THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

(4) Is against the law.

I am sure there are others to add.

Actually, “it’s against the law” is a terrible addition to the criteria.  As the BALCO showed, many athletes were taking substances that most would consider to be PEDs, but these substances were not illegal under any local, state, or federal law.  This was because no one outside Patrick Arnold, Victor Conte, and a select few others knew of the existance of THG until about 2003. It is highly likely that other athletes today are taking similar type of designer steroids or PEDs that are not illegal under any law anywhere in the world.

Also, legal/illegal is an arbitrary standard as many substances are illegal in one country but legal in others, or legal at one point in time, and then illegal.  The first two criteria outlined by Fahey are objective and fundamental qualities of PEDs, not arbitrary ones.

I have the same problem with #2.  It needs some sort of threshold, otherwise you could include ibuprofen and aspirin.

I think you mean Paralympics rather than Special Olympics.  The former is for physically disabled competitors (e.g. those with missing limbs and “cool replacement legs") the latter is for developmentally challenged children (who were, back in the day were called retarded).

Anyway ...

WADA’s first two tests are absurd.  Taken literally, something as innocuous as water could be banned under #1 and #2.  Clearly being properly hydrated is an advantage while competing and drinking water to excess can cause death.  Then we are left with #3 (against the ‘spirit’ of sport) which is a purely esthetic judgment for which there is and can be no one right answer.

Caffeine should be considered a PED and banned?  Really?  Athletes should not be allowed to drink coffee, soda, or tea?  Really?  We should just completely disregard personal liberty and require athletes to not use substances many of us use almost every day?  Does this really make any sense to any of you?

To me this is proof that WADA like so many other quazi governmental and governmental agency’s has totally bought into the nanny state mentality, is only driven by the desire to expand their own power and importance, and thus is a very real danger to the personal liberties of us all.

#5:

This isn’t a surprise. This is what happens when the power to decide what is “safe” to ingest is taken from the individual.

Tango:  Are you saying (a) you like the rules as written, or (b) you like the fact that someone has laid out some rules, just to make it easier to talk about this stuff?

I don’t think I can take these WADA ideas seriously if they lead to a caffeine ban.  From there it’s not much of a leap to a sugar ban. Then what—a protein ban?

#5:  I use antihistamines everyday that are on the banned substances list.  Over the counter medicines.

I suppose in #1 I wrote my response incorrectly.  I meant that if a substance was “against the law” that it should be considered an “unfair PED”.  My point being, not only should atheletes not have to endanger their bodies with potentialy unhealthy drugs, but they should also not have to worry about criminal liability for drug usage.  The criminal law should usurp anything in the baseball drug use rules.  If steroid X is against the law to use/possess, then you can’t use the excuse that baseball never banned it.  That was my point, hope it is written clear enough now.
vr, Xei

bowie/7: I like that there are criterias to discuss, and I like those criterias.  If, for example, caffeine is considered “fine”, then anything like soda or energy drinks would likely be considered fine as well.

It let’s us have a discussion with consistent results, and we can discuss where lines can be drawn.

***

Yes, paralympics.  We discussed it in this blog a year or two ago, where I (speaking for the minority I think) said that bionic people should participate because they are people and those parts of their body are now part of them.

The third criteria makes it possible to include or exclude just about anything depending on one’s point of view.

KY—indeed.  Rule #3 sounds Orwellian.

My quick thought is there should be some sort of common sense rule that if everyday normal people can use it for whatever, the athlete can, too.  If I can drink a cup of coffee in the morning to get my work day started, an athlete should be able to use caffeine as a “PED”, as well.  If I can get a prescription for a drug to help me recover from an injury, an athlete should be able to use that drug, with a prescription, to treat what it’s meant to treat, as well.  Not sure how to word that rule, exactly, but I think it’s ridiculous to think of banning something like caffeine.

#13 I agree.  You should be able to layout these things on some kind of spectrum or scale from 1 to 100.  I would put caffeine, ibuprofen and coffee somewhere around a 3 or 4 on the scale.  My grey area would probably be in the 40 to 60 area.  Anything below 20 would be in the “common sense” bucket like you mentioned.  Even questioning those items would give you the dunce cap.  HGH and anabolic steroids (I’m not a PED expert) and other obvious cheats would be on the upper end of the scale and be banned.  The difficult part would be determining what do do with items that fall in the grey area.  Perhaps a lower punishment for those items could be a compromise.
vr, Xei

My recollection was that caffeine is on banned lists in some circumstances - but only in high quantities. According to one source, the threshold is around the level of 8-10 cups of coffee. This makes sense - caffeine in normal quantities is harmless, but that doesn’t mean that any quantity of it is harmless.

I seem to recall an olympic fencer beeing disqualified and suspended for cafeeine a few games ago. He claimed to just have had “a few” cups of really strong coffee before the competition. The limit (which he was over) was however set high enough that a normal person would need about 50 cups to pass it.

Having certain substances that are banned in some concentrations but ok if below some threshhold seems reasonable to me. In fact for technical reasons I am guessing that low trace amounts of a lot of “totaly banned” substances are considered to be a “clean test”.

Yes, setting high limits on everyday drugs like caffeine that normal people wouldn’t approach seems reasonable to me, too, especially if science can show those high levels are more dangerous than the acceptable amount....

I originally found references to the dangers of high doses of caffeine at a website offering an open source formula for making cola at home. They advised to never store caffeine at home, and never put in extra amounts for a bigger jolt. It claimed 10 grams was a lethal dose.
http://www.jtbaker.com/msds/englishhtml/c0165.htm
A cup of coffee was supposed to be about 115-175 mg, but one cup of Starbucks Grande is 330
http://wilstar.com/caffeine.htm