This weekend I happened to run across ABC News doing a brief bit about Lance Armstrong winning his third straight Tour de France. Of course they couldn’t leave the topic without mentioning long-standing suspicions that Armstrong uses performance enhancing drugs.
ABC falsely reported that Armstrong had flat-out said he doesn’t use such drugs. But they were running clips from an interview in which Armstrong never actually says, “no, I don’t use performance enhancing drugs,” but rather dances around the issue by noting he’s passed all his drug tests, he can look his family in the eye, etc.
He’s so good, that I don’t think it would really matter whether he is or not (I doubt drugs can give him such a huge advantage in quantities that won’t show up in a drug tests).
But the thing I found strange was the cycling world’s position on cortisone — it’s banned, except in very small amounts, by the Tour de France and other races. In fact the press freaked a few years ago when Armstrong tested positive for very small amounts of cortisone — he’d used a cortisone cream to treat a minor injury, and the level in his system was only about 8 percent of the maximum level.
I found that bizarre because in most sports I follow, not only is cortisone not banned, but athletes who don’t take cortisone shots to deal with pain are often looked at as whimps (the actual pejorative used is far more uncouth, but this is a family blog).
In the National Football League, for example, heavy use of pain killing chemicals is considered the norm. In order to get ready for a game that had no playoff implications (because the Dallas Cowboys were already out of contention), Troy Aikman once took an epidural the Monday before the game, followed by several cortisone shots throughout the week, and then another cortisone shot right before the game.
In fact it is very common for players in pain to receive cortisone shots in the locker room during halftime. In a completely meaningless game between the 2-6 Cincinnati Bengals and the 2-7 Cleveland Browns last October, for example, Cincinnati quarterback Akili Smith received a cortisone at halftime to alleviate pain in his knee (which was an incredibly stupid thing to do IMO).
Anyway, Armstrong is obviously much better than the other racers in the Tour de France and once athletes get to that level, often the psychological aspects of the sport become as interesting as the physical aspects. I saw an interview where Armstrong was describing how he fooled the other riders into thinking he was tiring on one of the more mountainous legs of the race, only to blow away the field at the end.
That reminded me of a story I heard Deion Sanders tell a reporter. Whatever else you think of Sanders, who announced his retirement this week (and he was certainly never much of an inspiration or role model), he was clearly the best corner back ever to play in the National Football League. He was so good, in fact, that quarterbacks would sometimes simply refuse to throw to the receiver on the side of the field he was covering.
So Sanders had a plan. He’d run his first few man coverages so there was no way the quarterback would be foolish enough to throw the ball, but also so it looked like that’s all the speed he had. Once he had sold that routine a couple of times, he’d run with the receiver and pull up a half-step or so, making it look like the receiver had him beat.
As soon as that football left the quarterback’s arm, then Sanders would quick in the speed leaving the receiver and quarterback wondering what just happened. Of course the cockiness Sanders had to have to pull that off didn’t exactly translate well off-the-field, but it’s one of the reasons he returned almost 17 percent of his interceptions back for a touchdown, not to mention the all-time NFL record for touchdowns on returns (fumbles, kickoffs, punts and interceptions).