Category: Misc

Camping out with 15 or so under-10 year olds is a blessing and a curse. The blessing part is simple enough: they keep each other busy and entertained. Aside from having to occasionally telling them to stop climbing walls or some such, they’ll just move from one game to the next or one activity to the next.

The curse is that getting any sleep is an exercise in futility.

The basic timeline from lights-out (and there has to be a lights-out, even if none of them are in bed or even ready for bed) follows a pretty simple arc. For the first ten minutes, it’s bedlam. Kids laughing, farting, burping, hooting and any other thing they can come up with. After that, things start to settle down a bit. Kids who weren’t in bed are in bed, kids who weren’t ready are ready and one their way. It’s still loud, but all the craziness is becoming tamer. After about 25 minutes, it’s noticeably calmer. Most of the noise is kids fidgeting in bed. The laughter and jokes are quieter, and a couple of them are one their way to sleep. Finally, at the 40 minute mark, they are all basically quieted down and falling asleep.

But that doesn’t mean the parents get to sleep. Now, the room is a cacophony of heavy breathers, snoring, rolling on air mattresses and other noises of sleep. If you’re not asleep by now, there is no guarantee you’ll be getting to sleep any time soon. If you are asleep, the odds are you’ll be up for one reason or another: the strange environs, the unfamiliar rhythms and noises, a kid rolling over and farting in your general direction.

At that point, the arrival of morning is your best friend. Because the morning means you can go home and lie down on the couch to catch some Z’s, finally. But morning is a long way off, and, wouldn’t you know it, you come to the realization that your air mattress has a slow leak in it. Pretty soon, you’ll be sleeping on a hard wood floor.

But the kids had fun, every last one of them. So there’s pride in the knowledge you helped facilitate an enjoyable time for them. They don’t even want to go home. Of course, they got to sleep.

So we’re outside tidying up the yard before Sandy starts to get wound up here when the boy come running up to me and says “Dad, there’s a beaver and Mom wants you to take a look at the tree. The actual tree in question is a bit further down in the pictures, but after looking at it, I started looking around generally. The little critter has been keeping himself occupied of late.

The most remarkable thing is that all of this has been happening within the passed couple of weeks.

The pictures are after the jump.

So Professor Bainbridge wrote a quick post about Lance Armstrong where he wonders why not just allow PED’s in sports and be open about it. The post is brief, but I’m going to excerpt this part here (it’s Professor Bainbridge referring back to something else he’d written):

A while back, I argued that:

The only rationales for caring I’ve ever been able to see are (1) paternalism to protect players from themselves and (2) drug use by some creates a market for lemons (see my TCS column Drug Testing and the Market for Lemons). I’m somewhat persuaded by the latter, but at the end of the day it’s just not much of an issue for me. I wouldn’t watch baseball or cycling whether the players were juiced or not, while I would watch football and basketball whether the players were juiced or not.

I used to be a fan of the paternalism argument. Then I grew up. I was completely unfamiliar with his other reason, and had no idea what a “market for lemons” is. It turns out, it ties into exactly the reason I do believe that sports PED should not be allowed.

The theory’s name is based on the used car term for a “lemon” being a car that is known to be broken when sold.

The idea starts with a simple assumption: fans don’t like cheaters(they would be the lemons). That is, they are willing to fork over their money for tickets and the like to watch extraordinary people do amazing things in a given sport. Owners and players are aware of this and thus a perverse incentive develops: to allow cheating but to keep it secret. The cheating leads to increased salaries for players and increased revenues for owners because fans assume, initially, that what they are watching are legitimate efforts by athletes(i.e., they are not watching “lemons”) who are gifted in ways that the rest of us are not.

But the problem comes when the cheating becomes known. If the perception that everyone is cheating is allowed to foster, then the sport is devalued. No one wants to pay to watch cheaters, and the assumption on the part of fans will become that everyone in the sport is cheating; that they are not, in fact, watching extraordinary people.

The “market of lemons” application here is more of an economic argument than I would make. Personally, I’m of the opinion, as hinted above, that people want to watch athletes do extraordinary things in their sport. They want to watch Michael Jordan win back-to-back-to-back Championships and indisputably lead his team to those championships; they want to see Tom Brady win 3 championships and set the single season touchdown passing record; they want to see Randy Moss outrun 3 defenders on the way to making a long touchdown pass; and they wanted to see Lance Armstrong win those Tour de Frances. They want it because it’s something unobtainable to the average individual who cannot play basketball like Michael Jordan, throw a football like Tom Brady, run as fast and catch a football like Randy Moss, nor ride a bike as long and as fast as Lance Armstrong. Anyone who has ever watched a sporting event and ended up jumping up and down screaming like a wildman after seeing something remarkable understands the phenomena.

The key to the experience for the fan; however, is the belief that what they’re watching is someone who excels (amongst those who already excel) because of a combination of talent and dedication, not because they took a chemical that allowed them to practice more than is humanly possible. Because, while not anyone can throw a football like Tom Brady, anyone can start taking a chemical regimen to improve their strength, speed or stamina to a ridiculous point. Body builders from the Ahh-nold era come to mind- their gains aren’t seen as real, just the logical outcome of their chemical regimens.

In the case of Lance Armstrong, the offense is particularly egregious. The whole point of the sport is endurance and recovery and who has the best combination of the two due to their training and whatever intangibles they have. It’s a 3-week event with 100+ miles rides just about every day, in some cases up hills that are hard to walk up, let alone pedal a bike up. For a rider to become depleted and then cheat by artificially aiding his recovery through blood doping or chemical usage destroys the very nature of the competition. No one finds it remarkable, and therefore interesting, to win something when you’re cheating; let alone when you’re better at cheating than everyone else.

In Professor Bainbridge’s case, he admittedly doesn’t care about sports outside of football and basketball. Obviously, the competitors in both those sports can benefit from PED’s, mainly in the context of competing at a high level for an entire season. The question is, would the allure of those sports be adversely affected if a majority of fans came to believe that what they were watching wasn’t legitimate?

I think they would, and I’d point to the Lance Armstrong case as one good data point. The sport’s popularity has cratered since Armstrong left and the discovery of the rampant usage of PED’s throughout the sport. I’d also point to the vilification of other sports figures like Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire and Jose Canseco, to name a few. While the sport of baseball has managed to avoid the perception that PED usage is widespread, it’s popularity certainly took a hit when these players, and others (remember the Mitchel Report?), were determined to have made their achievements using PED’s. I think it’s safe to say baseball was at a crisis point from a fan perspective. Track and Field also serves as examples: Ben Johnson and Marion Jones in particular come to mind.

I think the key is achievement in sport needs to be seen as legitimate. Someone who uses PED’s violates that legitimacy. The perception becomes “Well, anyone can achieve that if they’re willing to mess with chemistry to that degree.” If an entire sport were to become tarnished in this fashion, it would ruin that sport’s legitimacy and interest in it would crumble. As it happens, cycling is a good example of the effect. I see no reason to believe other sports would be immune.

Given all this, I still would rather that government stay out of sport. The public is perfectly capable of dealing with a ruined sport, should it come to that. While there are perverse incentives involved where PED’s are concerned, the viability of a sport trumps that, thus I think it will police itself.

I was asked years ago whether I though Armstrong was likely guilty of using PED’s and my answer at the time was “My head says yes, but I’d like to be wrong.” Given the recent revelations, well, I still wish I’d been wrong.

More recently, a friend asked what I thought about the recent news about Armstrong and his doping operation. The only interesting thought that came to mind involved Armstrong’s continued statements that he didn’t cheat. Given all the evidence, it seemed an odd statement.

But then, thinking about it from a lawyerly perspective, or parsing the words a bit more, there is one context in which they make sense. From Armstrong’s perspective, everyone else was using some kind of PED at the time. Therefore, his taking them meant that he wasn’t “cheating” in the sense that he had given himself a competitive advantage. He was keeping the other guys from gaining an advantage over him. When competing at the highest level, that’s probably all the rationalization needed.

While Armstrong is taking the brunt of the criticism here, it’s telling that the Tour will not be awarding the Armstrong’s now stripped victories. I take that as an admission that the entire era was out of control with regards to PED usage. To the point that they can’t name a victor because it’s likely that rider would also subsequently be found guilty. So, from an enforcement and “high ideals” perspective, that time period was not cycling’s best moment.

I guess the big question here is, does it really matter? After all, we’re talking about a time when everyone was “cheating”, and Armstrong won 7 Tour victories in the time period. If everyone was doing it, what’s the BFD?

I guess I’d go back to a couple of simple minded lines of reasoning. First, the sport, and the Tour particularly, is about endurance and pushing limits. How far can a man push his body over the course of the Tour? If the competitors are using PED’s, then we don’t get a credible answer. Second, by allowing the victories to stand, then a competitor can rationalize that it’s worth it. After all, the governing bodies for cycling won’t catch up until some time later and by then, the victories will be years in the past. By stripping those victories, a message is sent that it won’t be worth it. The rider’s name won’t appear in the books, except with a large asterisk that means “HE CHEATED TO WIN.”

Ultimately though, the whole thing is just terribly disappointing. For those years when Armstrong was winning, the race was interesting to everyone. It was probably a high-water mark for popularity of the sport, and the Tour in particular. Plus, Armstrong had a very compelling story with his cancer recovery. Looking back, it seems too good to have been true.

Turns out, it was.