Doug Logan (ex-CEO of USATF) publicly endorses PEDs

you totally lost me wrote:

nn wrote:

Not really an endorsement of drug use coming from an insider with experience and insight into the problems and costs associated with drug testing in track. Let the numerous drug enforcement agencies handle things. Track has problems. Fighting over drug testing has proven fruitless. It takes away from the positives in the sport. American Milers recently held a meet. Numerous great times. Attendance? Could count the spectators on one hand. Track is a great sport, but it isn't revenue generating. Have to jettison the negatives and invest all resources into the positive aspects of the sport.

What does this mean?

It means that your sport will do much better with the general public if you pay occasional lip service to doping control but mostly ignore the topic. Consider tennis. It is widely believed that Rafa Nadal [and presumably many other top players] dope, but no major tennis star has been busted for PEDs and the sport continues to do much better than track or cycling.

Btw, the claim that Rafa dopes seems to get quite a bit of attention in France. Check out

for a clip I think is hilarious but that Rafa didn't like so much.

dkny64 wrote:

you totally lost me wrote:

What does this mean?

It means that your sport will do much better with the general public if you pay occasional lip service to doping control but mostly ignore the topic. Consider tennis. It is widely believed that Rafa Nadal [and presumably many other top players] dope, but no major tennis star has been busted for PEDs and the sport continues to do much better than track or cycling.

Btw, the claim that Rafa dopes seems to get quite a bit of attention in France. Check out

http://www.programme-tv.net/videos/zapping/2104-rafael-nadal-fait-le-plein-dans-les-guignols/

for a clip I think is hilarious but that Rafa didn't like so much.

When it comes to doping, you simply can't compare sports with a high skills component with sports that test pure athleticism, and thus basic human limits. People will always have more tolerance for doping in sports like tennis and baseball, because they don't see it as necessarily undermining the sport entirely; right or wrong, they still see some scope for testing meaningful human qualities. This would not be the case in track and field. Here the effect of open drugs environment would be obvious for all to see, and would render the sport a complete farce as far as what sport is meant to be all about: measuring personal qualities that human beings find interesting, noble, and compelling.

the medicine man

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5ufdYXCPfc

SB wrote:

When it comes to doping, you simply can't compare sports with a high skills component with sports that test pure athleticism, and thus basic human limits. People will always have more tolerance for doping in sports like tennis and baseball, because they don't see it as necessarily undermining the sport entirely; right or wrong, they still see some scope for testing meaningful human qualities. This would not be the case in track and field. Here the effect of open drugs environment would be obvious for all to see, and would render the sport a complete farce as far as what sport is meant to be all about: measuring personal qualities that human beings find interesting, noble, and compelling.

I agree about the skills part vs [something] part, although I'm not prepared to accept "pure athleticism" as the contrast. Perhaps "pure wattage output"? Anyway, off the top of my head, I see 4 sports that are most affected by doping in the "pure [athleticism? wattage?] way"

-T&F

-Cycling

-Swimming

-Rowing

Rowing has it easy because [correct me if I'm wrong] it isn't a full-on professional sport and isn't subject to a high degree of scrutiny.

Swimming certainly has had doping scandals over the years [the E German women in 1976 and Michelle de Bruin more recently most immediately come to mind], but I think it's been spared close scrutiny by the economics of the sport. E.g. Does Michael Phelps dope? My best guess is yes, but the vast majority of his income comes from consumer products companies that are trading on his image with the general public and seem to have enough clout to prevent anyone from putting him under the microscope.

Cycling is, of course, the poster child for why doping is bad. I'm sure people who know cycling better than I do could spell out why this is the case in far better detail than I can, but I'll summarize my understanding as follows:

-in track, a top performer can get a lane in a pro meet based on performance regardless of affiliation. So if, for example, I'm a western-born athlete able to run 12:58 for 5000m, I'm going to have opportunities to run in DL meets whether I dope or not. In cycling, the teams call the shots, and no matter how good a cyclist might be, if every top team in cycling demands that their riders dope, then I either dope or quit the sport. Period.

-cycling is flipping dangerous. Riders die from crashes from time to time and sustain brutal injuries on a pretty regular basis. Really good runners might rationally refuse to dope because of the potential health risk, but anyone participating in cycling at the highest levels is already taking a significant health risk before factoring in doping.

This brings us to track. On the [open] men's side, I'm an advocate for letting athletes try whatever they want. I believe that the best athletes in conjunction with smart medical and pharma folk would rapidly figure out what types of doping work best and come up with regimens that would optimize performance over the long haul. And I think that would help the sport. I think you'd see better performances than we've seen to date but with smart people involved who would keep runners from falling into the "if 48% hematocrit is good, 52% must be better" kind of trap that cycling did. [side note - am I the only who finds it pretty darn interesting that K Bekele's fiancee keeled over dead of a heart attack back in the day? And you Paula Radcliffe fans out there might want to hunt up her account of what happened to her in Athens.]

What to do about women and juniors in T&F? Set limits for the right to participate in those competitions. In other words, you want to compete open, you can do whatever you want; you want to compete in a women's or junior's competition, you're going to have to submit to testing and fall within a set of established parameters. And if you're outside those parameters, we're not going to castigate you as a drug cheat, we're simply going to tell you that you're welcome to compete in the open competition, but not in the restricted women's or junior's competition [whatever your age or gender.]

On a continuum of pure skills sport on one hand and tests of pure athleticism/gross physical capacities on the other (think: golf versus power lifting if you will), the sports you mention are much closer to the second pole, and tolerance for doping within them by the public is, when it is revealed, very low, as per my argument. Imagine the outcry if Phelps actually tested positive, versus the relative ho hum when the latest baseball star's doping is revealed. Letting drugs rip in any of these sports, track and field in particular, would destroy them in short order. As for your suggestion that competition within which drugs were freely permitted would ultimately be safe, because regulated by "medical professionals": this is pure fantasy (although I take your point that some sports are already inherently quite dangerous). Dr.s who got involved this kind of "medical practice" would, by definition, be in gross violation of the Hippocratic Oath, and thus not likely to have the best interests of athletes at heart. There is no way some kind of quasi market mechanism could be counted to weed out unsafe practices. This is libertarianism of the most facile kind. We don't need a thought experiment to understand what would really happen; we need only look at the history of the old East Bloc system, where Dr.s rationalized their experimentation on young bodies in terms of "protecting athletes from the inherent rigors of training". This was and is recognized by every medical establishment on earth and the grossest kind of malpractice.

SB wrote:

Dr.s who got involved this kind of "medical practice" would, by definition, be in gross violation of the Hippocratic Oath, and thus not likely to have the best interests of athletes at heart. There is no way some kind of quasi market mechanism could be counted to weed out unsafe practices. This is libertarianism of the most facile kind. We don't need a thought experiment to understand what would really happen; we need only look at the history of the old East Bloc system, where Dr.s rationalized their experimentation on young bodies in terms of "protecting athletes from the inherent rigors of training". This was and is recognized by every medical establishment on earth and the grossest kind of malpractice.

A few quick comments / questions:

-During these most recent Summer Olympics, we were bombarded with ads for "Androgel" for men [presumably not elite athletes] with "low T". I reckon that means there are doctors out there who will prescribe good ole testosterone to middle aged men whose only real symptom is a non-optimal level of the hormone. What do you think of that practice?

-Athletes in the eastern bloc were in an extremely weak position relative to the authorities who insisted that they dope. In fact, my impression is that cyclists, at least to the extent that they want to be professional athletes, find themselves in a not dissimilar position in their sport. Until we get to the point of honest-to-goodness gene doping, I don't think men in track would ever find themselves in such a bad position. [As I gather you've noted in my previous comment, I don't see a way out of doping rules for women's competition, and I have to admit even I worry about what might become of an event like shot put in a fully deregulated state of men's competition. Then again, we may have seen a very minimally regulated form of men's shot put during the 1970s and I don't recall anyone getting terribly excited about it.]

Not sure I would have used the same headline. Maybe I would have said "Logan compares the war against drugs to Vietnam -- un-winnable".He actually doesn't say to stop drug regulation -- he said leave it up to the governments and their law enforcement auspices.I'll get back to that in a second, but it seemed to me the main message was one of futility, and the high costs (especially to innocent athletes) of trying to catch dopers at all costs, compared to the low effectiveness. He compared it to the Vietnam war, as something un-winnable.I'd probably go the other direction though. I'm not sure about dismantling the "adas". I'd rather see them get more authority over managing drug tests, taking away this responsibility from the respective sporting federations. "adas" would be less conflicted and more independent.I'd like to look at the "government" aspect a little further. If we look at the biggest busts in recent history, they have come from police, national or federal investigations: Festina, Operation Puerto, BALCO, etc. Even Lance was only taken down after many witness first gave testimony in a federal investigation. Once they testified, it was probably much easier to do it again for USADA.Although many of the drugs banned in sports are not illegal, it seems to me that other real crimes, like fraud, are often committed. Yet I'd hate to see federal or international court systems being clogged up though with sporting disputes. It might even turn ugly with baseless nuisance lawsuits.