Discussion: EPO in orienteering?

For a long time I have wondered whether the Swedish deaths might have had something to do with doping - and hoped not. I'm still hoping - but the doubt remains.

If you can run faster for the same effort level (or alternatively run at the same speed for less effort, freeing up mental capacity)... it's going to be the same advantage as it is in any other sport. At the top level navigation ability is pretty much a given.

I have doubts if it is enough to make a difference

Perpetuating this kind of thinking is a sure way to talk yourself (your NGB, IOF) out of due testing, and have abuse sprout so wide that your sport won't just lose any hope of being in the Olympics—it'll be out of all sponsorship contracts and perhaps out of the official sports framework in some countries. Another way to accomplish the same goal is to repeat the "our athletes are so moral, they would never cheat" mantra so popular in North America. I am happy there are drug tests at major IOF events, and I think there need to be more.

I'm also happy that truth about the early-1990s Swedish events somehow reached the intended audience, so that the series didn't repeat. (Or did "they" just get more reasonable with dosing?)

This has been discussed on AP before - maybe in a more obscure place in a personal log, but it is still a shock to me that these questions arise. Yes, I may be blue-eyed and think everyone of good, but having known some of the now dead orienteers it´s hard to imagine that doping would have been the reason. Evidence is still weak and research hasn´t really found one definite conclusive reason for the deaths in the 90-ies. BTW, there were a few similar deaths also in other sports around that time so it could be the same reason whatever it was...

Concerning the mantra that "they would never cheat" it´s certainly a dangerous position to take. Even Swedes have been known to cheat and/or use doping in Olympic sports and on other occasions.

As far as I remember the only two orienteers caught with doping are a Swedish male and a Norwegian female competing in World Cup races - both having used regular nasal drops or some equivalent. Another Swede was also suspended after failing to show up for testing (he went straight home after a local Night O event).

The situation for Elite orienteers in Sweden (mainly National Team) these days is the same as for any other athlete picked by their national Anti Doping Agency. They have to present their where-abouts almost down to the hour and be available for testing basically all times of the day on very short notice.

It is a strange person indeed that can take any personal satisfaction from winning through drug/epo assistance. Of course in LA's case there was a lot of potential money involved and hence that may have been a contributing factor, but our sport pales into insignificance when you look at possible financial rewards.

Even if there was a undetectable drug or potion that could magically transform me from a plodder to a world champ, I wouldn't be interested as my guilt mechanism just wouldn't allow it.

Money is not a requirement for cheating, and drugs/EPO aren't the only way: Kip Litton

Even if there was a undetectable drug or potion that could magically transform me from a plodder to a world champ, I wouldn't be interested as my guilt mechanism just wouldn't allow it.


You speak for yourself, but not for everyone. Anyone who has ever studied modern cognitive science/cognitive anatomy understands that the "guilt mechanism" is simply one of many organs in the brain. Just as someone can be born blind (or develop blindness), or otherwise be well endowed or deficient in other bodily organs (or develop such), the same principle applies to organs in the brain. One can even postulate a well endowed "guilt mechanism", but an even bigger "rationalization mechanism". This research is all out there, and (aside from a few wackos who don't know what fMRI stands for), is not controversial.

Translation to English: Some people cheat cause their perceived incentives (rewards) are stronger than their perceived guilt + the probability*cost of being caught (penalties). Duh. This stuff isn't hard. And, the parts of the brain responsible light up like a Christmas tree on an fMRI machine when subject to experimentation.

But, for some reason, most people on AttackPoint seem to think no one cheats. Or, if they do think that some people on some abstract planet somewhere cheat, that planet is not orienteering. How could it be? Orienteers are anatomically different, of course, than others who may cheat. Heck, some of these people even argued that orienteers should allowed to carry modern GPS devices (which make it quite trivial to cheat in various ways), and the uninformed governing body of American orienteering even bought it (in defiance of IOF norms, of course, but that's a kettle of fish for another day). Of course, I've personally witnessed one of the members of that body cheat (at a meet where no money or prestige was at stake, as an aside).

Some Swedes cheat. Just like there is nothing material, on average, about the orienteers' mental anatomy, there is nothing materially different about the Swedish mental anatomy. Heck, I've even witnessed a Swede cheat (again, at a meet where no money or prestige was at stake).

I've seen more, much more, but who cares? I've even studied economics. People cheat (except, of course, orienteers and AttackPoint readers). There's even been a seminal paper published in a prestigious economics journal titled The Prevalence of Cheating (except among orienteers). Look it up.

But hey, we all like living on Planet Naive where none of our peers cheat, so who am I to break the bad news? Just ignore me, I always go away for a few months to spend time in the real world.

BTW, in regards to a certain cyclist, its almost comical. Any objective look at that the data at the time revealed something untoward (just like looking at the data during the steroids era of baseball did the same), but this again just shows how awestruck and in denial people can be when living on Planet Naive. Heck, the most comical explanation I heard was that said cyclist's heart was anatomically different than their competition. Are you kidding me? You can't make this stuff up -- just look it up. People on Planet Naive will come up with any explanation rather than believe their friends, peers, heroes, etc. are what they are.

It will take a high profile orienteer to get caught to get the natives of Planet Naive buzzing. It will happen someday, but who knows when? I've seen so many instances of cheating in orienteering myself (and I don't count following), that it is only a matter of time. Cause, orienteers are not anatomically different, as much as some would like to believe that they are.

Surely cheating is just "levelling the playing field"

Money is not a requirement for cheating

Having read the whole Kip Litton article, I think it's hard to know exactly what has been going on, but there are hints that there could be a substantial bit of money involved in that particular case. (But this guy needs to watch The Prestige and learn how to do things properly.)

Hey Randy

I'm not on "planet naive" and never suggested there wasn't cheating in sports or indeed our very own sport, I just stated I thought those people were strange and was merely saying that I couldn't.

I cannot understand how some people find Charlie Sheen or Justin Beiber entertaining either, but I believe there are poor sods that do.

As you stated I was speaking for myself and while not having the scientific background you seem to have, I am not a complete dullard.

Cheers

Hey, if you look at the Junior Team budget, that's a substantial amount of money... per kid... relative to, say, minimum wage...

Yes it is.

There is at least one well-known case of cheating in UK elite orienteering, involving entering twice/punching some of the controls before starting again then cutting the course.
Couldn't be done now with epunching.

I firmly believe that the three documented "doping" cases in orienteering did not involve any deliberate attempt to cheat. I also know elites used caffeine (tablet form) in a deliberate attempt to improve performance.

I have never understood how anyone could have read Armstrong's book and not concluded that he was doping. The interesting question was whether he was gaining an unfair advantage over the competition.

I don't know whether the Swedes were doping. I can understand why you would hope not. But perhaps selfishly, I would rather hope there isn't an unknown and undiagnosed virus/bacterium out there which can randomly cause heart failure in normal fit people.

There was also that series of orienteering misdeameours documented by the great historian Wilf Holloway. Though I think he showed that the cheats generally got their just desserts.

"The Race of His Life", I think was the title of Holloway's short story. Basically a fictional account of an orienteer trying to be Kip Litton, but doing it more successfully, the point being to illustrate the many holes in orienteering that provide opportunities to cheat. Some think that epumching has patched up many of these holes, and I say they just aren't thinking creatively enough. (Not to say that anybody is exploiting those holes, but the holes are there.)

Probably the greatest protection we have against doping is that there isn't much money in orienteering, and I'm presuming that drugs (especially the sort of drugs which are difficult to detect) don't come cheaply.

I would imagine that most international-level athletes would be subject to some degree of testing in their home countries, and there is mandated testing at WOC (medallists plus some others at random, I think). In Australia, at least, since we're seen as a fairly low-risk sport testing isn't especially frequent - I've been tested three times in 20 years (twice in competition, once out of it), although those who've been in the national team more recently probably get tested more often than that.

Although it's easy to condemn the cheaters immediately, I doubt it was a snap decision. I don't think anyone woke up one day and thought, "I'm going to start an EPO regimen today!". The trouble with sports is that when it comes to performance enhancement, there's a large gray area and a fuzzy line. WADA has declared that some things are illegal, and some things are not, and some things are legal in certain doses. There are performance enhancements, such as that coffee before a race, asthma inhalers, vitamin supplements every day, or simply eating smart with an eye toward improving performance, that are not banned by WADA, but give a competitor an advantage over one who does not take these steps.

Regardless of how much money or prestige is associated with a given race, the desire to improve, or win, or reach whatever goal has been set, is fundamental to all athletes who enter the race. Athletes will do whatever they can to make themselves the best at their sports as they can. And while an athlete may begin by only using legal performance enhancements, that means that the athlete has accepted that this legal form of "cheating" is right, and despite rules and regulations, it's a big fuzzy gray area between two cups of espresso and an IV with blood transfusions.

As mentioned above, some people have the "guilt" center of their brain turned off, while others have it functioning normally, and maybe that is the difference between the "cheaters" and the "clean" athletes.

Great comments Alex!

I had this long reply written out and then my cat walked over my keyboard and erased it all.

I'll leave you instead with this interesting documentary on the Ben Johnson doping scandal which caused some serious changes in the Canadian Sport system.

it's a big fuzzy gray area between two cups of espresso and an IV with blood transfusions.

... just most of the fuzziness is hanging out by the espresso machine, and not in the lab.

Is it though? Gatorade powder was designed in a lab.

NPR had an interesting story on why people cheat.

Awhile back I read an article about a writer who tries a variety of PEDs. Some of it sounds appealing.

A quick google of "Masters cycling doping" will find examples of those who cheat with relatively little to gain. Yes, money is generally required to cheat, but as Alex said the carrot of prize money is not.

Here's a recent article on recovery of top tennis players. It makes no mention of PODs. However, date the article back 15-20 years, change the word tennis to cycling, change the names of the players,... sure sounds familiar.

But hey, we all like living on Planet Naive where none of our peers cheat, so who am I to break the bad news?

Given that all I know about the alleged bad news from reading your rant is that you claim to have witnessed, on multiple but not numbered occasions over the course of your orienteering days, unspecified forms of cheating other than following, from where I'm standing you haven't broken any bad news, Randy. I don't now know anything about cheating in orienteering that I didn't already know before you posted.

unspecified forms of cheating other than following...
most of the fuzziness is hanging out by the espresso machine...

Wait up guys, I'm late to the party. Is this the old water jug vs cup debate again?

What are our common IOF standard for cheating?

For instance, in our case as we are a very small orienteering country with many uncompetitive classes we don't bother much if someone train on a map before the competition. When the sport grow rules are more strict and goes into details, like ski jumping.

In most cases any unfair advantage can be considered as cheating no matter if this is equipment, terrain knowledge, maps, etc and I believe that in orienteering terrain knowledge on elite level can give a much bigger advantage than doping. How we tackle this more important problem in our sport than doping? Most of athletes don't have money to pay their trainings, trainer, physio,...and people still speak about doping even if this is a very marginal problem in our sport.

If you look how athletes prepare themselves for WOC sprint we can say that sprint rules are not in favor of sport. Now-days bigger nations produce their sprint map of the WOC sprint terrain. Technology, resources and easy access to data allows them to do that. Can we do more or we are going to say that this is not cheating because we leave this "problem" out of rules.

I suppose that in the future we can see a rule where all competition maps for all disciplines will be online before the competition. At least for Sprint this should be valid ASAP on my opinion. I think era of romantic orienteering is over. When was the last WOC on unknown terrains?

http://eurheartj.oxfordjournals.org/content/17/6/9...

From the WADA website:
"When was EPO banned as a performance as a performance enhancing substance?" "EPO has been banned since the early 1990s", so was use of EPO as a performance enhancer prior to its banning cheating?

Hawkeye, I just finished reading Tyler Hamilton's recent inside look into profession cycling and he touches on that. Prior to the early 90s there was no test for EPO. Since the purpose of EPO was to increase the blood's hematocrit (which could be testing) the UCI's (international cycling union) solution was to ban any cyclist who had a hematocrit above 50. Tyler was naturally around 42 some were naturally higher in the 40s. The name of the game therefore was to use just the right amount of EPO to keep your hematocrit just below 50.

Is that cheating?

There has already been good stuff posted about why people may be inclined to cheat in the absence of pecuniary gain, but here is another good piece: They're Not Pros, but They Cheat Like Them

And this is a more detailed look at the mechanisms: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Run-Swim-Throw-Cheat-scien....

Anyway, incentives are such that even orienteers might be inclined to cut corners (drinking from the bottle vs. using cups, dropping their gu wrappers, using GPS, using PEDs, etc.). One doesn't need to appeal to abstruse tools of economics to draw these conclusions.

I guess my response to that would be - unless it's the world champs, do we really care?

(Although I really don't approve of trash in the woods)

(Although I really don't approve of trash in the woods)

Or in the start list.

I've seen local age-grouper triathletes in non-prize money events cut short the run when heading to an unmanned u-turn. Not to mention congested swim buoys... Personality, morals.

@ndobbs

+1

Can't say I'm much bothered about people who cheat themselves.

From the little that's known about EPO and sudden deaths, it seems far fetched to suspect that the Swedish deaths were caused by EPO. You have to ask yourself, did all the abusers die, extremely unlikely, so that suggests a substantial number of the elite and near elite orienteers were taking EPO in a small area of Sweden. Not only that, but when some of their friends died (the deceased knew each other) they continued their own drug use. The study after the Swedish deaths considered drug abuse and found no evidence. Also the orienteers weren't dying in their sleep or before exercising, unlike some of the cyclists.

Or the unfortunate ones happened upon a bad batch...

and died over a period three years!?

It's not like you shop for the stuff daily...

There's plenty of evidence that it's not what happened if that's the predetermined conclusion you're trying to support. (And vice versa, no doubt.)

To connect the dots, suppose there was a small number of people using and they were all getting stuff from a small number of suppliers, and the suppliers didn't have good quality control, so once in a while a bad (or, more likely, overly concentrated) batch happened... and the once in a while didn't happen at the same time for everyone...

There is at least one well-known case of cheating in UK elite orienteering, involving entering twice/punching some of the controls before starting again then cutting the course.
Couldn't be done now with epunching.

No, you can just have someone with a laptop, a master station and one SI brick to replicate the course controls...

Random question - does anyone know of the organiser of a high-level event using different internal brick codes to the control stand codes specifically to avoid the possibility of this kind of cheating?

I've meen muttering for years that the station stamps that get written to the card should not be used as control codes. I'm dumbfounded as to why this practice started in the first place, it's not like we used to give competitors a list of pin patterns so that they could go ahead and punch their card. And it wouldn't require a laptop, you could just build a battery powered device that would fit in your pocket with a keypad that would let you enter the codes and punch your card without visiting the control. People talk about getting a phone to display your location on a photo of the map using GPS, but this would be way easier. I've been tempted to build the device just to illustrate the point. Using different codes would make this harder (thought not impossible, because there's still the possibility of getting the codes from the card of somebody who has already finished, just as you could have with pin-punching, by having them punch a second card to give to a friend). In theory, someone using this device could be caught by querying the SI stations, but nobody does this (and you can't do it with EMIT). The real solution would have been for the epunch manufacturer to write the information onto the card using encryption, such that the competitor doesn't have the info to do it. Maybe the next generation of cards will have this feature.

(To answer the question, the Billygoat and the Highlander have used separate codes -- not because they are such high-profile events that there's a risk of cheating, but rather because there's a tradition of using the initials of the previous year's finishers as codes.)

Sure - it's not quite that simple in a major event, particularly at international level, because your splits would show you going past people or meeting them at a control, and they would obviously have no recollection of it. And if you're going to win races (otherwise why do it?) people are going to notice this stuff.

I'm dumbfounded as to why this practice started in the first place

Obviously because it makes it easier for the organisers, and the technical hurdles to misuse the information are prohibitively high for 99% of people.

Judicious use of this technique is entirely feasible. You don't need to skip the whole course, just save yourself from a serious error or two, or skip a dogleg. The small differences can be the edge you need.

Easier for the organizers? Give me a break. We're using computers.

1% of the people is a big number. And it only takes one person to build the box and give it to somebody in the other 99%. Most people are incapable of building a GPS device, too.

My understanding is that Or (which has been used at the Highlander) supports alternate codes, but I don't think OE does. Does anybody have additional insight?

Guy, why does it matter? The software doesn't need to know what's printed on the control. It only needs what's coded into the control...

OE lets you define both the code, and a text description for each control. I can't figure out how to get it to print the text description instead of the control code on the splits sheet though.

Split printout... of course

Timing and course setting (creating maps and control descriptions for printing) use two different softwares so why would it be a problem.

Can you suppress the code on the splits printout? It's really not interesting information (at least not if you do the course correctly).

OE supports 'replacement' controls, but that's not really what you want.

The reason using the same code is easier for organisers is just because you look at the number on the stand and put the same brick there. Easy. Fewer errors, less drama when the first runner comes back and gets told they DNFed - and you've never lived if you haven't told a hyped-up elite they've DNFed at the finish printer. *rolls eyes*

Does it matter in real terms? Of course not - you just wait for a few more people to finish, see that they've all got the same punch and figure you made a mistake, then check the brick later. But...why make life hard for yourself?

In a major event eventually we might need a bit more consideration of this, but for anything less than national events there's no point.

You can remove it. You're correct that it isn't really important if you did the course correctly, but when someone mispunches, its nice to be able to quickly look at their printout and see what, if any, extra codes they did punch so you can explain to them what they did.
Having the codes on the split sheets also makes it easier for people on different courses to discover and compare shared legs.

Yes, well, the whole SI concept just needs another level of indirection (control number –> control code –> unique station serial number), but it wasn't thought of "at the time".

Split printout... of course

:-)