The U.S. Anti-Doping Agency had its way with Lance Armstrong, unilaterally stripping him of his seven Tour de France victories, which technically is an empty gesture if the French do not follow suit. Once more we have a puffed-up organization that like Cronus is so intent on eating its own in order to save itself from its own irrelevance. It should be made clear that despite the fact there seems on the surface overwhelming “evidence” against Armstrong as a doper, this consists almost entirely on the claims of former teammates who first denied that they themselves used performance enhancements, before being compromised by positive doping tests. Armstrong himself has never tested positive on a drug test.
Author and sportswriter Steve Eubanks called the USADA “the most hated heretofore unknown agency since the establishment of the IRS” for engaging in a witch hunt against a national icon with no physical evidence to substantiate its charges. As federal prosecutors determined, it would be near to impossible to convict Armstrong with only the testimony of clearly compromised persons with less than pure motives. “Lance Armstrong might well be innocent, or he might be, as cycling experts contend, guilty as sin,” wrote Eubanks. “But the public understands things like ‘preponderance of evidence’ and ‘innocent until proven guilty.’ Those are the bedrock standards of a just society.”
Armstrong recently announced he was not going to continue fighting the USADA’s charges, which precipitated the organization’s actions against him. “The bottom line is I played by the rules that were put in place by the UCI, WADA and USADA when I raced,” according to a statement released by Armstrong. “The idea that athletes can be convicted today without positive A and B samples, under the same rules and procedures that apply to athletes with positive tests, perverts the system and creates a process where any begrudged ex-teammate can open a USADA case out of spite or for personal gain or a cheating cyclist can cut a sweetheart deal for themselves. It's an unfair approach, applied selectively, in opposition to all the rules. It's just not right.”
Armstrong is clearly standing on the idea that factual—not circumstantial—evidence is what the court of public opinion requires. Even the MLB does not consider mere allegations as evidence of doping, but its own testing. Of course, in real courts of law, circumstantial evidence can convict in the absence of physical evidence; in missing and presumed dead cases (especially if the alleged victim is an attractive white female), a man can be found guilty of murder even if no body was ever found. What is being proposed in the Armstrong case is the metaphorical “murder” of the image of an American icon who beat cancer and became the Michael Jordan of cycling. If Armstrong is indeed guilty, perhaps no one in history was more clever in the use of performance enhancements; but the problem that remains with this Inquisition is that it cannot adequately explain how—if Armstrong was such a prolific doper—he never tested positive. Are his accusers making exaggerated claims to cynically save their own images? Fat chance of that in the eyes of most of the public.
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On another issue relating to doping, I was listening to a BBC World News report on performance enhancing in, of all venues, the Paralympics. I suspect that most people regard this competition—unlike other international competitions—as having a true sportsmanship character rather than being perverted by the win-at-any-cost approach. Unfortunately, this is just another myth for the idealist to ponder with melancholy.
The Paralympics competition has been somewhat tarnished by the fact that there have been reductions in the amount of levels that athletes can compete, based on their level of disability; athletes with more severe disabilities must compete with those with the less severe, meaning a certain level of unfairness in the competition. There has also been accusations of some athletes faking the degree of their disability in order to gain an edge when the competition actually starts. But more serious is the accusation that some athletes—especially those who compete in wheelchairs—illegally use techniques to enhance their physiological characteristics over the short-term, but in doing so commit virtual maiming of their own bodies. According to the BBC report,
“Athletes with spinal cord injuries do not get the blood pressure and heart rate increases that come from vigorous aerobic exercise as able-bodied athletes typically do. To make up that difference—and allow the body to train harder, thereby increasing fitness and results—paraplegics will intentionally cause their bodies harm, which increases their blood pressure and allows them to compete more vigorously.”
This purposeful maiming is called “boosting.” Athletes have admitted to doing such things as attaching electrodes to their genitals, breaking toes or fingers, and abstaining from urination. Of the latter method of boosting heart rates, one athlete—a quadriplegic climber named Brad Zdanivsky—revealed that “I tried several different ways of doing it. You can allow your bladder to fill, basically don’t go to the bathroom for a few hours and let that pain from your bladder do it. Some people do that in sports by clipping off a catheter (a tube used to aid urine release) to let the bladder fill — that’s the easiest and the most common — and you can quickly get rid of that pain stimulus by letting the urine drain out.”
Because of health risks like stroke, “boosting” was banned by the International Paralympic Committee in 1994. However, the “testing” program to catch cheaters—checking blood pressure—was rarely used in the Beijing Paralympics, and when it was used it apparently caught no one. Yet an unofficial survey revealed that 17 percent of athletes admitted to some form of boosting, and one Canadian doctor specializing in spinal injuries claimed that the true figure may be 30 percent. But the question remains why would these athletes physically harm themselves for fleeting “glory”? Perhaps the answer is not so hard to understand. Although the athletes would seem to have no monetary incentive to cheat (since commercial sponsors are few and far between), another BBC report on the remarkable success of the Ukrainian Paralympic team noted that because of their position in society of a lower order, personal success through this competition means a great deal more than it might to “normal” athletes, and winners are even rewarded with jobs and housing.
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