Blood Doping Comes To Triathlon

Almost lost among Major League Baseball's steroid problems, is this news item about Nina Kraft, winner of October's Ironman Triathlon World Championship in Hawaii. Kraft, who admitted using EPO (Erythropoietin), a banned, performance-enhancing substance, will be stripped of her championship (and its $100,000 prize)and banned from competition for two years.

The whole mess disgusts and confuses me. Whether in baseball, triathlon or any other sport, I like my athletes pure and the competition clean. I like to be able to debate Babe Ruth vs. Barry Bonds without having to correct for any advantages modern biochemistry provides. But I'm not sure that's possible any more.

Babe Ruth's training seems to have consisted of ducking out of Comiskey Park between innings, downing some beers and hot dogs in the tavern across the street and returning just in time for his at-bat. Modern-day players benefit from many substantial (and legal) advantages over Ruth's approach: better training and nutrition; the therapies and interventions offered by a modern health care system; the dozens of anti-inflammatories, vitamins, supplements and other perfectly acceptable substances available at the corner drug store. Inter-generational comparability is difficult even before you start to consider the dark side of performance enhancements.

But the dark side is already here in society outside of athletics. As we're all becoming quick-fix junkies it seems fair to ask how different blood-doping athletes are from users of Botox and Viagra? Each assumes some elevated level of risk to gain a desired benefit. It's not as if FDA and societal approval carry with them "risk-free" guarantees. Maybe the risk/reward ratio of performance enhancing drugs is so markedly negative that they deserve some special treatment; I don't know.

I do know that retired professional football players who are crippled with arthritis and forced to walk on multiple artificial joints are considered "warriors," while athletes suffering the side effects of long-term steroid use are considered cheaters and criminals. The warrior came by his disability "honestly." The cheater did something against the rules of his sport. In the end, though, both sacrificed health for athletic accomplishment. I'm not convinced there's all that much difference.

Then there's the issue of athletes as role models. Charles Barkley notwithstanding, athletes do influence behavior by how they act, train and compete. It's one thing for a 30 year-old to opt for steroids; it's another thing entirely for a high school football player to do so. Yet, role modeling has so many dimensions to it that pharmacology may be the least visible of all. Does anybody know (or care) whether the NBA players currently suspended for fighting with fans used steroids?

In the end, the best argument I can construct against the use of performance-enhancing drugs is an old standby: the legal relationship between an employee and his/her employer. It's really pretty simple. If you're going to take the man's money, you play by the man's rules, arbitrary or not. When the rules of competition ban certain substances or behaviors, athletes are free to choose: compete and abide by the rules, or don't compete at all. If you don't like a triathlon's bike course you don't make up your own. You ride the course set out or you don't compete. That's how the game works. That's how life works. And, as in most of life these days, the effing lawyers writing the rules have the last word.

More here from Slate.com on Nina Kraft and how doping scandals may also affect bike racing.