Doping in Sport

The latest edition of the Tour de France is in news more due to a series of doping scandals, than as the great sporting spectacle that it always is. The Tour de France is not just the premier event in the cycling calendar, but is the ultimate test of human endurance (6000 calories consumed per day). It is not just a sporting event with appeal cutting across sporting boundaries, but a cultural and social event without parallel.

For the uninitiated, the Tour de France is a 3550 km long cycling race, started in 1903 and spread over three weeks and watched live by over 15 million people. The riders average a staggering 40 km per hour over the 20 gruelling stages, which include steep mountain climbs on the Alps and the Pyrenees. The winner of the Tour is resented the Yellow Jersey in front of the Arc de Triomphe along the Champs Elysee.

The 104th edition of the Tour has been dogged by controversies even before it started. With last year's winner Floyd Landis' status still up in the Malibu courts for final adjudication, the Tour started without a legally valid defending champion. A series of doping revealations early this year by previous Tour leaders, set the stage for a "Tour de Dopage". Bjarne Riis, the 1996 winner, Erik Zabel and Rolf Aldag confessed to having used blood booster EPO. Former King of the Mountains, Ivan Basso, was banned for two years following revealations of his role in a Spanish doping scandal.

After the race started with "Le Grand Depart" from London, the scandals continued to unravel. Pre-race favourite Alexandre Vinokourov and his Astana team were thrown out of the race after tests showed he had a blood transfusion prior to Stage 13, whose time trial he won. Then the race leader Michael Rasmussen was sacked by his Rabobank team for lying about his whereabouts during the build-up to the Tour, when he missed crucial drugs tests. Similarly the Cofidis team also pulled out after one of its riders, Cristian Moreni, tested postive.

Despite intense efforts, doping continues to remain one of the most important challenges in all sport. Rigorous and mandatory testing before and after individual events and random testing in team events, has had little effect in controlling the doping menace. The Tour de France, for instance, has introduced blood tests every morning and normal anti-doping tests in the afternoon on all drivers. In an attempt to monitor sportsmen on a continuous basis, out-of-competition tests have become the norm in all sports. In fact, though every imaginable regulatory solution to eliminating drug abuse in sport has been tried, doping continues to remain the major challenge facing modern day sport. However, all these attempts to address doping has been from the general framework of banning and eliminating drug use from sport. Now, the time has come to try out something different.

The incentive sytem in modern day sport is responsible for making it so vulnerable to such malaise. Sportsmen compete not for the sake of mere participation or any utopian notion of Olympian spirit, but for winning. The stakes are very high, with massive sponsorship and television and media coverage of sporting events. The returns on winning are so high that any attempt to squeeze out even the last ounce of output, including performance enhancing drugs, is worth its weight in gold. For all the rapid advances in dope detection technologies, there have been significant improvements in dope-masking technologies.

We therefore need to structure a system of incentives that while accepting the reality of doping, tries to ensure that the results truly reflect human sporting skills and abilities. This incentive structure will need to cost in the drug factor and penalize sportsmen who indulge in dope. A scientifically derived schedule of penalty factors for each category of dope offence, in every sport, can be tabulated. The penalty factor could be in terms of time and distance penalty in athletics and racing sports, goals or scores in team sports, and points in racket games. This factor should be on the higher side, so as to serve as a deterrent on drug use. For example, an Alexander Vinokurov, caught with 3 units of EPO in his blood smaple could be penalised 30 minutes, or 10 minutes per unit of EPO found. The challenge is to make the cost of using drugs prohibitively higher than its benefits. Any incentive structure will have to persuade sportsmen to give up drug use, and this is the only sustainable way to controlling drug use in sports.

Critics will say that this will rob sport of all its thrill and suspense, since the final result will be conclusive only after the dope tests. This arguement is fallacious since in any case now that is the reality with considerable number of sports events decided well after the drug tests. Administrators will simultaneously have to come up with strong enough penalties to deter sportspersons from using these performance enhancing drugs. Ultimately, modern sport is after all entertainment and theatre, packaged to make it even more alluring, and despite drugs, sporting events and performances will continue to generate spectacular thrills and suspenses.

In any case, it is hard to believe that doping and drug abuse is new to sports. The testing procedures have improved and the benefits of drug use has increased substantially over the past two decades, resulting in more sportsmen using drugs and more positive cases being detected. But sportsmen in all ages have relied on external agents, be it amphetamines or brandy or the more potent performance enhancing drugs of today, for some form of stimulation. There is an excellent article in the Guardian by Dan Geister, "Bad Drugs, great sport", on this.