And When Everyone's Super...

No one will be!
- IncrediBoy, in The Incredibles (2004)

The way recent media has reported, one would think every single cyclist in the Tour de France is involved in doping. With his incredible past record of comebacks and achievements, no wonder Lance Armstrong finds himself, just as over the past few years, at the receiving end of this global media backlash.

The prevalance of doping has two related aspects - one being whether it is illegal for a cyclist to dope, and the second being that the governing body actively enforces the law. The enforcement part looks like it was lax for years before the governing body woke up. Would cyclists in the face of competition and peer pressure then still keep away from doping - I dont think so. This situation is no different from corporate competitive strategies, accounting management and pretty much any other case where near term incentives are significant enough and the risk of getting caught is low enough to encourage illegal behavior. Hopefully in the case of cycling, the dopers will be identified and punished, but there is another question to this story.

That question is in fact whether it is even possible to have a sport that is completely clean.

A sport is supposed to be a test of training and skill, but more than that a sport is supposed to be a test of one's heart, of one's will to win. Issues like doping skew the playing field one would say, and that taints the sport in addition to messing up the athlete.

So first, if everyone dopes, then why should it matter (outside of the fact that all these dopers will suffer the ill-effects for the rest of their lives) that they all do? If everyone is truly super, then maybe this *is still* a fair race... I know, I know, one could argue that even though everyone dopes, they all dope to different extents, so the most secretive and innovative doper wins. In a sense, the "smartest" participant wins in such a scenario, rather than the best one, and maybe that is not the original intent of the Tour de France. Similar arguments can be made against doping in practically every other sport.

But then in the absence of doping, would the playing field become level? I am not so sure, because I believe doping comes in many flavors - F1 is tainted by technology doping, the NBA is tainted by free-agency doping, baseball is tainted by no-salary-cap doping, and possibly every sport in the world is tainted by training doping. Why only punish the athletes for individual offenses, when in fact in today's world, it might just be impossible to come up with a sport that tests purely human skill and will.

And if it is about a sportsman being a good human being outside of the sport - if survival and do-gooding were sports lets say - then Lance Armstrong maybe is already in their respective Halls of Fame.