ToreBear said:
http://csslsblog.org/2012/09/06/on-the-doping-discourse-in-the-united-states-think-outside-the-box/
. . . It basicly uses France as a contrast to the US. . . .
My impression is that the US is particularly susceptible to doping. Mantras like win at all costs and the tendency to call ahtletes heroes are for me anectotal indicators of a larger issue. . . .
For cycling, I get the impression that doping has been part of sport even at lower levels for some time in the US. . . .
Where do I start? My points, not necessarily in order of importance, are these:
The article shows significant difference between the US and France, save one, and that has little or no impact on the bottom line - preventing doping in sports.
Up until the eighties and 90's, the use of drugs in sports was more commonplace in Europe than the US. And it was more widely tolerated.
The levels that doping reaches - I will combine that with the 2nd point.
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The difference approach to inhibiting doping: the French criminalize it, making the prosecution etc a government process. The US has left that in the private sector, with sport agencies and more recently anti-doping agencies. Where it has been pursued by those agencies. I would say, that this approach has been of a similar level of effectiveness. In other words, not. I suppose an argument could be made that the government agency approach has advantages, and might have been more effective in the 1990's and 20-aughts. After all - Festina, eh? But, at the same time, athletes in other sports were being sanctioned in the US - quite vigorously. But not very effectively in cycling. Still, I do not see an inherent advantage to one approach over the other. Any other differences would be cultural, and I would argue, that at least in cycling, the French culture was quite possibly MORE tolerant of doping in cyling than the US. But I really don't know much about the French culture (other than reading the comments of Anquetil). What I do know is that it was far more tolerated and winked at in Belgium in the late 80's than in the US. After that period my life went in different directions, and so my information sources became those also available to the public.
The public attitude in the US might seem to be one of "win at all costs", but this is the final point of a long road. Up until the late 80's, doping to win a sport was regarded with extreme negativity. The "win at all costs" mentality was also supposed to include the "win fairly" mentality - which got lost somewhere along the way. Winning by doping would not have been winning fairly. Which is why steroid usage has been banned and tested for in American football from an early time.
It was the advent of the internet, in the early and mid 90's that changed this in the US. The internet meant performance enhancing drugs became commonly available to the masses. Prior to that, they were difficult to obtain, difficult in the extreme. And, the information on how to use them was also difficult to obtain. That was when doping began to appear among the youth of sport, and I would bet that any reliable comparison would find little difference of the growth in such use between the US and Europe.
I will guess that different Euro countries have different social attitudes towards cycling and doping. Just as the US has a different attitude. I also know that even though cultures change - they do so with difficulty. I would bet that even today casual drug use by the youth of Euro cycling is more common today than in the US. I would also bet that we would find more variation between Euro countries than we do between the Euro countries and the US. But who knows? The latest generations of youth have been incredibly homogenized by the internet. Sometimes the differences between teenagers from Greece , Russian, China, France, and the US seem incredibly tiny.
, or rather Collorado or something?
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