No Such Thing as a Sweetheart Deal from USADA

According to the AP, "Lance Armstrong's attorneys say the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency is offering cyclists a ''sweetheart deal'' if they testify or provide evidence that the seven-time Tour de France winner cheated by doping.

If those riders have been caught doping, the deal from USADA could result in a reduced ban from competition and other incentives, attorney Tim Herman told The Associated Press on Monday."

What Herman is desperately attempting to characterize as something inappropriate, is actually a very forward-thinking, progressive provision in the WADA code.

There's nothing that prevents USADA from inviting athletes suspected of doping to reveal not just their own story, but the details of others' doping that they observed or were aware of, in hopes of earning a reduction of their (possible) sanction.

Just as Dan Staite was apparently targeted for testing by UKAD as a result of 3rd party information, former teammates of Lance Armstrong might choose to provide evidence against him to USADA, or to a government agency - in this case with the hope of seeing their own potential liability reduced.

The WADA Code provides:

10.5.3 Substantial Assistance in Discovering or Establishing Anti-Doping Rule Violations

An Anti-Doping Organization with results management responsibility for an anti-doping rule violation may, prior to a final appellate decision under Article 13 or the expiration of the time to appeal, suspend a part of the period of Ineligibility imposed in an individual case where the Athlete or other Person has provided Substantial Assistance to an Anti-Doping Organization, criminal authority or professional disciplinary body which results in the Anti-Doping Organization discovering or establishing an anti-doping rule violation by another Person or which results in a criminal or disciplinary body discovering or establishing a criminal offense or the breach of professional rules by another Person.

After a final appellate decision under Article 13 or the expiration of time to appeal, an Anti-Doping Organization may only suspend a part of the otherwise applicable period of Ineligibility with the approval of WADA and the applicable International Federation. The extent to which the otherwise applicable period of Ineligibility may be suspended shall be based on the seriousness of the anti-doping rule violation committed by the Athlete or other Person and the significance of the Substantial Assistance provided by the Athlete or other Person to the effort to eliminate doping in sport. No more than three-quarters of the otherwise applicable period of Ineligibility may be suspended. If the otherwise applicable period of Ineligibility is a lifetime, the non-suspended period under this section must be no less than eight (8) years.

If the Anti-Doping Organization suspends any part of the otherwise applicable period of Ineligibility under this Article, the Anti-Doping Organization shall promptly provide a written justification for its decision to each Anti-Doping Organization having a right to appeal the decision. If the Anti-Doping Organization subsequently reinstates any part of Article 2.8 is involved and whether the violation involved a substance or method which is not readily detectible [sic] in Testing. The maximum suspension of the Ineligibility period shall only be applied in very exceptional cases.

An additional factor to be considered in connection with the seriousness of the anti-doping rule violation is any performance-enhancing benefit which the Person providing Substantial Assistance may be likely to still enjoy. As a general matter, the earlier in the results management process the Substantial Assistance is provided, the greater the percentage of the otherwise applicable period of Ineligibility may be suspended. If the Athlete or other Person who is asserted to have committed an anti-doping rule violation claims the suspended period of Ineligibility because the Athlete or other Person has failed to provide the Substantial Assistance which was anticipated, the Athlete or other Person may appeal the reinstatement pursuant to Article 13.2.

Thomas Frei and Doping as a Public Health Issue

Former BMC domestique, Thomas Frei, who previously rode for Astana, spoke in greater detail about his involvement in doping in cycling and explained the motivation to cheat, and the conflict he experienced in doing so. A translated version of the interview he gave to NZZ Online is available here.

I'm not surprised that he articulates a feeling of relief at being caught, almost a liberation. He says that once having begun to dope, the only way out was with a positive test:

NZZ: Jetzt, da Sie überführt wurden und Sie gestanden haben, sind Sie erleichtert?

Now that you have been convicted and have been you, you will be relieved? 

TF: Ja. So doof das klingt: Wenn man mal mit Doping begonnen hat, ist der einzige Ausweg die positive Probe.
Yes. So stupid that sounds, if one has even begun with doping, is the only way the positive sample. [That is, once you've started doping, the only way you stop is by testing positive.]

I was recently asked if I would have continued doping 1) had I not been caught and 2) had Whistle gone ahead and delivered me the lucrative contract they promised for 2007 when the team would become Cinelli-Endeka-OPD.

My response:

"I don’t think it would have mattered if I’d gotten a huge contract or not, b/c my subconscious had already done me in – I believe that I subconsciously wanted to get caught b/c it was the only way I would stop doping. I consciously don’t think that I could have brought myself to the point of stopping, b/c it facilitated my continued , participation in elite cycling in Europe. But I didn’t want to continue and remember a moment of self-reflection when I recoiled at the fact that I had become more adept at injecting myself w/ an IV than most nurses."

David Millar has consistently expressed a similar sentiment, though at first I thought he was just being self-serving. Now, however, I understand that doping exerts a powerful hold over its practitioners, and even the ones who would seem to have a strong sense of character and an intellectual understanding of right and wrong can find it inescapable.

In 2004, Millar told the Guardian UK, "You dope because you are a prisoner of yourself, of glory, of money. I was a prisoner of the person that I had become."

And then earlier this year, during an interview with Cycling Weekly, Millar described his two-year ban and forced hiatus from the sport as something that he no longer saw as destructive:

"That's a positive of getting caught, and getting out of that spiral I was in. It allowed me to reboot my life. There's no way I'd be here now, if none of that stuff had happened, and if I'd continued the linear development I was on as a young athlete, I wouldn't have found such happiness. You end up in this eternal, success-driven, materialistic world. I escaped that by losing everything and having to start again."

The theme of being trapped, of being a prisoner to doping is constant. And what can or should you do with riders like this after they've gone positive? Do you try to flip them and prey on their own self-loathing in hopes of turning them publicly against doping and the riders they know who remain undiscovered, or do you just banish them without study, intending to make a harsh example to others of what happens when an athlete is caught?

My own situation not withstanding, I'm wondering if doping is not something that could also be studied as more of addiction-related condition, rather than just a question of greed or criminal behavior. When someone wants to stop (as Frei implies he did) but can't, and even says that only testing positive would halt the individual's cheating...maybe appeals limited to the ethical or moralistic aspects of a rider's personality are incomplete and should be augmented not just by threats of prosecution, but also by approaches one might use with an addict? Before anyone makes the mistake of thinking that I'm trying to excuse such behavior, I'm not. But if there is a disease component to someone's anti-social behavior, is that a valid point of inquiry when searching for a solution?

This WADA report on the attitudes and experiences of medical doctors towards doping in the Balkan region is an interesting starting-point for further study.

Sport shouldn't just represent people who are lily-white, sweet-natured, and who look good on - a cereal box

Melbourne barrister Paul Hayes thinks WADA might be transforming itself into "Big Brother" with a little too much enthusiasm. The following is excerpted from an interview which appeared in the Australian press.

''Sport shouldn't just represent people who are lily-white, sweet-natured, and who look good on … a cereal box.

''Everyone is entitled to play sport and often sport is a path to redemption for people who have made poor life choices. What we don't like in sport is cheats. But the current WADA code goes beyond protecting the integrity of sport from those seeking an unfair advantage.

''Someone who out of season and out of competition might have to answer a case in criminal law certainly should not be dealt with by WADA unless the conduct is in some way geared towards cheating. What Stokes is alleged to have done has nothing to do with his preparation to play football or had any effect of enhancing his performance and he should not be subjected to the WADA code in these circumstances.

''He should be dealt with by the courts and the courts alone.''

WADA: Good Cop, Bad Cop

By Brian Alexander, Outside Magazine
[Editor's Note: Presented without comment.]

WADA, The International agency that oversees drug testing in sports, has done a solid job of cleaning up some rotten games. But a growing number of critics contend that it's become overzealous and arrogant, sometimes trampling the civil liberties of athletes in the process. As the case of Winter Olympian Zach Lund illustrates, they have a point.

SINCE I ALREADY know Zach Lund's life story, I can't help it: The first thing I do when we meet is stare at his shiny bald head. He looks good bald, though he also looks more like an ordinary guy who works out than an Olympic athlete. He's fit, compact, and so unassuming that, as we stand around in his hotel room at the Hilton Universal City, gazing at the Hollywood Hills, he seems a little amazed to be here in the heart of showbiz.

Lund has spent the past ten hours smiling, talking, and emoting for NBC, which has been shooting profiles of athletes expected to make the U.S. Winter Olympic team in Vancouver. The day was fun but a struggle, too. Lund has overcome a lot to succeed, but he's mainly known for getting kicked out of the 2006 Winter Games in Turin, Italy, thanks to a drug-related suspension that he and many others believe was unfair. Inevitably, Turin is what everybody asks about, so, later that night when we sit down to dinner, he wants to make sure I understand his full story.

Lund, 30, makes his living in "a crazy-ass sport" that most Americans watch for a few minutes every four years. He races on a glorified cafeteria tray called a skeleton sled, down twisty ice tracks at speeds of up to 90 miles per hour. Back in 1992, he was a 13-year-old kid living in a Utah mountain town when the USA Luge people came through and held scouting tryouts. Lund's showing earned him an invitation to Lake Placid, New York, to be part of the development squad. He was thrilled. He'd wanted to be in the Olympics since he was nine and watched Carl Lewis compete in Seoul. He was so taken with the pomp and spirit of the Games that he ran into his backyard and started doing wind sprints.

Unfortunately, soon after Lund was picked, his mother was diagnosed with melanoma, and he stayed home to be with her. After her death that year, Lund's dad worked two jobs to help support his son's Olympic dream. Lund worked, too—Home Depot, airline baggage handler—and took a few college classes, but skeleton was his life. With Salt Lake City hosting the Winter Olympics in 2002, he hoped to make the team, but injuries from a car accident kept him from doing well at the trials. Finally, in 2006, he flew to Turin as the favorite.

A shadow loomed, though. The previous November, at a competition in Calgary, Lund had tested positive for a drug called finasteride, an anti-baldness medication that had been banned by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), the Montreal-based outfit that sets drug-testing and enforcement policies for every Olympic and many non-Olympic sports. Lund started battling premature hair loss in 1997, so when WADA was formed two years later and then developed its first list of banned substances in 2004, he checked it carefully. He checked again when his doctor switched his medication brand. Finasteride wasn't mentioned. Even so, Lund always told doping-control officials he was using it.

In 2005, WADA added finasteride to its list, saying the drug could mask the use of steroids. That year, Lund didn't check the list. That may seem dumb, but Lund wasn't doing anything different than he'd been doing for years, and he simply forgot. He kept telling doping officials he was using the anti-baldness drug, and nobody said a word. He'd even been tested after finasteride was banned and declared to be clean.

WADA presides over a worldwide network of national satellite organizations that, ultimately, answer to WADA. In the United States, the affiliated group is the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency (USADA), a mostly taxpayer-supported organization based in Colorado Springs. As Lund's home-country doping agency, USADA had first crack at disciplining him, and the agency, along with Lund and his lawyer, L.A.-based Howard Jacobs, arrived at a deal in January 2006. Though USADA recognized that Lund hadn't gained any performance advantage from the anti-baldness drug—and that there was no evidence he'd ever used steroids—Lund agreed to have his results from Calgary nullified and to accept a public reprimand for failing a drug test. In return, USADA would not press to ban him from future competition.

WADA, then headed by Dick Pound, a former Olympic swimmer from Canada and a member of the Canadian Olympic Committee, didn't like the deal. WADA regulations specified tougher sanctions for a failed test, so it appealed to a panel of the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), the Lausanne, Switzerland–based outfit that acts as judge and jury in these situations. At a hearing in Turin just before the Games started, Jacobs argued that Lund had made an honest mistake. He insisted that finasteride shouldn't be on the banned list in the first place, because it didn't mask steroids. But CAS, at WADA's urging, refused to hear him out.

CAS ruled against Lund, and on the day of the opening ceremonies in Turin, it suspended him for a year. He was immediately expelled from the athletes' village. A sponsor, Speedo, dropped him. Pound publicly ridiculed him, suggesting that Lund cared more about his hair than being an Olympian. Lund went home broken. Two Canadians won gold and silver in skeleton.

After his suspension, Lund rebounded to win the 2007 Skeleton World Cup title. Then, at the beginning of the 2008 season, WADA announced it was removing finasteride from its list. Instead of acknowledging the possibility that finasteride shouldn't have been banned to begin with, it issued a statement claiming that WADA-affiliated labs had created new techniques that rendered it ineffective as a masking agent. The details of those tests were not divulged.

WADA said no to Lund's subsequent request that his record be cleared. This means that if Lund should fall afoul of WADA's rules again, he could be banned from the sport for life, even prevented from coaching.

Lund remains bitter about it all."That was a kick in the gut," he says during our dinner. WADA, he says, "has no one to answer to, and they're taking down honest people. And the government doesn't care..."

Continue to Page 2.

WADA Social Science Research

According to its website, WADA is committed to improving evidence-based doping prevention strategies through social science research. Understanding the fundamental differences between athletes who choose to compete clean and those who resort to doping or why some athletes decided to dope – despite being well aware of the harmful effects of doping and of anti-doping rules - will assist in ensuring that doping prevention strategies are effective and efficient. In fact, I contributed to this research myself after testing positive and owning-up to my involvement in doping, and was honored to have the opportunity to do so.

WADA’s Social Science Research Grant Program was created to ensure that preventive anti-doping education programs were designed using an evidence-based approach. Since the creation of the Program in 2005, 26 projects have been funded with awards nearing the US$730,000 mark.

Target Research Program
To further ensure effective doping prevention strategies, WADA’s Education Committee identifies specific areas that they feel require additional evidence in the way of social science research. Several years worth of WADA-funded research is available for review online here. One study of particular interest to this author, The Development and Validation of a Doping Attitudes and Behaviour Scale (DABS), is summarized below, and a subsequent post will present the full results of the study.

The Development and Validation of a Doping Attitudes and Behaviour Scale (DABS) - PROJECT SUMMARY

"Athletes’ use of prohibited ergogenic substances for performance enhancement is a form of cheating behaviour which can jeopardise their health and careers. Unfortunately, few studies have attempted to understand the psychological mechanisms underlying such behaviour (Roberts et al., 2004). This oversight is unfortunate because anti-doping measures cannot be fully effective unless they address the reasons why athletes engage in cheating in the first place. Against this background, Moran, Guerin, McCaffrey & MacIntyre (2004) conducted a qualitative study of Irish athletes’ understanding of cheating in sport. They discovered that cheating was perceived to occur along a continuum of behaviour ranging from less serious activities such as “smart play” (or gamesmanship), at one end, to the use of banned substances to enhance performance (doping), at the other end. They also found that cheating was rarely perceived as stemming from an individual decision by an athlete but was attributed to a particular type of coaching environment characterised by a “win at all costs” approach. Given such findings, the next step in this programme of research is to explore the “doping” end of the cheating continuum by developing a theoretically-based, self-report instrument which can measure not only athletes’ attitudes to doping but also their propensity to engage in doping behaviour. This scale development task requires three separate studies using a combination of quantitative and qualitative methodology (see Biddle, Markland, Gilbourne, Chatzisarantis & Sparkes, 2001) and is guided by the following research questions. First, what are Irish athletes and coaches’ perceptions of, and attitudes towards, doping in sport? This question will be investigated using a series of semi-structured interviews with athletes and coaches/managers from sports (e.g., athletics, cycling and weightlifting) in which doping is known to be prevalent.

Of particular interest in this study will be the attitudes and experiences of athletes who have been investigated for alleged breaches of ant-doping regulations. Second, based on the attitudes elicited by our interviews, what is the best way to design a theoretically-grounded, objectively scored, self-report scale to measure athletes’ attitudes to doping and their propensity to engage in doping behaviour? This question will be answered by rigorous psychometric analysis. Finally, what combination of relevant psychological variables produces the best prediction of a proclivity to engage in doping? Among the predictor variables to be investigated here will be moral reasoning (Tod & Hodge, 2001), perceived motivational/coaching climate (Ommundsen, Roberts, Lemyre & Treasure, 2003), attributional style (e.g., Hanrahan, Grove & Hattie, 1989) and perceived importance of competition (as there is evidence that athletes are more likely to engage in doping when the outcome is perceived as especially important). Although each of these variables has been associated with cheating in sport, no study has yet combined them statistically using multiple regression analysis to predict a propensity to engage in doping behaviour. In summary, the purpose of our study is to develop a theoretically-based, psychometrically sound, self-report scale provisionally entitled the “Doping Attitudes and Behaviour” Questionnaire to assess athletes’ attitudes to, and propensity to engage in, doping behaviour in sport." Click here to read the study in its entirety. Study is in PDF format.

International Standard for Therapeutic Use Exemptions

Because I'm planning a comeback to racing in late-2009 in Italy, I need to apply for a TUE for my don't-be-stupid medicine. I'm in both the USADA and UCI OOC testing pools, but thankfully there is international harmonization and standardization in the TUE process, as is conveniently explained in this 24-page document. Enjoy.

International Standard for Therapeutic Use Exemptions

The International Standard for Therapeutic Use Exemptions was first adopted in 2004 and became effective in 2005. The enclosed represents version 3.0 that incorporates revisions to the International Standard for Therapeutic Use Exemptions that were approved by the World Anti-Doping Agency Executive Committee on 10 May and 20 September 2008. The revised International Standard for Therapeutic Use Exemptions is effective as of 1 January 2009.

Published on 1 October 2008 by:
World Anti-Doping Agency
Stock Exchange Tower, 800 Place Victoria (Suite 1700), PO Box 120, Montreal, Quebec, Canada H4Z 1B7 www.wada-ama.org, +1 514 904 9232, +1 514 904 8650 (fax); e-mail: info@wada-ama.org