There have been a few posts over the past couple months that have touched on blood doping and steroid use by professional athletes (see references to these posts below). It is true that in cycling, track and field, baseball, and other professional sports, each athlete is faced with a prisoner’s dilemma where it would actually be irrational considering the payoffs to not use performance-enhancing drugs. Each of these posts adds something to the picture, but they’re also missing important points that I will try to address here. The article listed below does a thorough job of providing a detailed history and analysis of drug use in professional sports, presents statistics that are both convincing and startling, and makes recommendations that are plausible as well as impactful.

In the cycling and track and field worlds, blood doping means adding extra red blood cells to your blood so that more oxygen can be carried at once. This can be done through straight injections or by using a drug called r-EPO to boost production of red blood cells. According to reliable estimates, “between 50 and 80 percent of all professional baseball players and track-and-field athletes have been doping,” which is staggering considering that in the media we only hear about a handful of athletes actually being investigated. In this way the public has the wrong impression about drug use in sports. In many cases entire teams organize their use of performance-enhancing drugs as part of their “medical program”. Let’s say you’re a professional cyclist. Using r-EPO along with other drugs can make your performance 10-20% better, and this can translate into around a 150 second difference in a 31-mile time trial, or a 160 second difference on a 6-mile steep climb, which is substantial. If you choose not to use, you’ll almost surely get much less money than you would (unless your parents endowed you with some awesome genes), and possibly even cut from your team. Almost no one even gets tested for these drugs, let alone caught; even if they do, the punishments are not very severe. So why wouldn’t you?

Until even the 1990s, the payoffs for athletes were such that it wasn’t worth it to cheat, but with the arrival of r-EPO most players have to either “cheat or lose”. The fact that this practice is so widespread can be explained by experiments done on many-person variable-round prisoner’s dilemma scenarios. What generally happens is that the players initially cooperate (play fair), but “once defection by confessing [cheating] builds momentum, it cascades throughout the game”, and this is what happened in the professional sports industry. The reason why everyone doesn’t just agree to not cheat and forego the health and reputation risks is because the consequences of getting caught cause a code of silence to be maintained among the athletes. There’s no incentive for someone to confess initially, because they’ll be threatened by their teammates, fined, discredited, and lose all of the fame and fortune they would have gotten. This is why Michael Shermer’s recommendations for how to alter the payoff matrix so that no one wants to cheat are sound (I only summarize some of them here). He suggests that there should be no repercussions to athletes who cheated before 2008, as long as they don’t cheat anymore. Also, testing should be done by more reliable bodies, should happen to more athletes more often, and the methods should be improved by giving scientists rewards for keeping up with the new drugs. Last, the penalty for getting caught should be harsher and affect your whole team, not just you.

The only problem with these recommendations is that (at least in my opinion, mostly because I was so surprised by some of the content in this article) the general public doesn’t realize how common drug use is. So many people would be crushed by this knowledge, and faith in professional sports could potentially dwindle. This doesn’t give the owner of Major League Baseball much incentive to carry out any of these recommendations, and it doesn’t give any player, current or retired, incentive to come forward and help the cause, no matter how it benefits the entire sports world. If the public were aware that this problem is as big as it is, then it might not be a big deal (and it might actually be looked upon more favorably) for a player to confess to doping and/or drug use. This is why articles like this are so important.

The Doping Dilemma: Game theory helps to explain the pervasive abuse of drugs in cycling, baseball and other sports

By Michael Shermer

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=the-doping-dilemma

(This is only an e-preview - I have the full article on paper)

3/21/08 “Doping is a Dominant Strategy” - http://expertvoices.nsdl.org/cornell-info204/2008/03/21/doping-is-a-dominant-strategy/

3/5/08 “Athletes’ Prisoner’s Dilemma” - http://expertvoices.nsdl.org/cornell-info204/2008/03/05/athletes-prisoners-dilemma/

2/27/08 “Use of Steroids by Professional Athletes” - http://expertvoices.nsdl.org/cornell-info204/2008/02/27/use-of-steroid-by-professional-athletes/