Cogombre said:
Then it's likely that he thinks that it's a bad thing. Anyway it's funny how doping becomes the consecuence of a system which predicates cooperation, rather than of a system based on competition. Maybe I'm missing something there?
Cooperation within teams, and "gentleman's agreements" to compete on a level field between them.
The Prisoner's Dilemma plays a big part, here. You can be as clean as you want, and you can be assured some of your competition is clean, but if you have doubts about even one of them, then you have a nonzero risk of losing to a cheater. If a large fraction of your competitors is cheating, you have a large risk of never succeeding. That leaves you with a choice of suffering a mediocre career, quitting the sport, or joining in to compete under the prevailing conditions.
Repeat for 90 or 100 years and you have a culture of cheating, and it's not the competitors' fault if they find it necessary to go along to get along. It's the system's fault for not preventing and policing it across the system. When the system engages in contributory negligence, and profits from the increased performance, it takes extra effort to get the system to find more profit in changing.
It seems to be getting better, incrementally, but it's been incrementing for decades. Testing still doesn't catch everything. The punishments from the league are still not totally effective as a deterrent. People who are caught seem to shrug off 2-year suspensions, and many observers don't consider it time-served when it's over. It needs to do some more incrementing, or just go to the wall and make cheating a lifetime ban, with jail time if the drugs are illegal, too.