wrote:

here's inrng's thoughts on hypoxic tents:

http://inrng.com/2012/06/the-altitude-tent/

PS: he also likes to talk in terms of law whether or not their use is 'legal' !

Thanks for that link, because it confirms what I thought - that the tents were illegal in Italy. I'd been thinking about that since I heard that Farah and training colleague had been using a depleted-oxygen house in the US.

Do you think Hinault, Contador or Pantani (and others that can be used in same sentance) use/d this sort of thing? Or did/do they get on their bike and train with passion in the mountains?

skylla

frenchfighter wrote:

GeorgeShaw wrote:

skylla wrote:

here's inrng's thoughts on hypoxic tents:

http://inrng.com/2012/06/the-altitude-tent/

PS: he also likes to talk in terms of law whether or not their use is 'legal' !

Thanks for that link, because it confirms what I thought - that the tents were illegal in Italy. I'd been thinking about that since I heard that Farah and training colleague had been using a depleted-oxygen house in the US.

Do you think Hinault, Contador or Pantani (and others that can be used in same sentance) use/d this sort of thing? Or did/do they get on their bike and train with passion in the mountains?

No, it was a passionate training session on a stationary bike on rollers in a hypoxic house high up in the mountains wearing pressure socks and hypotonic refreshments were served by kinky podium girls wearing Tinkoff knickers... Come off it FF, we're talking about someone's profession here!

bompington

frenchfighter wrote:

Do you think Hinault, Contador or Pantani (and others that can be used in same sentance) use/d this sort of thing? Or did/do they just get on the blower to Dr Ferrari?

FTFY

inseine

I dislike Sky for exactly reasons you mention, among others. I have said it before and I will say it again, there is a difference between God given talent and developed talent

I love your idealistic view of your heros FF, I really do, though I disagree completely. I know you hate SKYs fancy skinsuits and robotic riding, whereas I dislike (I don't do hate) unrepentant dopers. All part of the sports rich tapestry!

KieranHardman

My only issue with the god-given talent aspect is that, for example, your oxygen carrying ability can be shaped quite strongly when you are growing up as a child. A kid with the same passion and innate ability will be unable to compete with a kid from the mountains purely as a result of the lottery of where he or she was brought up. All other things being equal, the mountain kid is receiving a performance enhancement the other kid doesnt have access to. I guess that is why it is called god-given talent.

This doesnt justify hypoxic tents or any additional training aids, however if you are only recreating the conditions another athlete was brought up in naturally, it may be possible to understand why people would claim it is levelling the playing field.

I am unconvinced that the benefits that everyone lays on these things is as extreme as is suggested. am intrigued to learn more about Novak Djokovic and his hyperbaric Egg though...

powerbookboy

Rick Chasey wrote:

It's pretty basic.

Sport has some pretty well defined rules on what you're allowed to do and what you're not.

So doing stuff you're not allowed to do is cheating.

Edit: the only grayer area is stuff that is difficult to spot cheating.

In which case, theoretically, you're cheating but in practice you're not, since, rightly or wrongly, it's only cheating in practice if you get caught.

The problem with teaching people that interpretation is that it absolves the athlete of moral decisions.

The "no-needles" Garmin policy was admirable because they banned something (injections of legal compounds) that they viewed as a gateway to taking PEDs. It may or may not have put them at a significant performance disadvantage to other teams, but it was a moral stand. Or maybe it was a purely risk/reward calculation?

It seems to me that sort of decision is in the long term going to produce riders less likely to dope, than the "anything as long as it's not banned" attitude that seems common amongst athletes, teams and fans.

British Cycling's "as good as I can be" mantra is also a good thing. Don't worry about other people, get the best performance you can from yourself. This might explain the relative lack of positives amongst our riders.

rick_chasey

morals shmorals.

This is competition. There are no morals in competition.

S'why you need rules as much to protect the people involved in competition as the people outside of it.

frenchfighter

KieranHardman wrote:

My only issue with the god-given talent aspect is that, for example, your oxygen carrying ability can be shaped quite strongly when you are growing up as a child. A kid with the same passion and innate ability will be unable to compete with a kid from the mountains purely as a result of the lottery of where he or she was brought up. All other things being equal, the mountain kid is receiving a performance enhancement the other kid doesnt have access to. I guess that is why it is called god-given talent.

This doesnt justify hypoxic tents or any additional training aids, however if you are only recreating the conditions another athlete was brought up in naturally, it may be possible to understand why people would claim it is levelling the playing field.

I am unconvinced that the benefits that everyone lays on these things is as extreme as is suggested. am intrigued to learn more about Novak Djokovic and his hyperbaric Egg though...

Yeah that is a point although not one I would push too strongly. You could use the same reasoning with people born in poor ares of the World.

If you want to take Contador as an example, his family was very poor and they couldn't afford to buy him a bike. He only rode a bike when his brother passed his old one off. This old one was as heavy as a boulder and yet Contador would race with Madrid's best and hold his own, particularly on the climbs.

Javier Fernández, who signed the teenage Contador up for the neighborhood team of Embajadores, said the following to El Pais about the young rider, "He was about 15 the first time I saw him, with that iron bike, which was completely outdated. He had a natural talent and strength, and broke away from the pack in a race that included Madrid's best young cyclists. It was obvious he had no technique, but also that he wanted to be a cyclist. Alberto had nothing. His parents couldn't even go with him to the races because they had to stay with his younger brother Raúl, who has suffered from brain damage since he was a child. Raul was always in his wheelchair."

disgruntledgoat

frenchfighter wrote:

GeorgeShaw wrote:

skylla wrote:

here's inrng's thoughts on hypoxic tents:

http://inrng.com/2012/06/the-altitude-tent/

PS: he also likes to talk in terms of law whether or not their use is 'legal' !

Thanks for that link, because it confirms what I thought - that the tents were illegal in Italy. I'd been thinking about that since I heard that Farah and training colleague had been using a depleted-oxygen house in the US.

Do you think Hinault, Contador or Pantani (and others that can be used in same sentance) use/d this sort of thing? Or did/do they get on their bike and train with passion in the mountains?

By all accounts Hinault barely trained at all never mind in the mountains.

Another interesting example I'd throw back at you is Merckx. Now clearly Merckx was an amazingly gifted athlete, but if he hadn't have been so open to new training methods, obsessive about equipment, position etc and so prepared to work in training, would he have won as much as he did, especially post Blois?

Robert Millar was another one, gifted but an absolute fanatic for structured training and the right equipment.

Zabel was noted for training more hours than just about anyone.

disgruntledgoat

Every time you post that "iron bike" thing I think to myself it must be a mistranslation of steel. Nobody has ever made a bike from iron.

frenchfighter

Rick Chasey wrote:

morals shmorals.

This is competition. There are no morals in competition.

S'why you need rules as much to protect the people involved in competition as the people outside of it.

Sold.

powerbookboy

frenchfighter wrote:

GeorgeShaw wrote:

skylla wrote:

Do you think Hinault, Contador or Pantani (and others that can be used in same sentance) use/d this sort of thing? Or did/do they get on their bike and train with passion in the mountains?

I don't know about the other 2, but Pantini from a very young age was rammed to the eyeballs with PEDs. He was very much a product of the pharmaceutical machine. Ricco strikes me as another. Seduced by the doctors and money, mentally a bit broken. I hope Ricco doesn't go the same way, ditto Hamilton, Landis.

skylla

disgruntledgoat wrote:

Every time you post that "iron bike" thing I think to myself it must be a mistranslation of steel. Nobody has ever made a bike from iron.

[my interpretation using FF logic] Either way he cheated as the heavier bike the harder he needed to push the fitter he was or would be. It is an unfair advantage during training as others pushed much lighter bikes [/]

Paulie W

Rick Chasey wrote:

morals shmorals.

This is competition. There are no morals in competition.

S'why you need rules as much to protect the people involved in competition as the people outside of it.

The whole were Sky right to ride after the Valverde fall; the continued arguments about diving in football; the uproar over the Chinese badminton players at the Olympics, all suggest that morality still has from a societal perspective a central part to play in competition.

rick_chasey

Paulie W wrote:

Rick Chasey wrote:

morals shmorals.

This is competition. There are no morals in competition.

S'why you need rules as much to protect the people involved in competition as the people outside of it.

The whole were Sky right to ride after the Valverde fall; the continued arguments about diving in football; the uproar over the Chinese badminton players at the Olympics, all suggest that morality still has from a societal perspective a central part to play in competition.

Yeah. For fans.

Not for the competitors.

With Valv. the peloton has rules to protect itself. It'd be much worse if there were no unwritten rules.

The debate comes whether sky broke said rule or not. IT's not a moral question, it's a competitive question.

Paulie W

Rick Chasey wrote:

Paulie W wrote:

Rick Chasey wrote:

morals shmorals.

This is competition. There are no morals in competition.

S'why you need rules as much to protect the people involved in competition as the people outside of it.

The whole were Sky right to ride after the Valverde fall; the continued arguments about diving in football; the uproar over the Chinese badminton players at the Olympics, all suggest that morality still has from a societal perspective a central part to play in competition.

Yeah. For fans.

Not for the competitors.

Again, you seem to think sportsmen/women live outside society!

rick_chasey

Paulie W wrote:

Rick Chasey wrote:

Paulie W wrote:

Rick Chasey wrote:

morals shmorals.

This is competition. There are no morals in competition.

S'why you need rules as much to protect the people involved in competition as the people outside of it.

The whole were Sky right to ride after the Valverde fall; the continued arguments about diving in football; the uproar over the Chinese badminton players at the Olympics, all suggest that morality still has from a societal perspective a central part to play in competition.

Yeah. For fans.

Not for the competitors.

Again, you seem to think sportsmen/women live outside society!

Eh?

They're not the same.

If I went around rugby tackling people in the street there'd be a problem. Not so in the middle of a rugby game.

Sport is a little arbitrary world with different arbitrary rules, where winning within the confines of the rules is the objective.

Paulie W

Rick Chasey wrote:

Paulie W wrote:

Rick Chasey wrote:

morals shmorals.

This is competition. There are no morals in competition.

S'why you need rules as much to protect the people involved in competition as the people outside of it.

The whole were Sky right to ride after the Valverde fall; the continued arguments about diving in football; the uproar over the Chinese badminton players at the Olympics, all suggest that morality still has from a societal perspective a central part to play in competition.

Yeah. For fans.

Not for the competitors.

With Valv. the peloton has rules to protect itself. It'd be much worse if there were no unwritten rules.

The debate comes whether sky broke said rule or not. IT's not a moral question, it's a competitive question.

It's both. Competitively there was no reason not to ride except if Sky believed that the potential payback was not worth the benefits of riding. Morally, there was a question of whether it was right to ride when the race leader had fallen which was closely bound up with the (moral) view of the Peloton.

ReesA

dsoutar wrote:

Just stirring the pot on this one...

I was given to thinking if there anything that is not cheating (i.e. against the rules) but ethically wrong (at least considered as such by the Pro racing fraternity)

As an analogy, take the Jimmy Carr tax thing a few months ago. Not illegal but considered by most to be morally / ethically wrong.

I can't readily think of a similar instance in cycling

you mean like riding off on the leader in a grand tour if they crash or have a mechanical?

Outsider art by Loan

Morality, at least the universal, 'these things are right and these are wrong and they are so for every crunt' sort is a figment of your (you know who you are, whoever you are) poorly imagination. Can you reduce this delusion - ha, wait, that's not helping - I mean, your heartfelt belief that some things are Just Wrong, etc, to a non-arbitrary criteria? Don't answer that, I'm just fu cking with you. You can't, 'cause it's impossible.

There's also relativistic morality, which, hopefully needless to say, is for practical purposes a bit limp-dicked by comparison. It's just got no fu ck in it; it's like, 'well, I approve of these things so I shall call them right, and to me they really, trully, wholly are, but they can be wrong to you too!' and so on. Yeah, that's cool, but it's like the assertion, 'I like the colour red'. It can't be debated, and it won't persuade anyone to also like the colour red.

frenchfighter wrote:

GeorgeShaw wrote:

skylla wrote:

here's inrng's thoughts on hypoxic tents:

http://inrng.com/2012/06/the-altitude-tent/

PS: he also likes to talk in terms of law whether or not their use is 'legal' !

Thanks for that link, because it confirms what I thought - that the tents were illegal in Italy. I'd been thinking about that since I heard that Farah and training colleague had been using a depleted-oxygen house in the US.

Do you think Hinault, Contador or Pantani (and others that can be used in same sentance) use/d this sort of thing? Or did/do they get on their bike and train with passion in the mountains?

IIRC, Pantani didn't like climbing. Hated it, or so he said. That's why he went so fast and did so much EPO and all that fun - to minimize the suffering! But, honestly, that seems implausible and I expect he was only trying to sound profound. I mean, a more logical man by no high standard would have instead opted to turn around, don't you think?

Wily-Quixote

Of course the OP is plain wrong in conflating drug taking with legitimate methods of training. To state that that illegal is not necessarily immoral is true, but does not mean that The reverse is true and thatit IS moral to take drugs.
Taking PEDs is surreptitious and gaining an advantage by deception, it forces on the subject's body a physiological advantage that cannot ever be attained by simple training alone and is demonstrably dangerous to the individual involved. These are some reasons as to why it is unethical, and tangibly different to the norms of bike training and that is presumably why it is illegal.
The example that the OP draws upon to demonstrate training advantage is altitude. This provokes a normal physiological response that creates more REd blood cells (RBCs)and shifts the oxygen dissociation curve to the left, allowing more o2 to be gained and released by RBCs. Once the RBC production reaches a physiological limit production ceases by a negative feedback mechanism, this last bit is important because it explains why a normal individual can never approach the physiology of a doper. This is completely different to supplemental EPO, where you can force the bone marrow to keep making RBCs until the dose of EPO is complete or the bone marrow is depleted. A more accurate analogy is that using PEDs is like having radical surgery to assist with cycling, such as having the upper limbs replaced with carbon fibre struts in order to save weight and to confer an advantage.
The author ignored that training and technology are part of the sport and always have been. Cycling is as much a race between bike technology as it is between trained athletes. There are limits to how these races are played out, they are called rules. Normative arrangements between individuals in sport may not be to the author's satisfaction but spurious ethical pronouncements won't make them go away.
I suggest that the OP, as he/she has stated, gets around to teaching his/her children, that this starts with ethics. Spotting false analogies and straw man arguments could be the first step in the children teaching the parent.

mfin

Wily-Quixote wrote:

Of course the OP is plain wrong in conflating drug taking with legitimate methods of training. To state that that illegal is not necessarily immoral is true, but does not mean that The reverse is true and thatit IS moral to take drugs.
Taking PEDs is surreptitious and gaining an advantage by deception, it forces on the subject's body a physiological advantage that cannot ever be attained by simple training alone and is demonstrably dangerous to the individual involved. These are some reasons as to why it is unethical, and tangibly different to the norms of bike training and that is presumably why it is illegal.
The example that the OP draws upon to demonstrate training advantage is altitude. This provokes a normal physiological response that creates more REd blood cells (RBCs)and shifts the oxygen dissociation curve to the left, allowing more o2 to be gained and released by RBCs. Once the RBC production reaches a physiological limit production ceases by a negative feedback mechanism, this last bit is important because it explains why a normal individual can never approach the physiology of a doper. This is completely different to supplemental EPO, where you can force the bone marrow to keep making RBCs until the dose of EPO is complete or the bone marrow is depleted. A more accurate analogy is that using PEDs is like having radical surgery to assist with cycling, such as having the upper limbs replaced with carbon fibre struts in order to save weight and to confer an advantage.
The author ignored that training and technology are part of the sport and always have been. Cycling is as much a race between bike technology as it is between trained athletes. There are limits to how these races are played out, they are called rules. Normative arrangements between individuals in sport may not be to the author's satisfaction but spurious ethical pronouncements won't make them go away.
I suggest that the OP, as he/she has stated, gets around to teaching his/her children, that this starts with ethics. Spotting false analogies and straw man arguments could be the first step in the children teaching the parent.

Some good points. But loads of it lost from not being able to construct paragraphs. Im honestly not having a dig there, don't get me wrong, but your post was very very very difficult to read.

mfin

disgruntledgoat wrote:

Every time you post that "iron bike" thing I think to myself it must be a mistranslation of steel. Nobody has ever made a bike from iron.

Well, agreed. Until there's fact about just how heavy it was compared to everyone elses then this is just another adoption of over-romanticised fairytale crap which gets lapped up and repeated. Repeated only by those with an compulsive inclination to believe it just cos it fits in with the emotive film-like screenplay they have in their head.

Wily-Quixote

mfin...you're totally right, my writing was very convoluted, let me be clearer:

1. Doping is different to the normal physiological response to training. The normal physiological response is self limiting. Doping forces the body to respond beyond its normal parameters. This is dangerous to the individual (ethical objection 1) and does not maximise health (ethical objection 2) and may be an imposition from scurrilous team managers (ethical objection 3).
2. The OP stated that because something is illegal it does not mean that it is immoral. I agree, but the converse does not automatically hold. Doping can still be immoral (i prefer unethical) and illegal, in fact it is both.
3. The OP concluded that altitude training is sufficiently similar to doping to conclude their equivalence. They are not equivalent for the reasons stated in point 1 above. I went on to point out that a better analogy of doping would be surgical enhancement of an individual to confer an advantage - my reasoning being that doping is a medical intervention, not a natural result of training. The other point being that altitude trianing only confers a mild advantage at sea level, it confers a greater advantage when racing at altitude (the main reason this whole altitude thing started).
4. My last comment was a mischievous comment upon the OPs construction of argument. My belief is that his/her argumentation is flawed by incorrect analogy.