Big Mig - honest, dishonest?

In article . com,
" wrote:

On May 25, 7:02 pm, Ryan Cousineau wrote:
"B. Lafferty" wrote:

I wonder how you would feel if you raced clean and lost Olympic Gold or
the
Tour to a doper. I'd want justice and the medal.

And it pains me to admit it, but Brian's not only right, he's probably
been right about doping prevalence more often than most people in this
group.

About the worst thing you can say about WADA-world is that it's a
McCarthyite witch hunt. Overzealous, willing to transgress the
principles it claims to get to its targets. And like McCarthy, the
witches it's hunting are mostly real.

I can't remember who keeps quoting "it's possible to frame a guilty
man," but all I think of a lot of the time is a quote by Kissinger:
can't they both lose?

My saving grace with the whole "justice and the medal" approach is that,
however proper it would be, moving everyone up a rung is probably
better-than-even odds of just promoting a different doper in a large
number of these cases.

Dumbass,

I said "Even a guilty man can be framed." I'll take
credit for coining the phrase, unless of course I
unconsciously cribbed it from somewhere. If it makes
you happy, I originally said it about Alger Hiss, who
was almost certainly guilty but not proven beyond a
reasonable doubt until many years after the fact.

Dumberass:

Benjamin Franklin, DUH!

More seriously, a quick google suggests your phrasing may be unique, but
the thought may not be.

Here's a link to a 2004 article about the Rosenbergs titled "framed but
guilty?"

http://www.workersliberty.org/node/3408

[as an OT aside, the article seriously argues in one place that the case
was an example of anti-semitism, as evidenced by the fact that the
judge, prosecutor, and defence attorney were all Jewish. I have no
words...]

It may not be very fair; cycling is a game with rules
and is supposed to be fair, but still you make your
choices and then you live with them. Or you can go
on muttering about it years after the fact and
turn into a street crazy. From there, it's a short
step to posting to RBR.

Ben

The two things that drive me nuts about doping cycling are the fairness
and, for what it's worth, the children.

I have a reasonably strong connection to the children, despite not
having any myself. My club runs a substantial and effective
youth-development program (dEVo): we've got a lot of kids going through
this program, including ones that are national-level riders in this age
group. I'm not directly involved with the dEVos except for seeing them
on rides and working for them in races when possible, but I'm proud of
the work our club does.

I don't want to developing these kids and pushing them into high levels
of competition in a sport in which at some point the rule becomes "to
win at the next level, you must cheat the rules." That's not a
gamesmanship thing. Whether one agrees with it or not, cycling's doping
sanctions position doping as among the most serious transgressions you
can commit against the sport. Get caught even once, and your career is
brutally carved up, at a minimum.

Further, I'm pretty doubtful the answer is to let the pros dope. First,
I suspect a trickle-down effect to Fatty Masters, amateurs, and the
aforementioned kids. Second, I don't trust the pros to do it well or
safely, given that once "safe" doping programs are established, the
temptation will remain to push the legal limits to the edge of
detectability without much regard for safety. Just like today!

Finally, I think there may be an argument to be made about what the
limits are and what the line is between "fair" performance enhancement
(motorpacing, altitude tents) and "unfair" performance enhancement (EPO,
deka, autologous blood transfusions). This debate is ongoing, as seen by
the near-miss with altitude tents and the moving caffeine limits, among
other things. I think that's fairly healthy, and I also think that to
the extent I agree or disagree with current WADA proscriptions, they're
probably reasonably to the best answers right now.

The dark background to all of cycling's doping scandals has two parts:
the culture of doping, and the ease of cheating. Interestingly, a severe
weakness in either part would be enough to unravel the current
prevalence of doping.

If we could detect the cheating better, this argument wouldn't be
happening because nobody could cheat. It would be like the rules
governing safe finishing sprints: debatable moments, a few
controversies, but mostly no news because most riders know that if you
deliberately impede another rider in a sprint, you'll get relegated.

Of course, if cake had no calories, I could eat cake without getting
fat. Maybe WADA could work on that too.

As to the culture of doping, I have more hope here, and despite the
"cycling is over!" pronouncements, stories like Riis coming clean are
probably steps in the right direction. Maybe only in a "heighten the
contradictions" way, but if riders start getting the idea that Omerta is
dead, that everyone now thinks, whatever Riis did, that it was wrong and
is wrong, then we might have ourselves a new culture.

Back on topic, that stage today sounds wonderful. I can't wait to check
out the highlights. Anyone else looking forward to the finish atop Monte
Zoncolan on Wednesday?

--
Ryan Cousineau http://www.wiredcola.com/
"I don't want kids who are thinking about going into mathematics
to think that they have to take drugs to succeed." -Paul Erdos

rechungREMOVETHIS wrote:
I was a kid when the Four Color Problem was first solved. You may know
that it was one of the first of the algorithmic proofs that was done
by exhaustive computer checking and wasn't hand-checkable. I had a
friend whose father was a topologist. Every few months my friend's
father would get a letter from someone claiming to have proved the
Four Color Problem. He'd glance through the proof and then pull out a
form letter that said something like, "Dear Sir, I've received your
proof of ______. Your first error is on page ____, line ____." Then
he'd fill in the blanks and send it off. After Appel and Haken
presented their proof, he got several letters from guys saying, "Hey,
asshole, I was right."

Perhaps they should have tried the Erdos program.

On May 27, 7:11 am, Ryan Cousineau wrote:
The two things that drive me nuts about doping cycling are the fairness
and, for what it's worth, the children.

Dumbass,

It only drives you nuts because you think sports are important.
They're not.

Ryan Cousineau wrote:

Back on topic, that stage today sounds wonderful. I can't wait to check
out the highlights. Anyone else looking forward to the finish atop Monte
Zoncolan on Wednesday?


Yes I'm really enjoying the Giro.
Why wait for the highlights watch it live!
http://www.media.rai.it/mpelenco/0,,...E32643,00.html

wrote:
On May 27, 7:11 am, Ryan Cousineau wrote:
The two things that drive me nuts about doping cycling are the fairness
and, for what it's worth, the children.

Dumbass,

It only drives you nuts because you think sports are important.
They're not.

With respect to the 'for the kids' argument, my kid (12 years
old) asked me about Floyd Landis the other day. I told her I
thought he did something, but that I didn't know for sure
and we would likely never know for sure. The point I stressed
was that while I thought bike racing was a fun hobby, being
a professional athlete was not an acceptable career choice.

Ryan, professional cycling is what it is. In spite of the
recent revelations it has always been what it is. Other
endurance sports are no different.

If you have people in your club that are encouraging young
riders to pursue cycling at a high level under the premise that
competition in endurance sports at high levels is something
other than what it is, that is a problem that is within your
power to address. Your club owes them honesty above all else.

Bob Schwartz

In article ,
Bob Schwartz wrote:

wrote:
On May 27, 7:11 am, Ryan Cousineau wrote:
The two things that drive me nuts about doping cycling are the fairness
and, for what it's worth, the children.

Dumbass,

It only drives you nuts because you think sports are important.
They're not.

With respect to the 'for the kids' argument, my kid (12 years
old) asked me about Floyd Landis the other day. I told her I
thought he did something, but that I didn't know for sure
and we would likely never know for sure. The point I stressed
was that while I thought bike racing was a fun hobby, being
a professional athlete was not an acceptable career choice.

Bien sur. And most of our dEVos go on to be just kids with surprisingly
low BF% and good memories.

But at least three of the current members of Symmetrics did their first
road riding as dEVo kids in our club. Symmetrics is not ProTour, of
course: some of their riders are full-time pros, some are riding with
them while they finish school, and so forth. But "how far is too far?"
would be the other question.

Do Div III teams in the US routinely dope? Is there any point in a fast,
clean Cat I signing to ride at that level? Not a trivial question.

Ryan, professional cycling is what it is. In spite of the
recent revelations it has always been what it is. Other
endurance sports are no different.

If you have people in your club that are encouraging young
riders to pursue cycling at a high level under the premise that
competition in endurance sports at high levels is something
other than what it is, that is a problem that is within your
power to address. Your club owes them honesty above all else.

Well, this is the problem. Even at the amateur level, I don't want
cycling to be a sport where one has to say "good, you have shown ability
enough to get this far. Now retire, because to go further is to
compromise your ethics and reputation."

Because sure, there's going to be kids who through sheer will drive
themselves to high levels of achievement. But there's also going to be
kids who just come out, shoot through every level of competition
available, and through no fault of their own, are naturals to go to
Europe at age 20 and join up with a neo-pro team.

At that point do you say "now stop: go get a degree or a trade, and if
you like you can still race the Tuesday Nighters and the Tour de
Gastown."

Seems kinda sad.

--
Ryan Cousineau http://www.wiredcola.com/
"I don't want kids who are thinking about going into mathematics
to think that they have to take drugs to succeed." -Paul Erdos

On May 27, 6:59 pm, Ryan Cousineau wrote:
But "how far is too far?"

How far is too far with alcohol?

Well, this is the problem. Even at the amateur level, I don't want
cycling to be a sport where one has to say "good, you have shown ability
enough to get this far. Now retire, because to go further is to
compromise your ethics and reputation."

Why would going further compromise ethics?

Because sure, there's going to be kids who through sheer will drive
themselves to high levels of achievement. But there's also going to be
kids who just come out, shoot through every level of competition
available, and through no fault of their own, are naturals to go to
Europe at age 20 and join up with a neo-pro team.

At that point do you say "now stop: go get a degree or a trade, and if
you like you can still race the Tuesday Nighters and the Tour de
Gastown."

Seems kinda sad.

It only seems sad because you think sports are important.

Dumbass, doping among airline pilots, bus drivers, nuclear power plant
operators, and the guy who does my taxes is important. Hitting
baseballs over fences, kicking a ball into a net, and riding a bike
fast isn't important -- what's more, the dope they take enhances
performance, not degrades it. If there was a magic elixir that made
airline pilots more alert and better able to perform their job (and
made mathematicians able to produce more and better theorems), would
you suspend them if they used it?

rechungREMOVETHIS wrote:
If there was a magic elixir that made airline pilots more alert and
better able to perform their job (and made mathematicians able to
produce more and better theorems), would you suspend them if they used
it?

We haven't seen a ChungChart for ages. What PEDs are good for
statisticians ?

On May 27, 1:29 pm, wrote:


If there was a magic elixir that made
airline pilots more alert and better able to perform their job (and
made mathematicians able to produce more and better theorems), would
you suspend them if they used it?

dumbass,

there is. uppers. military pilots are given uppers to stay alert and
offset the effects of airsickness medication (i was part of a study
that looked at this). and everyone on rbr knows about erdos and
uppers.

wrote:

there is. uppers. military pilots are given uppers to stay alert and
offset the effects of airsickness medication (i was part of a study
that looked at this)

Is colour blindness one of the side effects?