Scientific American: Game Theory, Doping and Cyclists
on this post
Game theory helps to explain the pervasive abuse of drugs in cycling, baseball and other sports, says an article from the latest issue of Scientific American. In The Doping Dilemma, key concepts are highlighted:
- An alarming number of sports—baseball, football, track and field, and especially cycling—have been shaken by doping scandals in recent years.
- Among the many banned drugs in the cycling pharmacopoeia, the most effective is recombinant erythropoietin (r-EPO), an artificial hormone that stimulates the production of red blood cells, thereby delivering more oxygen to the muscles.
- Game theory highlights why it is rational for professional cyclists to dope: the drugs are extremely effective as well as difficult or impossible to detect; the payoffs for success are high; and as more riders use them, a “clean” rider may become so noncompetitive that he or she risks being cut from the team.
- The game theory analysis of cycling can readily be extended to other sports. The results show quantitatively how governing bodies and antidoping agencies can most effectively target efforts to clean up their sports.
Michael Sherman writes:
For a competitive cyclist, there is nothing more physically crushing and psychologically demoralizing than getting dropped by your competitors on a climb. With searing lungs and burning legs, your body hunches over the handlebars as you struggle to stay with the leader. You know all too well that once you come off the back of the pack the drive to push harder is gone—and with it any hope for victory.
I know the feeling because it happened to me in 1985 on the long climb out of Albuquerque during the 3,000-mile, nonstop transcontinental Race Across America. On the outskirts of town I had caught up with the second-place rider (and eventual winner), Jonathan Boyer, a svelte road racer who was the first American to compete in the Tour de France. About halfway up the leg-breaking climb, that familiar wave of crushing fatigue swept through my legs as I gulped for oxygen in my struggle to hang on.
To no avail. By the top of the climb Boyer was a tiny dot on the shimmering blacktop, and I didn’t see him again until the finish line in Atlantic City. Later that night Jim Lampley, the commentator for ABC’s Wide World of Sports, asked what else I might have done to go faster.
“I should have picked better parents,” I deadpanned. We all have certain genetic limitations, I went on, that normal training cannot overcome. What else could I have done?
Plenty, and I knew it. Cyclists on the 1984 U.S. Olympic cycling team had told me how they had injected themselves with extra blood before races, either their own—drawn earlier in the season—or that of someone else with the same blood type. “Blood doping,” as the practice is called, was not banned at the time, and on a sliding moral scale it seemed only marginally distinguishable from training at high altitude. Either way, you increase the number of oxygen-carrying red blood cells in your body. Still, I was already 30 years old and had an academic career to fall back on. I was racing bikes mostly to see how far I could push my body before it gave out. Enhancing my performance artificially didn’t mesh well with my reasons for racing.
Curiousity piqued? Read the rest and tell us what you think. This is a comprehensive article worthy of your time and feedback.
Share/Bookmark: 
Categories: Activism, Doping, Science of Cycling
Tags:
Leave a Reply