When Papp came clean, professional cycling slapped him with a two-year ban... But the social consequences were far worse than that.
“The sport spit me out,” he lamented to me. “A team becomes a band of brothers,... but with a team of dopers there’s an additional bond—a shared secret—and with that there is a code of silence. If you get busted, you keep your mouth shut. The moment I confessed I was renounced by my friends because in their mind I put them at risk. One guy called and threatened to kill me if I revealed that he doped.” Papp was never a Tour-caliber cyclist, however, so perhaps the game matrix—with its implications for the rider’s own cycling career—is different at the elite level.
Not so, as I learned from another insider. “For years I had no trouble doing my job to help the team leader,” said Frankie Andreu, who was the superdomestique, or lead pacer, supporting Lance Armstrong throughout much of the 1990s. “Then, around 1996, the speeds of the races shifted dramatically upward. Something happened, and it wasn’t just training.” Andreu resisted the temptation as long as he could, but by 1999 he could no longer do his job: “It became apparent to me that enough of the peloton [the main group of riders in a cycling race] was on the juice that I had to do something.” He began injecting himself with r-EPO two to three times a week. “It’s not like Red Bull, which gives you instant energy,” he explained. “But it does allow you to dig a little deeper, to hang on to the group a little longer, to go maybe 31.5 miles per hour instead of 30 mph.”
One of the subtle benefits of r-EPO in a brutal three-week race like the Tour de France is not just boosting HCT levels but keeping them high. Jonathan Vaughters, a former teammate of Armstrong’s, crunched the numbers for me this way: “The big advantage of blood doping is the ability to keep a 44 percent HCT over three weeks.” A “clean” racer who started with a 44 percent HCT, Vaughters noted, would expect to end up at 40 percent after three weeks of racing because of natural blood dilution and the breakdown of red blood cells. “Just stabilizing [your HCT level] at 44 percent is a 10 percent advantage.”
Scientific studies on the effects of performance-enhancing drugs are few in number and are usually conducted on nonathletes or recreational ones, but they are consistent with Vaughters’s assessment. (For obvious reasons, elite athletes who dope are disinclined to disclose their data). The consensus among the sports physiologists I interviewed is that r-EPO improves performance by at least 5 to 10 percent. When it is mixed in with a brew of other drugs, another 5 to 10 percent boost can be squeezed out of the human engine. In events decided by differences of less than 1 percent, this advantage is colossal.
Italian sports physiologist Michele Ferrari, as knowledgeable on doping as he is controversial (because of his close affiliation with elite athletes who have tested positive for doping or been accused of same), explains it this way: “If the volume of [red blood cells] increases by 10 percent, performance [the rider’s net gain in output of useful kinetic energy] improves by approximately 5 percent. This means a gain of about 1.5 seconds per kilometer for a cyclist pedaling at 50 kilometers per hour in a time trial, or about eight seconds per kilometer for a cyclist climbing at 10 kph on a 10 percent ascent.” In the Tour de France, those numbers imply that a cyclist who boosts his HCT by 10 percent will cut his own time by 75 seconds in a 50-kilometer (31-mile) time trial, a race typically decided by a few seconds. On any of the numerous 10-kilometer (six-mile) climbs in the Alps and the Pyrenees, on grades as steep as 10 percent, that same blood difference would gain the rider a whopping 80 seconds per climb. If any of the top cyclists are on the juice, their erstwhile competitors cannot afford to give away such margins. That is where the game matrix kicks into defection mode.
In game theory, if no player has anything to gain by unilaterally changing strategies, the game is said to be in a Nash equilibrium. The concept was identified by mathematician John Forbes Nash, Jr., who was portrayed in the film A Beautiful Mind. To end doping in sports, the doping game must be restructured so that competing clean is in a Nash equilibrium. That is, the governing bodies of each sport must change the payoff values of the expected outcomes identified in the game matrix.
- First, when other players are playing by the rules, the payoff for doing likewise must be greater than the payoff for cheating.
- Second, and perhaps more important, even when other players are cheating, the payoff for playing fair must be greater than the payoff for cheating. Players must not feel like suckers for following the rules.
In the game of prisoner’s dilemma, lowering the temptation to confess and raising the payoff for keeping silent if the other prisoner confesses increases cooperation. Giving players the chance to communicate before they play the game is the most effective way to increase their cooperation. In sports, that means breaking the code of silence. Everyone must acknowledge there is a problem to be solved. Then drug testing must be done and the results communicated regularly and transparently to all until the test results are clean.
That will show each player that the payoff for playing fair is greater than the payoff for cheating, no matter what the other players do. info@goliveideas4.com >> http://www.goliveideas4.com
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