Demosophia

About Lance and EPO

OK, I've been commenting on a lot of blogs about the Lance Armstrong/EPO accusations, and figured it's about time to put my thoughts into a blog post. First of all Daily Pundit can get you caught up on the all-important minutiae of the controversy: whether the EPO test is definitive; what a "B sample" is; what the specific accusations are and who's making them; and what kind of things strike people as suspicious about choices made by L’Equipe. Go get caught up.

Now it's my turn.

It seems to me that whether or not EPO was illegal at the time that Lance is supposed to have used it in 1999 is largely irrelevant; and not just because he's protected from prosecution by technicalities. If he had been smoking marajuana we'd be a bit disappointed in him, but it just wouldn't be very relevant to his cycling career. Marajuana isn't generally considered a performance enhancer, except for people on chemotherapy. The basic contention is that he cheated, by using a substance that gave him an unfair advantage. And I submit that the pattern of his career places a much larger burden on the accusers than on Lance. The fact that he won the same race six more times after 1999, often by greater margins, mostly during a period when there were good tests for EPO, suggests that whatever he used in 1999 didn't give him an advantage he didn't also have in 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004 and 2005. And that advantage just might have been that he was a better athlete, with a better team and a better trainer.

Compare this to the performance pattern of another great American cyclist, Greg Lemond. Unlike Lance, his performance significantly degraded over time, and it was demonstrably due to the presence of a foreign substance in his system. Not a banned substance, mind you, but one that had a marked hindering effect on his health: lead slowly released into his bloodstream from pellets embedded during a hunting accident. The pattern is clear, and has a rational explanation.

One doesn't use a substance with a documented impact on performance, without having it show up in the performance pattern somewhere. So, where is it L’Equipe?

(Cross-posted by Demosophist to The Jawa Report)

Posted by Demosophist at August 25, 2005 01:41 PM | TrackBack