First, an article from Page 2, talking that we need to approach our own sports with our opinion of the doping in cycling.

http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=hill/070731

Quote :

"Excuse us, kind Frenchmen. We Americans can be haughty. We can be delusional. We can be accusatory, and we love laughing at you while ignoring the outrageousness of our own situations. We sat here for the past week or so, high and mighty in our sports ivory towers, ridiculing the Tour de France, which concluded with numerous doping scandals and a heavy cloak of embarrassment. Understand that it's very easy for American sports fans to thumb their nose at the Tour de France and find great pleasure in the unraveling of an international event, especially when our homeboy Lance Armstrong is no longer involved. And yet during all of these doping headlines, as one rider after another was snared in impropriety, we carefully avoided asking an important question: How on earth could a clean man dominate a sport riddled with this many dirty riders? Anyway, we'll save that conversation for another day. For now, let's stick to the American hypocrisy of lambasting a sport and a country for doing far more to clean up sports than we do. What Americans would never, ever want to do is what cycling officials did. We would never want to let a band of doping experts loose on American athletes. We are far too comfortable being entertained by dirty athletes to want to see any real cleansing take place."

Now, a more philosophical article on performance enhancers from the Washington Post.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/31/AR2007073101997.html?hpid=artslot

Quote :

"Some day soon -- maybe today -- we're going to have to admit it. We have a new norm in sports. Athletes routinely are enhanced. Many of their achievements are as dependent on technology as they are on talent, dedication and spirit. The way their competitions are set up, they have little choice. The old rules are increasingly untenable. Especially the one that goes: Enhancement is indistinguishable from cheating."

Quote :

"As human enhancement advances exponentially, it may seem odd that these issues showed up early on our sports pages. But it should not. Technology is usually first adopted wherever you see the most competition -- where small advances can have big consequences. That's why the other big arena in which human enhancement is being pursued most aggressively is the military. That's why questions of what it means to be human could really explode if something dramatic were to occur in a sports venue. Suppose, for example, that in the 2008 Olympics, some athletes walk out with necks wider than their heads, and haunches like steers, and world records that normally are only broken by a tenth of a second start being broken by 20 seconds or more? Suppose these athletes pass their drug tests with flying colors, because the technologies they're employing are not drugs? Would that be a shock on the order of Sputnik, producing comparable fundamental reordering of society's priorities? This is not to predict that such a thing will happen. It is simply to report that such technology -- known as "gene-doping" -- has existed in lab animals for years. At Johns Hopkins, in mice, it has yielded 61 percent increases in muscle mass with two treatments. Another researcher, H. Lee Sweeney of the University of Pennsylvania, says that scarcely a day goes by that his lab doesn't get a call from an athlete or a coach interested in using gene-doping on humans. So what are the rules?"

As long as a serious amount of money and prestige is involved in sports, it looks like performance enhancement is here to stay til the end of time. While the first article is more concerned with us looking in the mirror at our country's own athletes, the second is more concerned with "where is the dividing line between legal and illegal?" Do you think there will be any long-term repercussions from this as far as sports and the public's interest in them, or do you think sports will become like bodybuilding and pro wrestling, where we just won't care as long as we're entertained?

[Edited on August 1, 2007 at 4:07 PM. Reason : .]

8/1/2007 4:06:26 PM

It's really gonna hit the fan when they don't let the pitcher with the bionic eye play

8/1/2007 4:09:56 PM

Quote :

"Anyway, we'll save that conversation for another day. For now, let's stick to the American hypocrisy of lambasting a sport and a country for doing far more to clean up sports than we do. What Americans would never, ever want to do is what cycling officials did. We would never want to let a band of doping experts loose on American athletes. We are far too comfortable being entertained by dirty athletes to want to see any real cleansing take place.""

what exactly did cycling officials did? doesnt seem to me like they did a lot when they've got dopers every single year (and btw in cycling, "doping" isnt taking drugs...its basically a blood transfusion to get more highly oxygenated blood through your system, fyi)

8/1/2007 4:19:35 PM

Quote :

"what exactly did cycling officials did? doesnt seem to me like they did a lot when they've got dopers every single year "

As a journalist put it regarding steroids, he described how everyone knew Ben Johnson cheated after the 1988 Olympics running the 100 in 9.79s and Johnson was ridiculed for disallowing Carl Lewis from his gold medal. The truth was that everyone Johnson was running against was using pretty much the same stuff, they were just able to mask theirs better so they couldn't get detected.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doping_at_the_2007_Tour_de_France#Overview

Quote :

"The 2007 Tour has generated a wide array of criticisms and a general distrustful and hostile attitude towards the sport of cycling itself from media and public opinion. By the end of the Tour, two cyclists were dismissed for testing positive, one was voluntarily retired by his team for lying about his whereabouts and missing doping tests, and a fourth rider was confirmed to having used doping while in a training session prior to the 2007 Tour (he did start the race but had to retire due to a crash before this was made public). Along the way, two teams contesting the competition were asked to withdraw due to positive tests of at least one member. The doping scandal has also been accompanied by the threat of several team sponsors to retire their support if the events advance further, most noticeably Gerolsteiner and T-Mobile. The media decided not to wait and TV channels like ARD, ZDF and the newspaper France Soir left the tour once the scandals broke."

[Edited on August 1, 2007 at 4:33 PM. Reason : /]

8/1/2007 4:27:04 PM

ok well at least they're kicking people out / not letting them race...i figured if they were still catching people though they hadnt done enough...not that any sport has really though

8/1/2007 4:31:42 PM

did you watch any of the tour? All of team Astana left when their leader, whatever his name is, was caught blood doping.

Vinikorov I belive was his name. I think the officials did a pretty good job this year.

8/1/2007 4:42:47 PM

Quote :

"and btw in cycling, "doping" isnt taking drugs...its basically a blood transfusion to get more highly oxygenated blood through your system, fyi"

doping in cycling is taking drugs also. EPO, steroids, growth hormone, IGF analogues. cyclists are about the only athletes on earth stupid/crazy enough to take a blood transfusion without any medical supervision and then take EPO on top of that. I wouldn't be surprised to find out that some of the guys are bicarbonate loading or doing some other type of blood buffering so they can sprint faster, despite how nasty the side effects are.

8/1/2007 5:00:13 PM

^^nah didnt watch any
^sure blood doping isnt the only way some cyclists have tried to get an advantage, but for the extremely casual fan, when they hear an athlete has cheated by "blood doping" they might think "dope" and think drugs, when is often the transfusion method...and yeah they're pretty stupid/crazy to risk that

8/1/2007 5:01:49 PM

you can't just take a transfusion to up your red blood cell count though, because the way they test for doping is by checking your hematocrit/hemoglobin level. these guys are taking blood transfusions along with saline solutions to pump up their blood volume, and then they take fast acting diuretics to drop the excess water and jack up their hematocrit levels. On top of that, it's speculated that some of the newer synthetic blood substitues are being used as well.

8/1/2007 5:10:12 PM