Hacker News Reader

Comment by notatoad | Hacker News Reader

The olympics don't really set the protocol for any of this. the rules and procedures for each sport are set by their respective international sport organization. for cycling that's the UCI.

the olympics is only one event, and only happens once every four years. the rest of the season, that happens every year, is much more important and doesn't have an olympic host to provide bikes. so there needs to be some procedure that catches motor doping at all the races, not just one infrequent race. The olympics is just going to follow the same procedures that are used for all the rest of the worldtour level races. and while the olympics might not care about keeping the rider's bike sponsors happy, the rest of the races do.

if riders weren't out there promoting bike brands and riding bikes provided by their sponsors, pro bike racing wouldn't be a thing.

View on HN

> promoting bike brands and riding bikes provided by their sponsors

Therein lies an answer - change the disincentives - instead of banning cheating riders, ban all of the sponsors of those riders for a time. Now the onus is on the sponsors to discourage cheating.

I don't know much about sponsorship. How would a sponsor be banned? What sort of activities or relations would be off-limits during a ban?

I imagine they would be unable to sponsor participants in that organization for a time, and their name would be dishonored.

Maybe it's a bit circular but the organizers could disqualify the racers being sponsored which would mean either the banned sponsor doesn't sponsor anyone or it's done under wraps. The latter would defeat the advertising purpose the sponsor would have for the sponsorship.

You wouldn’t ban a sponsor, but a team. People typically refer to a cycling team by a sponsor’s name, but teams can (and do) change sponsors from season to season (or sometimes even within a season like “Jumbo Visma” -> “Visma Lease a Bike” did this year between the Giro and the Tour).

Jumbo Visma is the same team as Visma Lease a Bike. They have the same riders, managers, athletic director, staff, etc. Just a different name on the jersey.

As for how a team is banned: you simply ban them. In most of cycling you need to be a member of a team (professional) or club (amateur) to even enter a race. Your racing license will name your team/club. If your team is banned you may not register for the race.

Also, at the World Tour professional level, your team would have several cars driving within the race to support riders with food, bottles, and mechanical assistance. Since the race will be on a closed course, only official vehicles can drive with the riders. Even if started the race, you would be at a serious disadvantage to race with no team support.

How does it work now? Are teams banned if caught cheating?

They can be. For example, Team Astana’s license was initially not renewed for 2007 following a doping scandal.

Unfortunately, the UCI usually reissues the license if the team pinky promises not to dope again.

Team Astana signed Lance Armstrong in 2009 and we all know how that went.

(Just an aside, doesn't invalidate any of your reasoning)

The name change from Jumbo Visma to Visma | Lease a Bike didn't happen between the Giro and the Tour, it was a lot earlier. I would say, but I'm not 100% certain of this, that the name change happened between the 2023 and 2024 seasons. I think teams have to register their name with the UCI, and can't change it during the season.

For example here is a photo of Jan Tratnik finishing first in Omloop Het Nieuwsblad on 2024-02-24, long beclearly wearing a Visma | Lease a Bike shirt.

The team did change the design of the shirts before the Tour, because their old shirts had a lot of yellow which conflicts with the yellow jersey of the GC leader. Maybe that's what you were thinking of?

UCI has barely ever had the willpower to do this.

Tons of teams are still run by folks who were heavily involved in the 1990s and 2000s doping scandals. They all claim they're all clean and reformed but most of them were never really punished.

“Red Bull caught cheating at $event in sprawling plot; banned for 6 years” - they might invest some dollars to avoid such a disaster. According to the quote in the article, curbing this is only a matter of will and $$$.

Of course it's a matter of $$$. Sports doesn't actually make anything. It's entertainment that's paid for via ads. But that's also why hitting the sponsors wouldn't work, because without them the (professional) sport might not survive.

Surely this just moves the incentive from the sportsperson/team to the sponsor - who have significantly deeper financial resources to undermine WADA's testing regimes.

WADA's budget is something like $50m. The likes of Ineos & Red Bull have sports marketing budgets well into the billions.

It is important to separate the teams vs. the company itself. The Ineos cycling team has a total budget closer to $50M. That's the budget to support 20+ riders and all the support staff.

I had to look up Ineos bc I’m only familiar with the Grenadier truck. Turns out to be a 20b English chem/energy chaebol.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ineos

Seems like they would have a lot more to lose as well. A scheme where Red Bull is helping athletes cheat is front page news. It would be catastrophic to their reputation. Much bigger deal than the athlete themselves getting caught.

They would just funnel it through some other company that they can blame.

In GP's proposed scheme, the sponsor gets punished whether or not it knew or assisted

The sponsor isn't punished when their reputation gets associated with a cheat? US Postal sued Armstrong for $100M (settled for $5M) after he got caught. Guilty by association with a PED athlete is the dominant economic risk of sports sponsoring. At least in sports that have dropped the "just pretend we did not notice" attitude that's still going strong in e.g. football (both of them, I suppose)

A scheme where Red Bull is helping athletes cheat is front page news. It would be catastrophic to their reputation.

Well, either that or it would triple sales overnight. "Hey, this stuff really DOES give you wings!"

I mean we are talking of an overrated "energy drink" that no one actually needs to consume but yet manages to sell billions of dollars worth of every year.

I don't think their target market is that susceptible to reason.

Energy drink is an arbitrary category. Caffeine + sugar + water is the root of a lot more than 1 billion in beverage sales because the combo works.

Energy drinks additionally contain taurine.

Several call themselves energy drinks and don’t like C4 Smart Energy.

At least as far as the Federal Trade Commission is concerned that’s not an issue.

It's good iff you mix it with Vodka.

The biggest world tour team has a budget of $50 million

Because the Olympics organization would never want to pay to outfit athletes with non-sponsored gear (whether for cycling or any other sport).

It’s hard enough for bike teams to get sponsorship. Adding that burden on the sponsor could kill the sport.

The sponsors aren't partners who are tuning up the bikes. It's companies who cut a cheque and expect logos everywhere.

Individual riders/teams are motivated to win and get sponsor dollars, so may resort to cheating. They know they will lose sponsors forever and be banned if caught, so they try to hide it from sponsors and officials. Basically: the same disincentives exist today. They just need to catch folks. It's just doping v2.

Sailing does this (one design), so it's possible

Nobody buys the sailing boats that are being used for recreational use.

I myself have sailed several of them. Currently the laser. Previously the 49er and 470. There's actually lots of great second hand boats because of the competitors selling them after 1-2 seasons.

Im talking about the crazy carbon fiber expensive ones that are multi crewed.

It's definitely possible, it just means the professional level of the sport can't be funded mostly from the amateur level of the sport.

cycling is getting there, a lot of the big teams have petrostates or oil companies as sponsors now, but the bike brands are still too important to cut out.

The race organizers actually don't care about the bikes or sponsors the same way. The race organizers (at the world tour level) have a solid income stream. The biggest races are bigger than the World Tour and are older, and will still be around when the current World Tour setup folds.

It is the teams that are begging for money, all the teams need sponsorships for bikes and everything else. Teams in cycling have no home stadium and have no place they own and can sell tickets. They aren't in control of TV rights or anything like that for races that are big enough to be televised.

It's one of the unique things in cycling. Even at the grassroots levels clubs were often volunteer but race organizers might have been or are for-profit. Even at the grassroots level the organizer charges entry fees.

> if riders weren't out there promoting bike brands and riding bikes provided by their sponsors, pro bike racing wouldn't be a thing.

That would be a bonus.

Not for those that are concerned by this which is the important part.

Alternatively it would be interesting to have a race or series of races where it's anything goes, including drugging. It's already such a cat and mouse game so why not just embrace it.

If you allow e-assist, at that point wouldn’t you just have motorbikes?

Yeah how silly would that be? A guy on a MotoGP bike just blowing past the peloton on their e-bikes.

> why not just embrace it

Everything-goes sounds fun in theory but in practice it'd just kill the athletes (and the sport, by extension)

Case in point, Group B rally.

https://youtu.be/FN93WoPDJS0?si=vL90dmpYovOLjiiR

And even that still wasn’t “no holds barred”, leaving aside what little safety rules it had (and how weakly enforced they were) Group B did have rules on minimum weight and displacement classes (with negative offsets for turbo and super charging).

This would just mean the teams with the biggest budgets win. Doping is expensive.

Not to mention, every person responds differently to doping protocols.

What if you're a C rider who becomes an A+ rider when doped? And you race against a B+ rider who becomes an A minus rider when doped. Still not an even playing field.

This is effectively what lance did. He had record levels of hematocrit naturally, and an extremely high vo2. It meant he had a magnified sensitivity to doping protocols that the other riders didn't. So his doping advantage actually increased his relative abilities even -higher- than his also-doped competitors.

Not to mention kids coming into the sport. Would be a massive mountain to climb to go from a prodigy 16 year old against doped pros.

e-bike racing is a thing that exists. nobody wants to watch it because it's incredibly dumb.

beacuse what will really happen is, some nation desperate to make a statement on the world stage will take a thousand small children and force feed them drugs to make 10 athletes

100 die of the drugs during childhood

700 suffer the rest of their shortened lives from consequential medical issues

perhaps its easier to just throw the 'failed' 990 into a meat grinder to ensure there is no controversy later

but sure, its fun to watch the 10 athletes at the peak of their game!

east germany

There is actually a proposition to do just that but it hasn't been getting a lot of traction so far for obvious ethical and moral reasons.

https://enhanced.org/

There are high level competitive sports leagues that effectively allow doping. Pro bodybuilding is probably the most obvious. There are tested federations, but they're virtually ignored because the guys competing are half the size of the guys doing drugs. Powerlifting also has untested federations, and strongman I think might do token testing just to appease law enforcement since you can't openly allow something that is illegal is most jurisdictions, but it's designed to be easy to beat and everyone is well aware that the top competitors are not only using drugs but have to use drugs to do what they're doing.

Notably, this is probably part of why the Olympics doesn't have bodybuilding, powerlifting, or strongman on the program, as sports need to have a WADA-approved antidoping program to qualify.

Also, the Olympics itself from the 50s to the 80s basically was what you're asking for. This is the time between when synthetic steroids were first widely available and when tests for them became possible. In the meantime, with no way to catch anyone, it was anything goes. I wouldn't say that led to pretty outcomes. Records that stood for 40 years, sure, but eastern bloc nations with mandatory athletics camps were injecting 12 year-old girls with testosterone and telling them it was vitamins. At a reasonable dose, most performance enhancing drugs are fairly safe for men but virtually none of them are safe for women because of the masculinizing effects. The changes to a female body are permanent.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com