The authors showed pictures of one of the participants in the study who had an excessively long nose caused by over 15 years of using every type of performance enhancing drug that he thought would benefit him. You can see the picture below.
Okay--I better stop there before my nose starts growing. In truth, I found this photo in an article that I read in August and have been wondering how I could use it on the blog. I decided to get it off my desktop today and thought you might want to see it.
With that said, I do think there is truth to the correlation between doping among athletes and nose growth. The true correlation is that when an athlete decides to dope, he or she has to live a lie and rationalize that breaking the rules is justified. At that point, the doper becomes a liar and a fraud. We've seen it many times and only rarely do the dopers admit their fraud when they get caught. The most notable in cycling was Floyd Landis but we have many other examples of those who were caught and tried to lie their way out of it including Tyler Hamilton, Jan Ullrich, Ivan Basso and others.
They actually need to weave a web of lies, just to back the initial lie. They're either including their friends and loved ones, or they must then resort to an ever-evolving plethora of lies each and every day. What's in that package? Where were you last night? Why the bandages? Why the mini fridge? Why do you keep it locked? Who are all these people visiting us? Why do you need to train in Italy for 2 weeks when there are perfectly tall mountains next to our vacation house in Aspen?
ReplyDeleteWhat happens is that you become really GOOD at lying, and you start lying about little (unrelated) things without even thinking about it. Stupid things like "I'll be back tomorrow, have you taken the trash out?". Lying becomes the fabric of everyday life.
Floyd didn't lose his marriage over EPO. He probably lost it over his wife remembering years of lying about paying a bill on time, taking out the garbage, forgotten birthday gifts, etc. Then add the stress of a doping fight. Eventually the lie collapses and you've hot some kind of bottom.
Unfortunately, Lance can cast aside his wives and girlfriends and still have a nice cushion of economic security to help prevent his truly hitting bottom. Mom isn't that much older than he, so he'll always have her around.
Another notable confessed doper was world time trial champion and Tour de France stage winner, David Millar. Here is what he said in 2004 after he and other members of his French Cofidis team were caught: "The two syringes found at my house were the ones with which I injected myself while I was there. I kept them to remind me that I had become world champion at Hamilton while I was doped. I had dreamed of being a world champion but I had done it through trickery."
ReplyDeleteWhile the doping in cycling is truly disheartening, the lying and lengths to which these men go, to me, is the saddest part. Millar is one of the few of which I am aware that owned up to the fact he had cheated rather than wasting people's time and money by fighting charges they knew to be accurate. Kudos to Mr. Millar, not for cheating, but for being man enough to admit he did so.
"hit" some kind of bottom (Paragraph 3)
ReplyDeleteEric, very well said. I had David Millar in mind when I wrote this and said "only rarely do the dopers admit their fraud when they get caught." Thanks for the quotes.
ReplyDeleteWasn't there a pro racer (MTB?), maybe even a world champion who admitted to doping even though he wasn't caught? This was 5-15 years ago. He just came out and basically said "I doped. Sorry, here's the medal".
ReplyDeleteAh yes, Jerome Chiotti, the 1996 world MTB "champion". Except, he actually waited 4 years to do it. Still, that's an unsolicited admission AFAIK.
ReplyDeleteBjarne Riis, 1996 Tour de France champion who dethroned Miguel Indurain, also admitted it 11 years after the fact (and after about 8 others on his Telekom team admitted drug use). For some interesting information on this, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bjarne_Riis#Doping_admission. However, unlike Millar and maybe a few others, these did not admit doping when caught doping.
ReplyDeleteAmerican pro Matt Decanio also came clean all on his own. And when he started talking, he never stopped. Decanio never tested positive but his admission was used against him and he served a 2-year ban. Matt was so eager to name names and identify doping methods that he was almost unilaterally shunned and ignored (most notably by USAC and USPRO). He was so outspoken that he was fired from his team long before the doping case was filed against him. Matt is now racing in France and he has a website called stolen underground (www.su13.us).
ReplyDelete