How can professional cycling be saved?

[OregonRider]

What's going to really solve this problem? Clearly the incentives to cheat are huge, and the benefits of staying clean are vastly smaller. If a particular rider (or team for that matter) thinks everyone else is cheating, then they're more likely to succumb to temptation.

Would stiffer penalties help? Lifetime bans for a first offense? Automatic disbanding of any team if any one rider is caught? Fines 2 or 3 times larger than a year's salary/endorsements?

The technological arms race between the governing body (UCI, WADA or whoever) and the cheaters will always go on, so better testing isn't really the answer, but testing must always be improved.

Other thoughts?

 

[Oldman]

What's going to really solve this problem? Clearly the incentives to cheat are huge, and the benefits of staying clean are vastly smaller. If a particular rider (or team for that matter) thinks everyone else is cheating, then they're more likely to succumb to temptation.

Would stiffer penalties help? Lifetime bans for a first offense? Automatic disbanding of any team if any one rider is caught? Fines 2 or 3 times larger than a year's salary/endorsements?

The technological arms race between the governing body (UCI, WADA or whoever) and the cheaters will always go on, so better testing isn't really the answer, but testing must always be improved.

Other thoughts?

More solid, clean, beer loving riders from Portland, Seattle, Vancouver, Missoula....We start over like we started out, I guess.

 

[sida-mot]

IMHO you have to take the problem seriously. Get rid of the doping culture. Clear out all the garbage, or as much as it is possible anyway. No point in trying to save the sports face anymore. New riders will fill the gaps. Don't worry about that. Strike hard and ruthless.

Throw together a heavily ideologically brain wash seminar about what it means to be an athlete that every pro has to enter in order to get their license.

More and stricter tests. It seems like a bit of a myth that dopers are always one step ahead. They use pretty much the same methods now as they did 10 years ago.

 

[Cerberus]

Honestly I don't think it's possible to clean up professional Cycling. you can level the playing field, you can insure that perhaps you can get into the top 10 clean rather than the top 20, but fundamentally cleaning up the sport is not I think possible. I would love to be proven wrong of cause, but I don't think I will.

 

[petesam]

Ah, I think the teams/management have the biggest role to play in this. Giving riders a decent wage, security and prospects would reduce the urge to use illegal measures to perform well. However, being a sport, it is of competitive, so there will always be someone who strives a bit more to be a bit better...

Testing is obviously important, but unless there are tests that are 100% sensitive, and 100% specific, for every drug that could have the potential to improve performance, then testing alone is not the answer.

I think in truth, it will go in waves. In the 90's, new drugs were used, everybody (apparently) was on something. Now people are getting the fear, people are getting busted, stories are coming out - I think that will go a long way to clean up the sport. But give it 10/20 years, and new drugs will emerge no doubt and I have a feeling another doping boom will arrive...

 

[Jonathan]

What's going to really solve this problem? Clearly the incentives to cheat are huge, and the benefits of staying clean are vastly smaller. If a particular rider (or team for that matter) thinks everyone else is cheating, then they're more likely to succumb to temptation.

Would stiffer penalties help? Lifetime bans for a first offense? Automatic disbanding of any team if any one rider is caught? Fines 2 or 3 times larger than a year's salary/endorsements?

The technological arms race between the governing body (UCI, WADA or whoever) and the cheaters will always go on, so better testing isn't really the answer, but testing must always be improved.

Other thoughts?

Here's what I think would help:

- A testing authority that is absolutely independent of the teams and the governing body of cycling.

- Research into doping as a complex medical/social problem, designed to model the various factors resulting in the current situation. Methods: observations, focus groups, anonymous surveys and interviews, large-scale retroactive testing on samples from past races.

- Interventions at key factors in this model.

- Likely outcome: different team structures, offering more income security to riders accompanied by less high salaries. Riders should probably be treated as regular employees, with accompanying benefits.

- A plan to make less money circulate in cycling.

 

[wattage]

Problem is the money, when you make millions you can afford to maintain doping-program which would cost like 100k year. Get rid off the money and sport will clean up nicely. There will still be lot of good riders at races even though they wouldn't make a dime.

 

[Rip:30]

Open up all the biopassport data (and perhaps testing program/test design) to real scientific peer review. Public database it all.

We'll need some funding system to support the scientific investigators though...

It might be already available though willing national funding agencies, like the NSF here in the US, who have no connection/conflict to/with cycling.

 

[Rip:30]

Problem is the money, when you make millions you can afford to maintain doping-program which would cost like 100k year. Get rid off the money and sport will clean up nicely. There will still be lot of good riders at races even though they wouldn't make a dime.

Great point. Take XC mountain biking as a proof of concept for this.

 

[pataphysician]

Shaming. If a rider fails a test, the entire team has a syringe superimposed over the main sponser logo on jerseys, team bus and bikes etc. for a full calendar year.

or if you fail a test you have to ride an old steel bike for a full season

 

[karlboss]

Keep pushing on with the bio-passport, ban more riders based on values. As they more parameters become evident test for these as well. Lock down periods to establish baselines?

 

[Potomac]

"how can cycling be saved"

You are presuming that it needs saving.
Cycling isn't going away.

The worst case:
Less sponsorpship and/or less viewship means smaller salaries. Bad for the individual families trying to make a living from it, but hardly fatal to the sport.

 

[Inner Peace]

I don't think money is the issue here - Master's athletes still dope...

There needs to be a day of amnesty (i think that's the word)

At the end of the season, all riders have until their first race of the next season to confess their sins without punishment. After that, lifetime bans for anyone caught doping (present day, and retrospective) and all results obtained previous to the test are wiped off the permanent record. If that means Christophe LeMevel wins the Tour de France, then so be it.

The choice to dope is a function of the risk of getting caught (small) and the punishment (still quite small - two years and you're back and you only lose the results that you were busted in???)...

You have to increase the risk of getting caught = retrospective testing
You have to increase the punishment as well = lifetime bans resulting from retrospective testing

Give riders that choice for 2011, and give them until the end of 2010 to admit doping without punishment, and you could change the culture..

 

[Pantani_lives]

Take the responsibility for testing out of the hands of the UCI. An independent agency like WADA should do the testing.