devashish_paul wrote:
I take this from Armstrong as an admission that he played on a level playing field with his peers and won. I don't need to like the scenario, but I accept it.
It's not a level playing field even when lots of people are doping because PEDs can have different effects on individuals depending on their physiology. Vaughters explains it pretty well in this interview:
Quote:
One of the rationalizations made for doping is that if everyone’s doing it, it’s a level playing field. People use that to argue that doping should be legal. Should it? Would that actually make a level field? No. There are a few arguments on that. I’ll start with physiological and we’ll go to psychological. Physiologically, let’s go with oxygen vector doping. Humans have a variety of natural red blood cell counts. Some people have a hematocrit of 36 naturally, some people have a 52. Me, in an untrained state, riding 100k a week, I’m more—I’m like 53.
You needed a TUE [therapuetic use exemption—a certificate the UCI uses to allow something that would otherwise result in a positive test or health flag] to compete once they put in the [maximum hematocrit] 50-percent rule, right? Yeah, I submitted blood records back to my pediatric days. But for EPO, the person who’s at 36, whether there’s a 50 percent limit or not is irrelevant because the biggest improvement is in the low end, that thin blood range. That person, when they’re out training every day, their body is starved for oxygen and becomes extremely efficient at pulling oxygen from not very much hemoglobin. So you dump a big amount of red cells in that person who’s already very efficient and whoa! Are they going to go fast. Conversely you take a person at 47 and do the same thing. And let’s go to 60, say the limit isn’t 50 but that the limit is that you don’t stroke out and die. That person is not going to experience anywhere close to the difference. So people say, ‘Yeah, but that’s equalizing it out.’ But imagine the guys at 36 and 47 have exactly the same VO2 at threshold and they are neck-and-neck competitors their whole life, and one chooses to dope and the other says, ‘Well then I’ll dope too.’ Then one guy is going to go a lot faster and the other guy will go a little faster. And so you have guys that train the same, are very disciplined athletes and physiologically the same but one has a quirk that’s very adaptable to the drug du jour, then all of a sudden your race winner is determined not by who’s the best, some kind of Darwinian selection of who is the strongest and fittest, but whose physiology happened to be compatible with the drug, or to having 50 things in him.
Full interview here:
http://www.bicycling.com/print/67431
