This year’s Tour de France may be the most epic in its 97-year history, with no fewer than a dozen contenders for the podium’s top spot, including the legendary Lance Armstrong and his chief rival and last year’s winner, Alberto Contador.
Unfortunately, the pall of doping hangs over the event, especially since the disgraced 2006 winner, Floyd Landis, recently accused Armstrong and several other riders of systematic doping in previous years.
After the scandals of the last dozen years, most people — reluctantly, me included — believe that many, if not most, professional cyclists dope. The deeper question is why? And why did Landis come clean after all these years of vociferous denials? The answer comes from game theory and something called the Nash equilibrium, conceived by the Nobel Prize-winning mathematician John Nash (of “A Beautiful Mind” fame), in which two or more players reach an equilibrium when none has anything to gain by unilaterally changing his or her strategy, as long as the other players do not change their strategies.
Here’s how it works in sports: Players will do whatever they can to achieve victory, which is why well-defined and strictly enforced rules are the sine qua non of all sports. The rules clearly prohibit the use of performance-enhancing drugs, but the incentive to dope is powerful because the drugs are extremely effective, the payoffs for success are so high, and most of the drugs are difficult if not impossible to detect. If tests can be beaten with countermeasures, or if the governing body of the sport doesn’t fully support a comprehensive anti-doping testing program (as in the case of Major League Baseball and the National Football League), the incentive to cheat increases.
Once a few elite athletes in a sport cheat, their competitors must also cheat (even if they only suspect others are doping), leading to a cascade of cheating through the ranks.
If everyone is doping, there is equilibrium if and only if everyone has something to lose by violating the code of silence. So a positive test leads to an obligatory statement of shock and denial by the guilty party, followed by a plausible explanation for how the drug mysteriously appeared in the blood or urine, ending in fines paid and/or time served and often eventual return to the sport, no names named.
Can cycling (and other sports) be freed of doping? Yes, but it won’t be easy. Here are five recommendations:
• Immunity for all athletes pre-2010. If the entire system is corrupt and most competitors have been doping, it accomplishes nothing to strip the winner of his title.
• Increase the number of competitors tested, in competition, out of competition and especially immediately before or after a race to prevent counter-measures from being used.
• An X-Prize type of reward to increase the incentive of anti-doping scientists to develop new tests for currently undetectable doping agents.
• Substantially increase the penalty for getting caught.
• Professional cycling has a two-year ban, which is a good start. But it’s not enough. Try a return of all salary paid and prize monies earned by the convicted athlete to the team and/or its sponsors and investors, and extensive team testing of their own athletes.
Michael Shermer is publisher of Skeptic magazine and a monthly columnist for Scientific American. He wrote this for the Los Angeles Times.
