PRISONER'S DILEMMA EXPLAINS SPORTS DOPING (I of IV)

Scientific American Magazine - By Michael Shermer

Game theory helps to explain the pervasive abuse of drugs in cycling, baseball and other sports.

For a competitive cyclist, there is nothing more physically crushing and psychologically demoralizing than getting dropped by your competitors on a climb. With searing lungs and burning legs, your body hunches over the handlebars as you struggle to stay with the leader. You know all too well that once you come off the back of the pack the drive to push harder is gone—and with it any hope for victory.

Cyclists on the 1984 U.S. Olympic cycling team had told me how they had injected themselves with extra blood before races, either their own—drawn earlier in the season—or that of someone else with the same blood type. “Blood doping,” as the practice is called, was not banned at the time, and on a sliding moral scale it seemed only marginally distinguishable from training at high altitude. Either way, you increase the number of oxygen-carrying red blood cells in your body.

Imagine that my team had made performance-enhancing drugs part of its “medical program” and that I knew I could be cut if I was not competitive. Finally, assume I believed that most of my competitors were doping and that the ones who were tested almost never got caught. That scenario, in substance, is what many competitive cyclists say they have been facing since the early 1990s. And although the details differ for other sports such as baseball, the overall doping circumstances are not dissimilar. Many players are convinced that “everyone else” takes drugs and so have come to believe that they cannot remain competitive if they do not participate.

On the governance side, the failure of Major League Baseball to make the rules clear, much less to enforce them with extensive drug testing throughout the season, coupled with its historical tendency to look the other way, has created an environment conducive to doping. Naturally, most of us do not want to believe that any of these stellar athletes are guilty of doping. But the convergence of evidence leads me to conclude that in cycling, as well as in baseball, football, and track and field, most of the top competitors of the past two decades have been using performance-enhancing drugs.

The time has come to ask not if but why. The reasons are threefold: first, better drugs, drug cocktails and drug-training regimens; second, an arms race consistently won by drug takers over drug testers; and third, a shift in many professional sports that has tipped the balance of incentives in favor of cheating and away from playing by the rules.

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