By Sal Marinello
World record performance in the 100-meter dash and climbing hills in the Tour de France are related and may be a starting point to design a better way to detect performance.
It’s become commonplace to hear accounts of world-class sprinters covering a 100-meter course in 9.9 seconds; 9.9 or faster has been run 96 times over the past 2 decades. Take one-tenth of a second off this time, run a 9.8, and it’s only been done 16 times by four different guys; Maurice Greene (twice), Asafa Powell (seven), Usain Bolt (five) and Tyson Gay (twice).
Johnson: He wasn't the only one.
Back in the late 1980s when Ben Johnson ran the first sub 9.8-second 100-meters, he knocked almost two-tenths of a second off the existing record and won the Gold Medal in the Seoul Olympics’ 100-meter final (he ran a 9.79). Turned out he was fueled by Stanozolol and stripped of his Olympic title. Since then, Justin Gatlin and Tim Montgomery have run similar times and held the World Record and also have had their times nullified due to failed drug tests.
Testimony provided as a result of the BALCO scandal by mastermind Victor Conte, track coaches and track athletes revealed a glimpse of the performance parameters of the world’s fastest men. The prevailing wisdom was that doping was necessary in order to run world-record neighborhood times. Conte has been steadfast in his belief that track and field athletes, and sprinters in particular, owe their success to a steady diet of performance-enhancing drugs (PED).
Without even getting into women sprinters, and what we know about outstanding performances among baseball players and how drugs played a major role, there are more than enough reasons for people to be skeptical of outstanding athletic performances.
Now I’m going to shift gears and talk cycling.
While it’s not a major sport, cycling has developed a cult following in the United States and in many nations across the world. Cycling is a sport that has been rife with doping, and was the first sport to really delve into the high-tech areas of performance-enhancing drug use and extraordinary medical interventions. Even for an iconic figure like Lance Armstrong, the specter of PED use both follows and overshadows all that he, and other cycling champions, has accomplished.
PED use has so tainted the sport of cycling that this year’s winner – Alberto Contador – had yet to take his perfunctory victory ride in the final stage of the Tour when former Tour winner Greg LeMond questioned the issue of the “cleanliness” of his performance.
LeMond opined in the French newspaper “LeMonde” that, “What is one to make of Contador’s record setting speed on the climb to Verbier? According to Antoine Vayer (My Note: Former cycling insider and anti-doping advocate) and his recently published calculations he would need a VO2 max of 99.5 ml to do this effort. As far as I know, this is a number which (sic) has never been recorded by any athlete in any sport. This value corresponds to the oxygen needs required of many recent Tour de France winners’ performances in mountain stages and time trials. This is like a gorgeous Mercedes sedan from the showroom showing up for an F1 race and being competitive or winning. It just doesn’t add up, show me what is really under the hood.”
To put the climb performance in perspective, Contador covered 5.3 miles (8.5 km) with an average slope of 7.5% in a hair under 21-minutes, which means he averaged over 18.5 miles per hour (30 kmph) up a series of steep hairpin turns.
Much of the discussion that has come about as a result of LeMond’s column, the majority of which is in cycling circles, involves questioning the motives of Antoine Vayer and the math behind his methods. Matters of VO2 Max, efficiency, power output and the like are way beyond the attention and interest spans of the vast majority of sports fans, but they do serve as a jumping off point for the discussion that Greg LeMond has started.
Calculations and formulas aside, LeMond is on the right track when he brings up the notion of questioning outstanding performances that greatly overshadow current and historical norms. LeMond is not some desk jockey sniping away at real athletes without the benefit of knowing what it’s like to be the best in the race. He is a Tour de France champion. He knows when something just doesn’t look right.
Critics of the LeMond/Vayer school of thought, that power output calculations can be an indication of doping, have questioned Vayer’s calculations based on Contador’s 2009 Tour performance. However, Vayer published a piece earlier this summer in which he details his 3-point plan.
* Verified Doping (410 watts): Covering more than 400 meters at a world-champion level of athleticism, without getting tired and after five hours of effort
* Miraculous Doping (430 watts): Raising your leg by one meter, with 45 kilos [= 99 lb.] attached to it, more than 2000 times without faltering, after five hours of effort
* Mutant Doping (450 watts): Riding a bike at 10 km/hour up a slope of 10% steepness (which does not exist in France) while towing a cargo of 100 kilos [= 220 lb.], after five hours of effort
To understand the energy output required to reach the 410 watt level, the 400-meters would have to be covered at a rate of 9.7 seconds per 100-meters, or the world’s fastest 100-meter run, run four times after 5 hours of effort. Now you know why I started out talking sprinting.
Vayer also provides some context to this issue of the production of power. ”Since the beginning of the 1990s, the products or methods which oxygenate blood, combined with all the other toxic medications described ever more fully by former “champions,” have permitted [race] leaders to produce on their two wheels an amount of power, expressed in watts, almost double that of a donkey of the beginning of the century pulling a load (250 watts), and equal to that of a steam-engine before the invention of mechanical propulsion.”
The LeMond/Vayer position is a valid one, in that there are limits to human performance even among elites, and that extraordinary performances can be indications of PED use. Once you accept this position – that there is just so much work a human can do – details with regards to the calculations and formulas can be hammered out. Just as we know that baseball or football players cannot continue to add noticeable amounts of lean muscle mass, naturally, as they age, the amount of power a human can produce is finite and knowable within reason.
Athletes themselves have given us the reasons to question great performances and cannot blame anyone but themselves for the heightened sense of skepticism that exists among fans and journalists.
I’m curious, what should be done when circumstances point towards doping? If only there were some kind of scientific method of determining if professional athletes use performance enhancing drugs. If only there were tests.
LeMond’s view is interesting but not conclusive. It is also unnecessary because we have testing.
Why do so many ignore the results of testing? If we’re convinced doping continues undetected explain how some get caught while others do not.
Rumor, testimony or even circumstances (like going too fast) are insufficient to determine guilt. Testing exists to make the determination of doping. Let it.
J
ultimately I don’t know sporting organizations can police their sports regardless of the methods used.
My position on doping is that it happens and that we should recognize it, discuss it, and as a result not get into the whole, “so-and so would never take drugs” discussions. I don’t care if athletes use, they should be honest and say, “It might be the training, but it’s definitely the doping.”
Drug testing is folly because the science of testing will always be behind the science of doping. As we move into the next generation of performance-enhancing drugs – IMHO – blood tests and muscle biopsies will be the only way to determine if athletes are using. There’s no way that athletes will submit to this, and I can see things going in the direction where the courts could take away the right for sporting organizations to blood test.
A simpler method is – as I mentioned in my post – to get a better grip on our capabilities, along the lines of what LeMond/Vayer have talked about. Biomechanical experts have discussed that we have pretty much reached the ceiling for how fast we can run, so there is a way to – within reason – quantify how much we can lift, how fast we can run and how high we can jump. Getting a grip on this will be a better gauge – and be more informative to the general public – than inaccurate and invasive drug testing methods.
To make a long answer longer
Let testing allay skepticism. If you don’t why test at all?
Is testing behind the science of doping? Perhaps, but I’ll take it over rumor, circumstantial evidence or unfounded accusations. Plus, current testing works occasionally, ask Landis, Tyler Hamilton, Manny Ramirez, and the dozens upon dozens of professionals caught
The problem with your logic is when ever someone does something extraordinary, they are suspect. For example, Babe Ruth hit 29 homers in 1919, more than any other team that year! Or imagine this, from 1920, the Babe single-handedly out-homered the entire Red Sox team for 10 of the next 12 seasons.
Using your logic, the Bambino would be suspect of doping.
Or what about LeMond himself? Under today’s standard, his famous 1989 time trial would be suspect.
I don’t understand how some jocks are smarter than docs and others are not.
Whether we like it or not J, rightly or wrongly, that’s the case these days. People are skeptical.
I used to be into cycling – waayyyy back – and remember reading about the great Italian rider Fausto Coppi. Wikipedia had this entry:
Bartali and Coppi appeared on television revues and sang together, Bartali singing about “The drugs you used to take” as he looked at Coppi. Coppi spoke of the subject in a television interview:
Question: Do cyclists take la bomba (amphetamine)?
Answer: Yes, and those who claim otherwise, it’s not worth talking to them about cycling.
Question: And you, did you take la bomba?
Answer: Yes. Whenever it was necessary.
Question: And when was it necessary?
Answer: Almost all the time!
Man, was he blunt, eh?
Coppi and Bartali, for the record, cycled in the 1930s and 1940s.
J
I’m not disagreeing with your sentiment or logic. However, what I will say is that we know a lot more today about the capabilities of the human machine than we did in the day of Ruth. Also, even though it was 3 (?) generations ago, it seems the Bambino’s feats gave us an early glimpse into the limits of performance with regard to baseball. In a sport where the stats are really the measure of the man, the greats of baseball from the 20s, 30s and 40s seemed to have set the upper limits of what is possible. PED Papi hit about 80 HRs in his first 3 years and last 2, but hit over 225 HRs during a 5 year period in between. Just like Sosa, just like McGwire, just like Bonds, and on it goes.
The fact that greatness is cause for skepticism in any sport is simply a response to the reality that we’ve been confronted with. The 3 guys who have hit the most HRs since 2000 all being on “the list” is yet another example of this.
Biomechanics experts have been opining that we’ve already maxed out with regards to how fast we can go, how high we can jump etc. Just look at the furor surrounding the high tech swim suits used by swimmers. Advances in equipment is now needed to shave 100ths of a second off of a world record. The same goes with track. If you look at the history of the 100m, you can make the case that once electronic timing was the standard and man first broke the 10 second barrier, advances to facilities and the track are responsible for the improvements in the times. Of course drugs are the main reason man can run 100m in under 9.9.
Drug testing will be less and less effective with the advances in doping. The diagnostic tests will need to be more complicated, more invasive and the athletes will never allow themselves to be subjected to muscle biopsies and I can see a day where the authority of sporting organizations to test is challenged and severely diminished.
There is knowable limit to human performance and getting a grip on these limits will help to serve as a valuable compliment to the limited effectiveness of drug tests.
With regard to the 100m sprint it should read “advances to facilities like the track, and equipment….”
What bugs me is the media. They spend more time chastising bloggers than actually doing their jobs like, you know, investigating the PED thing. It took Jose Canseco’s book to jolt everyone out of their socks. Even then, they treated him like he was some sort of liar. Who’s laughing now?
Moreover, now they’re indignant about the whole affair calling athletes cheaters and surprised that fans are cheering the players. Are they for real? If they had done their jobs to begin with then I would have listened to their moral posturing but it’s hard to listen to them now.
I don’t know why they turned a blind eye to it all. I find it hard to believe with all the access and buddy-buddy system they have that they didn’t suspect something.
Maybe they should stop hanging out with athletes and draw the line and be journalists again. Right now, they’re on the same side as far as I’m concerned and that’s why blogging has become important. They go where no journalist (except for a few and investigative ones) has the balls to go.
Currently, there is no threshold for clean. There is nothing an athlete can do to prove he is clean other than fail miserably. Some say it is their fault the current environment of cynicism exists. If so, we acknowledge we are prejudice. We accept the concept of guilty until proven innocent and by the way, we don’t accept proof of innocence.
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I say if the rider tests clean using a reasonable agreed upon method then consider him clean.
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Whatever method used to determine doping, there has to be an end to the process. There has to be a final determination. Otherwise, as with LeMond and Contador, the accusations never stop. What is the incentive to ride clean if the outcome, accusations of doping, is the same?