Are you now or have you ever used anabolic steroids? Erythropoietin? Human growth hormone? Insulin-like growth factor-1?
The United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) wants to know. USADA’s investigation of Lance Armstrong was just the beginning. Now, the anti-doping organization wants to initiate a full-scale witch-hunt in the entire sport of cycling and look under each and every rock for suspected dopers. Steroid McCarthyism is alive and well.
What is the best way to promote a witch-hunt? Why not create an official-sounding commission to compel athletes in cycling to confess their doping “sins”? Why not go as far as comparing the abolition of doping in cycling to the abolition of apartheid in South Africa?
The analogy will inevitably lead to comparisons between cycling’s steroid-using athletes and apartheid’s perpetrators of violence and gross human rights violations. Does USADA think it help will demonize performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs) and those that use them? That is exactly what USADA wants to do.
USADA has advocated the creation of a “Truth and Reconciliation Commission” that would be openly based on the commission of the same name established in post-apartheid South Africa. USADA wants to offer “amnesty” to cyclists who confess, repent and ask forgiveness for their doping sins. But in order to be granted full amnesty, former steroid users must be willing to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth by “snitching” on friends, teammates, team doctors, team directors and anyone else who was rumored to be involved in doping.
Jonathan Vaughters, a reformed former doper who was once a teammate of Armstrong but is now an outspoken anti-doping crusader, explained how a Truth and Reconciliation Commission would work. The Commission would probe each cyclist individually and would fully investigate “rumors” in the sport:
“[The Truth and Reconciliation Commission would] look for specific rumors or issues or whatever else that seems unaddressed and then try to address them,” Vaughters said. “You know: `What happened there? What happened here? We’ve heard this rumor of X, Y or Z. Is it true? Is it not true?’ The point of it is that you’re trying to figure out what went wrong, how did people avoid testing positive, how did they circumvent anti-doping measures, and so how can that be prevented in the future.”
Travis Tygart, the CEO of USADA, told John Leicester of the Associated Press that USADA knows about many other “dopers” in cycling but has purposely withheld their names. USADA has demanded that the international governing body for the sport of cycling – the Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI) – establish a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. If Tygart doesn’t get his way, USADA threatened to release names of “several dozen” previously unidentified cyclists who doped.
Tygart said that during the probe of Armstrong and doping on his teams, USADA uncovered information on “several dozen” other people, some of them still in cycling and so far unidentified. “That’s just what we found, there are far more there,” he said.
If there’s no truth commission, USADA would turn over that information to other anti-doping agencies and the World Anti-Doping Agency.
“It’s really important people are revealed,” he said. “If you got away with it in the past and think you can get away with it today, what’s going to change?”
“There’s really no choice.”
USADA’s investigation into Lance Armstrong and the USPS pro cycling team has greatly embarrassed the UCI and the sport of cycling. Additional revelations of doping by individuals, who are still involved in the sport in some capacity, would further damage cycling.
USADA is determined to perpetuate the PED witch-hunt in cycling. The ends justify the means even if it requires some form of blackmail to accomplish its goal.
Source:
Leicaster, J. (October 24, 2012). Column: What of cycling’s other secrets? Retrieved from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/huff-wires/20121024/cyc-john-leicester-241012/
About the author
Millard writes about anabolic steroids and performance enhancing drugs and their use and impact in sport and society. He discusses the medical and non-medical uses of anabolic-androgenic steroids while advocating a harm reduction approach to steroid education.
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