Doping: Why Is Cycling Different From the NFL?

The opening paragraph of the Washington Post's recent column on Lance Armstrong, from a journalist who formerly covered the NFL and Redskins beat as an editor, exposes a huge imbalance in regards to Lance Armstrong's role in the history of doping in professional sports.

Cindy Boren begins her piece with these words words of judgement:

Just what has Lance Armstrong learned from being both the greatest and most disgraced athlete in cycling history?

Well, some, but not a lot because he says he'd probably dope again if he were somehow magically transported back in time to 1995.

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The Washington Post titled the piece, "I would probably do it again." This was a fragment extracted from a quote reported by the BBC, and alone, this could be interpreted to represent a number of different attitudes and perceptions about how widespread doping was in cycling, not to mention other sports. If a person has the belief that Armstrong and his teammates were the only ones using banned substances, and that's how they secured seven consecutive Tour de France wins, that's certainly going to color how they interpret the Post's chosen headline.

First, let's examine the entire BBC quote, as published by the Post:

"If I was racing in 2015? No, I wouldn't do it again," Armstrong told BBC Sport for an upcoming documentary. "Because I don't think you have to do it again. If you take me back to 1995, when it was completely and totally pervasive? [I'd] probably do it again."

The decision Armstrong made is the same decision any serious professional cyclist made at the time: You adopted doping because you were getting crushed by the teams that had already adopted a doping program. The use of EPO had changed the game so dramatically in the early 1990s of the European circuit, you either got on board or packed your bags and decided cycling for fun, and not money, is good enough.

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Here's my follow-up question to any journalist covering the NFL who takes some time to comment on what Armstrong has learned or hasn't since he was stripped of his seven TDF wins and handed a lifetime ban from participating in even a non-competitive charity bike ride.

What's the status of steroid and HGH use in the NFL? Why does the NFL, as the NYT's put it, get a free pass on doping?

Consider this bit from a 2013 story by Tyler Dunne on the pervasiveness of human growth hormone use in the NFL:

As soon as the three letters are mentioned—H-G-H—the player laughs. Human growth hormone? In the NFL? Come on. HGH use is rampant, this NFC starter says.

"It's like clockwork nowadays," he said, estimating 10-15 players on each team use the banned substance. "Not tested and it's easy to get. Nowadays, dude? In 2013? (Expletive) yeah. I'm just being real."

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In 2014, after years of negotiation between the NFL and the NFL Players Association, an HGH testing program has been launched. In Tyler Dunne's story, he clarified the hard truth about why the program would ultimately be needed, and why the sport of cycling has been going to great lengths since 2007 to administer its doping policy:

If testing were implemented, there could be serious collateral damage. The league's image is at stake 24/7. More than 108.4 million people were estimated to have watched the Super Bowl between Baltimore and San Francisco. If HGH testing is instituted and stars begin to test positive that popularity could take a hit.

Read all of Dunne's story, including the incentives propelling the use of steroids and HGH in the NFL and you get some clarity. Players are under immense pressure to be big, fast, strong, week-after-week in a 16-game season where every game is like demolition derby of bodily destruction, where million-dollar contracts are at stake and the average length of a pro career is a meager three years.

Perhaps that's why the NFL's HGH testing program has been criticized as being an exceptionally weak protocol. It may be just for PR as opposed to actually accomplishing any meaningful change.

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For sports fans that are morally aghast and filled with social media venom—like the kind directed at Lance Armstrong—because they discover professional athletes will use whatever they can get away with to survive and thrive in a professional sport, here are some questions for self-reflection:

How much physical sacrifice do you feel it is fair to expect from an extreme contest like an NFL game or 21-day bike race overwrought with crashes and high-speed mountain descents?

In the Tour de France, the doping culture of the event dates back to the first race, in 1903, when riders used cocaine. That was 68 years before Armstrong was born. It's fair to conclude that the governing bodies of the sport failed to regulate EPO and other performance-enhancing drugs both before the Armstrong era and after it. It had to be one of two things: Either they didn't care, or they failed due to gross incompetency. In either case, why is Armstrong paying such a heavy price?

Dig through the history of steroids in the NFL, particularly in the 1970s and 1980s, and you'll find that not only did Super Bowl-winning lineman use steroids, even a quarterback relied on injections to achieve top performance.

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"We did steroids to get away the aches and the speed of healing," former Steeler quarterback Terry Bradshaw told ESPN's Dan Patrick back in 2008. "My use of steroids from a doctor was to speed up injury, and thought nothing of it... It was to speed up the healing process, that was it. It wasn't to get bigger and stronger and faster."

In essence, that's why a Tour de France cyclist might want a fresh transfusion of blood or injection of EPO halfway through the TDF. The body gets hammered, the red blood cell count plummets along with the health of the immune system. Inflammation crawls upward, and what they do every morning is wake up and go back to a starting line for another torture-fest.

Bradshaw may have tried to characterize his use of steroids as being about recovery as opposed to performance, but that's not the deal. Fast recovery in a 16-game NFL season or a three-week 2,200-mile bike race translate to better performance over the long haul. It's one in the same.

But you don't see Terry Bradshaw being asked to give up his Super Bowl rings and not allowed to participate in a Masters swim meet, as Armstrong was. Or a triathlon or a Gran Fondo bike ride for charity—part of the assortment of prices Armstrong is continuing to pay even when he takes the time to answer a question and he watches the quote get manipulated out of context.

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