As reported on Wired.
BY BRIAN ALEXANDER
Talk-show host Oprah Winfrey interviews cyclist Lance Armstrong during taping for Oprah and Lance Armstrong: The Worldwide Exclusive, which will air nationally January 17 and 18. Photo: AP/Courtesy of Harpo Studios, Inc./George Burns
Lance-o-Rama has broken out … again. But this time, we’re getting a confession. On air. On Oprah. Tonight.
While many people speculate about this being his first step towards redemption, a comeback, a new chapter in the doping arms race, the one thing nobody seems to be discussing right now is what L’Affair de Lance means for you.
After all, if you’re like most Americans, you watched the Tour de France for about five minutes, and cheered when Armstrong won. You know a little about his cancer charity, and that he dated a pop star. And that’s about the extent of emotional energy you’ve expended. Since I’ve written a lot about doping in sports – and delved into how anti-doping agencies like the United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) conduct business – I’ve expended a lot more energy on your behalf.
So here’s the thing you need to know: The USADA takedown of Armstrong matters, and it could effect everybody. Because it will enhance the power and reach of a private, non-profit business that has managed to harness the power of the federal government in what’s quickly becoming a brand new war on drugs … with all the same pitfalls brought to you by the first war on drugs.
The USADA is a private outfit. Yet it gets taxpayer money. And it has existed in this weird legal nether world since its creation in 1999 at the instigation of the International Olympic Committee, United States Olympic Committee, and President Clinton’s White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. The USADA is designated by the U.S. Congress as the company that handles anti-doping for this country, because the World Anti-Doping Treaty – a UNESCO-promulgated document that the U.S. signed with almost no discussion – obligates the U.S. to do a number of things, which includes conforming our laws to the international anti-doping code.
Nobody cared much about that treaty. And few care much now, really, because it was understood that anti-doping was about testing athletes, and mostly elite ones.
But the Armstrong case isn’t based on testing at all.
The USADA has wanted Armstrong for years. To it, and to the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), Armstrong was Moby Dick: If they could kill the whale – and do it without a raft of positive tests to show Armstrong doped – a new model of anti-doping would be enshrined into practice. And that’s just what happened.
Piggy-backing on a federal investigation, the USADA was able to pressure Armstrong teammates to confess to doping and implicate Armstrong … with no positive test results. It was an FBI-style investigation spanning multiple countries, but there was no “smoking syringe” found stuck in Armstrong’s arm.
Yet this is now the main model for anti-doping. Athletes will still have to pee in cups and have blood drawn from their arms, but anti-doping agencies are using the Armstrong case to justify a tremendous expansion of their investigatory powers.
In Australia and the United Kingdom, anti-doping agencies are part of the government — and they’re beginning to look like police bodies. The U.K. agency, headed by the former chief constable of the North Yorkshire police, has promised to boost investigations. It, along with WADA, has called on governments to form alliances with the international police body Interpol.
The Australian Anti-Doping Agency, meanwhile, went so far as to demand private medical records from hundreds of athletes so it could fish for anything suspicious.
In an eerie echo of the tactics used by the American House Un-American Activities Committee during the Red Scare days, the Australian agency issued a call this past November “to anyone involved with, or has information about, doping activity in the sport of cycling to come forward and talk before someone else accuses them of doping.” If you talk first, you can get credit for snitching. If you wait, well, who knows what somebody else might say about you?
All of these state-sanctioned players – the Australians, the British, the Americans, and WADA — are hyping what they call “increased intelligence.” This includes anything from spying on athletes, to fishing through their garbage — and anything they find can be shared with “real” crime enforcers like the FBI (and vice versa). All of them have used the Armstrong case as illustration number one of why such actions are justified.
USADA chief Travis Tygart — who’s been talking like anti-doping’s Eliot Ness since the Armstrong story broke — has told me he’d like his own team of investigators. Let’s keep in mind that we’re talking about sports here: not terrorism, or even industrial espionage.
So while you might wish athletes didn’t dope — I do, too — and want action taken to combat doping, you might also want to be careful about what you’re wishing for. Especially since sports is taking on a broader definition that includes amateurs, low-level marathon runners, and even your kid’s high school football team.