Aaron Zelinsky, a student at Yale Law School, recently proposed an interesting three-prong anti-steroid strategy for Major League Baseball:
1) An independent laboratory stores urine and blood samples for all players, and tests these blood samples 10 years, 20 years, and 30 years later using the most up-to-date technology available.
2) Player salaries are paid over a 30-year interval.
3) A player’s remaining salary would be voided entirely if a drug test ever came back positive.
I’m not sure about points 2 and 3, but there is no question that point 1 is essential to any serious attempt to combat the use of illegal performance enhancers. The state-of-the-art in performance enhancement is the best set of techniques that cannot be detected using current technology. So, by definition, the most sophisticated dopers will evade detection, unless they are unlucky or make a mistake.
The threat of future improvements in testing technology is the most potent weapon available in this fight, because the user can never know for certain that the doping he does today won’t be simple to detect a decade from now. Retrospective testing of samples attributed to Lance Armstrong suggest that he used E.P.O., which was not detectable at the time. The circumstances surrounding this test were sort of murky (the identification of the sample as Armstrong’s was indirect, and it was also unclear why these samples were being tested in the first place), so the Tour de France champion didn’t pay the price he would have if formal testing at later intervals had been a standard policy.
The athletes most likely to be deterred by this sort of policy are the superstars who have the most to lose if their long-term legacy becomes tarnished. Presumably, it is doping by superstars that is of the greatest concern to fans.
Zelinsky has provided a measuring stick against which we can see how serious Major League Baseball, or any other sport, is about fighting illegal performance enhancers: if the league adopts a policy of storing blood and urine samples for future testing, it is serious. Otherwise, it is not serious.
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The payout over 30 years is a necessary component; it provides the only incentive for players to care about what future tests uncover. It would have a value to the players as well – while ex-baseball players aren’t quite as badly off as ex-footballers, they could absolutely use the boost. This encourages a more healthy fiscal perspective among ballplayers and also does help to discourage steroid use.
A few comments have asked about the 30 year payout. That isn’t far fetched, actually. Many players, particularly those with the large salaries, are paid with deferred compensation packages. They receive some money during the season in which they play, and then get more money later (even after they have presumably stopped playing or moved on to another team). For example, Bruce Sutter signed a contract with the Atlanta Braves in 1984 for which he will still be getting paid through 2021.
A more recent example is Alex Rodriguez, who has $36m of deferred compensation to be paid starting in 2011. On a related note, the “$252 million” contract he signed in 2000 is actually worth more like $166m due to the time value of money effects from annual payments and deferred compensation (assuming an 8% interest rate) – only the nominal value is $252m.
Apart from the reasons mentioned the Armstrong doping case concerning tests from the 1999 edition of the Tour de France (which the ASO said at the time, that they would not store) was not followed up by the UCI, because they lacked scientific evidence to prove that the storage of blood in so many years could not generate a ‘false positive’.
While I don’t disagree with Mike B. above – I think it might not be as simple as ‘open’ leagues.
There is an aesthetic problem with ‘doping’. In short, few people can stomach the idea that their heroes (or their childrens heroes) would be sticking a needle in themselves to gain an edge.
The NFL has managed this aesthetic admirably – and I wish cycling followed suit. In the NFL, instead of telling the world how the players are playing on epidurals and vicodin – they laud how tough their are to ‘play through the pain’.
In cycling – Tyler Hamilton road an entire grand tour with a broken collarbone. Afterwards he had reconstructive dental surgery because he had ground his teeth down to the nerves as a result of the pain. Hamilton was later failed a homologous blood doping test (a new test, for which there is no standard of false positive) – and villified.
Brett Favre recovered from Vicodin addiction (a habit he picked up while playing with a busted shoulder) and was celebrated for his tremendous strength of character in overcoming addiction to a powerful narcotic.
The NFL is arguably the most successful professional sport from a business standpoint. Despite the truly reprehensible ‘problems’ under the covers with retired players suffering early onset alzheimers as a result of multiple concussion syndrome. The league doesn’t air its dirty laundry – and the medical practices of the teams are not highlighted for the fans.
Cycling is collapsing. Sponsors are withdrawing left and right and talented riders can’t find teams. The UCI does a terrible job of managing the image of the sport – and instead seeks to blame the riders and the doctors and stands in opposition to them at every turn.
The NFL isn’t a WADA sanctioned league (none of the large North American sports are) – but cycling is. The aesthetics of doping is too much for sponsors and for fans. I contend that, as a sport, cycling is much cleaner than the NFL in terms of unsavoury medical practices – but the UCI publicizes every failure while the NFL has a tremendous code of silence.
In short – I think what is really needed is managed and supervised use of biomedical technology and a reasonable ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ management of the optics of the situation. I believe this is the defacto position of most of the large professional sports in North America and that baseball’s troubles recently are really an example of terrible PR – similar to what the UCI, IAAF and other WADA affiliates have done with their sports.
I’m not sure that option 1 would deter steroid usage that well. It seems like the people who use steroids are looking for short term gain and ignoring the long-term risk. So why would adding another long-term risk deter them?
Were I a drug-using athlete, I’d be much more concerned about my dealer getting arrested and talking than I would about some hypothetical future test for the things I was taking. That should be deterrent enough for many athletes.
This proposal addresses the athlete’s incentive to use steroids, but doesn’t address the team owners’ incentive to have their athletes on steroids. If it turns out that Barry Bonds was using steroids, for example, then the SF Giants probably benefited financially from that. If athletes have to defer earnings and make them contingent on clean future tests to prove they’re serious, the teams have to do the same with their TV receipts.