What’s Wrong With Cyclists Taking Drugs?

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What’s wrong with cyclists taking drugs?

I don’t do either – cycling or drugs that is – and for a pretty similar reason. Balance: lack of.

Cycling is simply out of the question as any speed at which I can feel the wind in my hair (you may laugh but I have very sensitive follicles) causes me to faint in sheer terror. Obviously, losing consciousness whilst in charge of a moving vehicle is perilous, especially a vehicle with no independent means of maintaining an upright stance, and since stabilisers are considered unbecoming in a man of my age and social standing, I am best giving cycling a miss.

Same goes for drugs. Reality is upsetting enough without having to deal with any chemical interference with my cognitive stability. I prefer to retain my mental balance. Call me boring but I’m quite happy with the meagre mind and muscles nature gave me.

Still, I have no ethical objections to other people indulging in either pastime. Separately, or even, if they so choose, at the same time. (Yes, I am aware of the legal issues; this is simply a thought experiment, a little philosophical tease, and not intended in any way as practical encouragement or endorsement.)

Whenever I talk to cycling enthusiasts they say they want their sport to be “clean”. They argue that “performance enhancing” products are cheating. I’m not convinced. Or maybe I just don’t understand, which is a distinct possibility.

Let’s take an area of culture that I understand a little better, say popular music and literature. Imagine arguing for the eradication of performance enhancing drugs here. Imagine Bob Marley without his herb; what the heck would “clean Reggae” be like? Or 80’s rave music without the influence of MDMA or the sixties sans hallucinogens … would you really think that would have been an improvement? I’m having doubts.

As for literature, the only readable poems I know were written under the influence of of some intoxicant or other. Half the stuff they made you recite in school assembly was written by hopeless junkies. Wordsworth, wandering lonely as a cloud? Yeah, on his way to meet his dealer. Novels, short stories, essays? All my heroes were regularly off their tits. One of my favourite books ever, Confessions of an English Opium Eater – a magnificently written, massively influential, gloriously individual story – was written by a guy (Thomas de Quincey) who could have snorted the Hacienda bare and still been able to medicine Liam Gallagher under the table. Then there’s Poe and Burroughs and Thompson and … well, most of them who put pen to paper really. Are we saying that we’d really they hadn’t? Their books would have been a hell of a lot more tedious if they’d been clean.

So, why if we can tolerate the idea that drugs aren’t always bad in culture, then why not in cycling? Why are drugs necessarily dirty?

Performance enhancing? Yes, just like that bike frame you pay several thousands of pounds for, the lycra onesie, and the funny hat … if we were serious about the performance enhancing argument we’d put all professional cyclists on the same bike and limit it to three gears – four or more is just showing off, surely? Oh, and we’d make ‘em all eat the same stuff. Wouldn’t want special diets giving someone an advantage now, would we?

Surely, in the end it’s not about the substances, it’s about the individual talent. Spike me with the contents of Lance Armstrong’s and I’m unlikely to go zipping up Beeston Hill in thirty seconds flat; most likely I’d be curled in a foetal position, dribbling out of the corner of my mouth and rambling incoherently about the space bugs speaking to me out of the telly. Similarly, I could smoke a heap of ganja and still not make it as a Wailer.

What do people think? Is there an ethical principle (as opposed to legal sanction) why drugs are wrong in a sport such as cycling?

16 comments

  1. Phil,

    It’s supposedly about the safety of the competitors.

    By avoiding any game of pharmaceutical one-upmanship in which the participants consume spiralling amounts of unproven and potentially dangerous substances, unforeseen consequences such as mid-race heart failure are kept to a minimum.

    Personally, I find watching any sort of vehicle whizzing round a track to be as interesting as watching paint dry. Now, give me some stock car racing any day…

    1. But that’s assuming there will be a cycling version of mutually assured destruction. Maybe that only happens now because the chemicals are clandestine?

  2. It’s also to do with robbing another competitor of their win.

    Like there’s actually two races going on at the same time on the same track, but with different rules and only one winner. Sport’s about two things, rules and winning, and if you don’t follow the rules, you aren’t really the winner.

    1. There’s something mad about a sport where the rules don’t seem to suit many of the best players, and where the best players are tempted to cheat.

    1. Simple and effective way to fix that… Change the rules? And wouldn’t that make it safer? Or would there still be pressure to find a magic bullet, however dangerous?

  4. Why can’t they have some races for the ones who don’t do any stuff at all, others for the ones who do stuff that’s not illegal but against the rules of the sport’s governing body, and others for the nutters who’ll neck anything that’s going?

  5. It is so easy to be glib about drugs in sport. True, from it’s very beginnings cycle sport has been rife with performance enhancing products, from the famous cocaine eye-drops of Henri Péllisier to the infamous ‘Pot Belge’ in the sixties and Seventies, right through to EPO, NESP and blood transfusions in modern era.
    But another thing that has followed this trend is death and addiction.
    The most famous victim of drugs in the sport in the UK is Tom Simpson, who tragically died on the 13th July 1967 while scaling the slopes of Mont Ventoux in the Tour de France. He had consumed amphetamines and brandy to give him a ‘boost’, but this resulted in a heart attack brought on by dehydration. He was 29.
    Internationally, the ‘poster boy’ for cycling deaths is Marco Pantani the mercurial and supremely gifted climber who won both the Giro d’Italia and the Tour de France in 1998, a rare double. Sure, he was on dope, but the Festina drugs scandal of that particular Tour pointed to the fact that many riders in the peloton were also doping.
    Drugs became an integral part of Pantani’s life, both on and of the bike, and this resulted in a terrible downward spiral that ended with him dying in a Rimini hotel alone, from a cocaine overdose, at the age of 34.
    But these are the famous ones, the Marilyn Monroes.
    The real victims of doping in cycle sport are in the junior ranks, the gifted young riders who raced clean and won every race they entered, but suddenly couldn’t make the pace at the higher levels. These riders gambled everything on a career as a racing pro, their parents sank savings into their racing careers, and suddenly they are no longer winning.
    The reason? Dope.
    So they ask around, spend money on products, inject, start to win again.
    And then they die in their sleep.
    Why?
    EPO increases the red blood cells, the cells that carry oxygen to the heart. This has the side effect of thickening the blood, forming clots, and killing young riders. As their strong hearts slow to a pulse rate of around 40 beats per minute while sleeping, the blood coagulates, and blocks the hearts valves.
    There have been dozens and dozens of unexplained deaths of young riders who have passed away in their sleep, but the reason is always the same.
    They took performance enhancing drugs to win bicycle races.
    Funnily enough, after the drug scandals of the 1998 Tour de France, the following year it was noticed that many of the recorded speeds on certain key climbs had significantly lowered, indicating that riders were not performing as well, leading to the conclusion that doping had dramatically decreased.
    The only exception was one team – The US Postal Service, captained by Lance Armstrong.
    Where other riders were reducing dope or stopping altogether, Lance and his team upped the game, effectively creating a dope arms race that changed the face of cycling for the next decade.
    Lance kept winning.
    Clean riders kept losing.
    Junior riders kept dying.

    This is why drugs should be kept out of sport.

    –

    One other thing. Your comparison with drugs in sport and drugs in the arts doesn’t stand up.
    Cyclists are trying to be the best they can be, to be the fastest, the supreme athlete. It only goes in one direction, the finish line.
    Art is not about who can write quickest, paint fastest. It goes in many directions, a creative force that has infinite paths. No cyclist is going to win the Tour de France by dreamily choosing their own route and riding it in a novel and creative manner!

    1. You really should have emailed me this as a separate piece… In fact, would you mind if we posted this separately? It’s really good… Rather better than the provocation.

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