Vive Le Tour! Vive Le Dope!

The Tour de France ended yesterday, with Alberto Contador in yellow, and Lance Armstrong on the podium in third.  Like Gordon, I love the Tour de France for many reasons, including that the French just aren’t that good at it anymore. I even went to the Tour last year, watching several stages in person (including the final stage on the Champs-Élysées) and rode part of the course (the flat part, but I did gain a new respect for the Mistral).  See one of my photos from the final stage at right – that’s me, stalking George Hincapie, who gave me a water bottle in exchange for a glass of champagne).

The drama of the mountain stages, Lance’s comeback, Phil and Paul (and Bobke, “Tour DAY France”), the unofficial norms – and their interesting enforcement mechanisms -- that guide professional cyclists’ behavior . . . and the doping scandals.  Yes, if you’re a fan of the Tour, or of cycling more generally, you’re familiar with the doping issues the sport has faced in recent years.

Even this year’s “clean Tour” has failed to escape the doping cloud.  Nor is the Tour likely to avoid such controversy in the future.  Aside from the history of the sport and the continuing doping allegations, power outputs have climbed suspiciously in the past decade -- even accounting for technological changes such as a reduction in the weight of the equipment, stiffer bikes, and better components.  And Contador’s record-breaking climb on the Verbier this year was sufficiently impressive to generate a rash of speculation about his potential doping.   

(See the chart at right from The Science of Sport for a comparison of Contador’s Verbier climb to famous Tour climbs of the past (and see their posts here and here for an elaboration of the comparison and its limitations, including factors such as wind, climb length, and race situation).

Doping problems aren’t unique to cycling, of course.  Baseball, track & field, and a number of other sports have faced doping scandals in recent years.  Moreover, controversial attempts to limit advancing technology’s impact on sport aren’t limited to drugs.  As existing swimming records fall around the world, FINA officials voted on Friday to ban the high-tech swimsuits that have made it possible, which have been likened by some to “doping on a hanger.”

A few weeks ago, I blogged about this year’s Reith Lectures, given by Michael Sandel.  Although the topic of that post was Sandel’s take on immoral markets, another important theme of the lectures is sports doping, which will come as no surprise to those who have read Sandel’s book, The Case Against Perfection, or Richard Posner’s Duke Law Journal response to it (my colleagues Doriane and Jim Coleman also weigh in, in the same journal issue, here).

As would be anticipated by those familiar with Sandel’s prior work, he opposes sports doping, believing that it detracts from the athlete’s achievement; “remake[s] nature, including human nature, to serve our purposes and satisfy our desires;” and poses the danger of transforming “three key features of our moral landscape—humility, responsibility, and solidarity.” (The usual caveats that a short blog post will doubtless fail to convey some of the nuances of either Sandel’s or Posner’s positions, and that you should read the full originals to get the whole picture, naturally apply). 

Posner, in contrast, argues that the sports doping “problem” is largely self-correcting.  Sports doping thus can mostly be left to the free market because: 

If what the public wants from sports performances is to observe hierarchies of innate qualities, then it is in the financial self-interest of the owners of professional sports teams, and for that matter the owners of amateur sports teams (such as universities), to prevent drug taking or other interventions that alter or obscure the relevant hierarchies.

There may be collective action problems, however.  Although doping bans may benefit team owners and athletes as a group, individuals have an incentive to defect from the agreement.  Here, according to Posner, is where public enforcement can play a beneficial role, through, for example, “criminal penalties on athletes who engage in forms of doping that both are difficult to detect and reduce the economic value of the sport.”

But it seems to me that Posner’s description, with it’s focus on resolutions to potential collective action problems, doesn’t sufficiently account for an important function of both public and industry-operated doping bans, at least in the context of the Tour.   The crowd does, to employ Posner’s terminology, prefer spectacle to sport, so long as we think that we’re getting sport, rather than spectacle.  If so, then the collective best interests of the industry dictate apparent – rather than real – control and enforcement (perhaps within some limits). 

Maybe it’s not earth shattering to suggest that the sport of cycling, just like numerous other industries, may benefit from the PR boost of cosmetic compliance.  Yet the point is rarely raised in debates on doping bans, which often boil down to discussions over the pros and cons of regulation versus free markets, and are less likely to address the potential benefits and costs (of which there are both) to a largely cosmetic, as opposed to real, regulatory or industry self-regulatory regime.

We loved Contador’s heroic feat on Verbier – it was exciting.  Just like we loved Floyd Landis’s epic 2006 comeback; Tyler Hamilton’s superhuman 142 km solo breakaway, stage win, and fourth-place GC finish with a broken collar-bone; and Vinokourov’s spectacular mountain-top breakaway.  Because, as Phil says in this video of the relevant Vino footage, “everyone loves a fighter.”

. . . Until we found out they were all doping, that is.

Maybe the Tour exists because – not in spite – of doping.  And it’s a wonderful spectacle. Vive le dope! Vive le tour!

Related Post: Testing Sport’s Limits : Cheating, Doping, and Technology

Comments

[Roger Dennis]

Kim--great post, two confounding data points on Contador's climb..there was a tailwind .which reduces the watts needed to climb pretty significantly..also the climb was shorter than the true monsters of the tour..it took only about 22 minutes versus the 35 minutes or more to climb the classic hc climbs in the tour...your commentator has done similar climbs in south africa and the rockies, torture at half the watts of our tour heros...and no epo for me!!!

[Kim Krawiec]

Roger -- I'm duly impressed (and would continue to be even if you laid claim to EPO enhancement). :-)
Science of Sport does discuss the effect of wind, climb length, and other factors on their analysis. My recollection is that they acknowledge the inability to control for wind effects, but dismiss the difference in climb length as unlikely to be significant. Apparently (according to their calculations), the impact of climb length on output is frequently overestimated (and understandably -- it sure *feels* harder).

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Here, according to Posner, is where public enforcement can play a beneficial role, through, for example, “criminal penalties on athletes who engage in forms of doping that both are difficult to detect and reduce the economic value of the sport.”