Just Like Pro-Wrestlin'

[andygates]

So the Tour de France once again blows up with a doping scandal: Vinokourov's hugely entertaining John McClane Die Hard battle has been seasoned with blood doping; he's under serious investigation and the Astana team have left the Tour under a cloud.

Blood doping is where you inject some extra blood into an athlete.  Have you ever given blood and felt a bit weak and woozy afterwards?  Blood doping is the exact opposite: you get blood and feel like Superman; all those extra red cells transporting buckets of oxygen to your hungry muscles.  And if it's your own blood, taken a couple of months before while at peak condition, then it's very hard to detect.  If you stay just below the critical red-cell count (haematocrit: there's a level beyond which no normal human can sensibly go, after all)

Vino's blood allegedly had blood from someone else in it.  That's a schoolboy error: it most likely means that his blood was mixed up with someone else's in the Secret Performance Lab.  Hey, who hasn't mixed up two bottles in a fridge?  Especially when they're not labelled "Vino" and "Fred" but "Aardwolf" and "Echidna" or "34783" and "34985" or some other super-secret no-we're-not-doping-honest code?

Actually, the idea of doping with my blood isn't too unpleasant, but a pint of someone else's is just groady.  Still, sports fans, don't be disillusioned by the seemingly systemic doping that takes place in the Tour.  There's a huge pile of cash riding on performances here, so the temptation to tweak is as strong as it gets.  Just think of it like pro-wrestling.  You still get the spectacle and the blood, the opportunity to yell at your screen and buy tie-in products - you just lose the nobility.

Comments

[ankaret.livejournal.com]

Now that's a pulp vampire-novel plot waiting to happen.

[andygates.livejournal.com]

The amount Phil Sherwen has been going on about "the quality of Kazakh dental work" whenever Vinokourov grimaces as he wins, Vino the Vampire has to be a label waiting for collection.

Heh. You could have a whole pro-cycling team in Thrall. I'm not sure what use that would be, other than providing a reason to drive around the Alps in a huge bus, but even so...

[ravenbait.livejournal.com]

You don't have the whole team in thrall.

Just the domestiques. Now you have a plot worthy of Anne Rice.

Just have to figure out what to do about the whole burning up on exposure to sun thing.

Ahhhhh. That's where doping (as opposed to feeding) comes in...

You know, I could make this work.

What pisses me off is all the fuss that was being made over Rasmussen, who has tested clean all through the Tour and fundamentally, whose only crime has to get his calendar confused. I know it's trad to go after yellow, but even so.

Now the erstwhile hero of the Tour turns out to be have been injecting the O neg. And he was sloppy about it! In a sport with this much riding on it (ignore the pun), there's bound to be doping. Just as there is in any other high pressure sport. The Tour shouldn't be ashamed of there being doping because they caught him: they should be ashamed of painting a target on their backs by making so much more of a fuss about potential doping than any other sport.

[andygates.livejournal.com]

Compare Rasmussen to Tim Don, triathlon's golden boy: he missed *three* tests, served his 3-month ban, then successfully appealed the lifetime Olympic ban on the grounds that it was a calendar screw-up. But tri seems to be more supportive - the "drug cheetz must DIE!!!" camp is much smaller.

The Tour seem to be quite happy at having caught dopers - but with such a history of it, the running joke that you can find the clean athlete easily (he's at the back) is getting rolled out again.

Mind you, at a grassroots level cyclists are almost all habitual caffeine (ab)users. Ergogenic and delicious; endurance activity encourages an awareness of metabolic tweaking. Which reminds me, must get some chocolate espresso beans for the Dun Run.

[despaer.livejournal.com]

I think the difference is that Tri doesn't have a huge long record of dopers whereas the TDF does. I saw a comment today that suggested that Greg LeMond was the last clean winner of the tour (subsequent winners are Indurain (team was known to dope; look at Pedro Delgado's history), Riis (admitted it), Ullrich, Pantani (Both 'nuff said), Armstrong and Floyd Landis. FWIW, I think that probably Armstrong was clean and I suspect LeMond wasn't since everyone was doping then. But the point remains the same that in most sports it is the exception when someone dopes but in cycling they all seem to do it.

Stupid people. Especially for lying to their audience and then hoping that they don't mind

[justoneway.livejournal.com]

I am not sure I could ever condone doping at high levels in any sport. Mainly because I do not think that the high levels where doping happens are that important. They are merely the shiny front end of sport that gets the media coverage. They would not exist without a grass roots that participated on an amateur basis.

This kind of behaviour will be poison to those grass roots. Why would you bother competing at amateur level if you were surrounded by doping cheats? There is no money in it and the enjoyment would be killed off by the pointlessness of your participation.
You would just go and find another sport.

And so the sport whithers, with just the dopers left in there own small clique while the rest of the world looks on with disgust or disinterest.

[andygates.livejournal.com]

I dunno. Amateur powerlifting is totally juiced even at the grass roots. Cheating is only unbalanced if not everyone is doing it ;)

[justoneway.livejournal.com]

Powerlifting is not something that will ever be a mainstream sport though is it? I mean would you want you children hanging about in sweaty gyms frequented small dicked blokes with hyperdermic needles and baby oil? The culture of doping has helped make it this way.

Cycling is a very accessible sport. Condoning doping will make it less so. I think that is bad.

[andygates.livejournal.com]

Doping's been present at the top end of cycling since at least 1924 though. The prevalent culture, on those massive stage-races, is doped.

Then again we Brits suck at stage races; we're handier at track stuff, at which we're pretty clean and we excel. Get thee to a velodrome!