Tag: Lance Armstrong

Performance Enhancing Swimsuits — and Why Not Ban Lance?

It’s kind of hard to understand the justification for banning performance enhancing drugs but allowing all sorts of other performance enhancing technologies. If the major concern is the “integrity of the game,” then high tech swimsuits that reduce drag far more than was possible at previous competitions seems just as unfair as some drug that increases available oxygen. This is why, for example, Major League Baseball has so far resisted using aluminum bats, even though such bats can apparently be configured to have very close to the same properties as wooden bats.

The real kicker there are Nike’s non-goggles — lenses that are affixed to the eye sockets with medical adhesive, eliminating both the protruding nature of goggles as well as the band connecting them to the head. Why not make them permanent and have a Bruce Sterling Olympics?

One of the fascinating things I learned about traditional performance enhancement is how elite cyclists such as Lance Armstrong can actually alter their physiological reaction to lactic acid. As you exercise, lactic acid builds up in your muscles and eventually causes that pain you feel in muscles if you sustain an intense workout.

But using intensive training methods, you can actually raise your body’s tolerance for lactic acid. A number of web sites and news reports suggest that through training Lance Armstrong has an extremely high tolerance of lactic acid — apparently significantly higher than other cyclists (presumably there must be some sort of genetic component to one’s ultimate lactic acid tolerance).

Suppose that tomorrow I invented a completely safe compound whose only major side effect was that it increased your tolerance to lactic acid to the maximum that your genotype allows. Should such a compound be banned? What if I come up with a genetic modification that will push your or Lance Armstrong’s tolerance for lactic acid even further (though not into unsafe ranges)? Would that be cheating?

Perhaps the best answer is a compromise suggested by Gizmodo a few week ago — adding an enhanced category to competitions. So you’d keep the current regimen for non-enhanced athletes, but add an enhanced category without drug or genetic testing and anything goes.

Source:

Suit changes take swimmers to new heights. The Associated Press, August 2, 2004.

Lance Armstrong, Performance Enhancing Drugs, and Deion Sanders’s Retirement

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).