Game theory helps explain the widespread drug use among cyclists, baseball players and other athletes
by Michael Shermer
The article was uploaded to the Hadaan site on August 18, 2008. In the meantime, he admitted Lance Armstrong Because he used drugs and all his titles, including the seven victories in the Tour de France
On the same subject: Genetic engineering - drugged genes
For a competitive cyclist, nothing is more physically breaking and more psychologically depressing than seeing the backs of other competitors recede uphill. The lungs are burning, the legs are burning, and the body is bent over the handlebars as you struggle to keep pace with the leader. You know very well that as soon as you drop out of the group you will lose the urge to increase effort - and with it all hope of winning.
I know the feeling because it happened to me in 1985, on the long climb from Albuquerque, New Mexico, during the "Cross-America" race - a race of 4,800 kilometers without a break. On the outskirts of town I caught up with runner-up (and eventual winner), Jonathan Boyer – an experienced road racer who was the first American to compete in the Tour de France. About halfway up the grueling climb, that familiar wave of crushing exhaustion washed over my legs as I gasped for oxygen as I struggled to keep from passing out.
To no avail. At the top of the climb, Boyer was a tiny dot on the flickering asphalt, and I didn't stop to see him until I reached the finish line in Atlantic City. Later that night, Jim Lampley of the ABC television network, the commentator for the program "The Wide World of Sports", asked me what else I could have done to ride faster. "I should have chosen better parents," I replied dryly. We all have some sort of genetic limitations, I added, limitations that normal training cannot overcome. What else could I do?
A lot, and I knew it. Riders from the 1984 US Olympic cycling team told me that before the competitions they received blood transfusions that contained their own blood that had been drained at the beginning of the season, or that of another person with the same blood type. "Blood intoxication", as it is called, was not forbidden in those days. And in an atmosphere of flexible moral standards, it doesn't seem so different from training at high altitude. Either way, you increase the number of red blood cells that deliver oxygen to the tissues in your body. But I was already 30 and had an academic career to fall back on. I entered the race just to see how much I could push my body before it gave out. Artificial performance enhancement did not fit into my motivations to compete.
But let's assume that I was 20 years old and making a living from cycling which is my one and only passion, and no other career was in my future. Let's say my whole team used performance enhancing drugs as part of their "medical plan", and if I didn't achieve as well as everyone else I would find myself out. And let's also assume that I would believe that most of my competitors use drugs, and that those who were tested were almost never caught.
This is the general scenario that many competitive cyclists have been reporting since the early 90s. Although the specifics are different in other sports, such as baseball, the general circumstances of drug use are not so different. Many players are convinced that "everyone" uses drugs, and are therefore sure that they will not be able to compete unless they do the same. Administratively, Major League Baseball's failure to formulate clear rules, much less enforce them through extensive in-season drug testing, along with its historical tendency to look the other way, created an environment that encouraged drug use.
Naturally, we don't want to believe that any of those sports stars actually used drugs. But the accumulating evidence leads me to the conclusion that in cycling, as well as in baseball, football and the various fields of athletics, most of the stars of the last two decades have used performance-enhancing drugs. It's time to stop asking "Is?" and start asking "why?" And the reasons are three: one, the drugs are getting better, there are cocktails of drugs and the training programs include drug use; the second, an arms race in which the drug users regularly beat the drug testers; And the third, a change in atmosphere in many of the professional sports, which rewards fraud rather than playing by the rules.
Sports betting
Game theory studies how players in a game choose strategies that will maximize their gains while trying to predict the strategies that the other players will take. The "games" for which the theory was invented are not only gambling games such as poker or sports competitions where tactical decisions play a central role. They also include terribly serious matters in which people make economic decisions, military decisions, and even national diplomatic strategies. What all these "games" have in common is that the "movements" of each player are analyzed in view of the range of options open to the other players.
The "Prisoner's Dilemma" game is the classic example: you and your accomplice are suspected of a crime and detained in two separate prison cells without being able to communicate with each other. None of you, of course, wants to admit guilt or inform on the other, but the prosecution presents each of you with these options:
1. If you plead guilty and the other prisoner does not, you go free and he gets three years in prison.
2. If the other prisoner pleads guilty and you don't, you get three years in prison and he goes free.
3. If you both plead guilty, you each get two years.
4. If you both keep silent, you each get a year.
The table in front of you, called the game matrix, summarizes the four results:
The results show that the logical choice is not to comply with the initial agreement and cheat on your partner. why? Think about the results from the perspective of the first prisoner. The only thing concerning the outcome, which is prevented from the first prisoner to control, is the choice of the second prisoner. Suppose the other prisoner remains silent. So, the first prisoner earns the "temptation" reward (zero years in prison) if he pleads guilty, but receives a year in prison (the "high" reward) if he remains silent. The better outcome in this case for the first prisoner will be obtained if he confesses. But suppose the other prisoner also chooses to confess. Even then, it is better for the first prisoner to confess (the "low" salary, or two years in prison) than to remain silent (the "sucker" salary, or three years in prison). Since the circumstances from the second prisoner's point of view are completely symmetrical to those of the first prisoner, it is better for each of them to confess regardless of what the other prisoner decides to do.
These preferences are not merely theoretical. When a group of subjects plays the game once or a fixed number of rounds without the participants being able to communicate with each other, cheating by confession is the common strategy. But when the subjects do not know how many rounds they will play, the most common strategy is measure against measure: each begins by cooperating, that is, by remaining silent, then moves on to imitating the actions of the other player. Even more mutual cooperation can occur in a multiplayer Prisoner's Dilemma game, when players are allowed to play long enough for mutual trust to develop. But research shows that once cheating by confession gains momentum, it takes over the game.
Cycling competitions, like baseball and other sports, have a set of rules. The rules of competition in cycling expressly prohibit the use of performance-enhancing drugs. But because the drugs are so effective, and many of them are difficult (if not impossible) to discover, and because the reward for success is so great, the incentive to use illicit substances is very strong. As soon as some outstanding athletes "cheat" the rules (cheat) and take drugs to gain an advantage, their competitors who prefer to obey the rules must also betray, and thus an avalanche of betrayals is created in the entire industry. Because there are penalties for breaking the rules, a code of silence prevents open discussion of how to reverse the trend and return to behaving according to the rules.
This was not always the case. In the years 1980-1940, many cyclists consumed stimulants and painkillers. In fact, there were no anti-doping regulations until the death of British rider Tom Simpson in the 1967 Tour de France, riding up Mont Ventoux in southern France while under the influence of amphetamines. Even after Simpson's death, drug control in the 70s and 80s was spotty, at best. In the absence of a clear concept of compliance with the rules, only a few perceived the use of drugs as fraud. However, in the 90's something happened that changed the matrix of the game.
The EPO potion
The "thing" that fell was the artificial production of the substance erythropoietin through genetic engineering. Erythropoietin, or EPO, is a hormone found naturally in the body. The kidneys release it into the bloodstream, which carries it to receptors in the bone marrow. When EPO molecules bind to these receptors, the bone marrow produces red blood cells. Chronic kidney disease and chemotherapy can cause anemia, so the development of the method for its production through genetic exchange (recombination) in the late 80s brought a great blessing to patients suffering from chronic anemia - and to athletes suffering from chronic competitiveness.
Taking "recombinant erythropoietin", or r-EPO, is just as effective as a blood transfusion, but instead of dealing with blood bags and long needles that have to be inserted into a vein, the athlete keeps tiny ampoules of r-EPO on ice in a thermos or in the small refrigerator in the hotel room, and simply injects the hormone under to the skin The most important result of using r-EPO for competitors is directly measurable: it affects the hematocrit level (HCT), i.e. the proportion of red blood cells in the blood volume. More red cells provide more oxygen to the muscles. In men, the normal HCT is around 45%. Trained endurance athletes can reach around 50%. EPO may increase the values even up to 60%. The winner of the 1996 Tour de France, Bjarne Rees, was nicknamed "Mr. 60 percent"; Last year he admitted that he owed his abnormal hematocrit level to r-EPO.
The drug seems to have infiltrated professional cycling circles in the early 90s. Greg Lemond believes it was in 1991. After winning the Tour de France in 1986, 1989 and 1990, LeMond set himself the goal of breaking what was then a record five Tour de France victories, and in the spring of 1991 he was poised for his fourth victory. "I was in better shape than ever, my segment times in spring training were the best of my entire career, and I gathered a wonderful team around me," LeMond told me. "But something changed in the 'Tour' of 1991. Riders, who in previous years were unable to stick to my rear wheel, now left me behind even on moderate climbs."
LeMond finished seventh in this Tour de France, and vowed to himself that the following year he would win. And it wasn't like that. In 1992, he added, "Our [team's] performance was very poor, and I couldn't even finish the race." The competitors who did not take drugs failed in their effort to catch up with the riders who took drugs. Lemond recalled a story told to him then by one of the members of his group, Felipe Casado. Casado heard from a rider named Laurent Zalaver, who belonged to the Spanish racing team ONCE, that Zalaver's personal drug-taking program was organized entirely by the ONCE team and included r-EPO. LeMond refused to take r-EPO, thus causing himself another DNF ("did not finish") in 1994, his last race.
Some of those who succumbed to the pressure to use drugs paid an even heavier price. Casado, for example, who left Lemond's group and joined a group whose training program included the use of drugs, died suddenly in 1995, at the age of 30. It is not known if his death was directly caused by the drugs, but when the hematocrit reaches 60% or more, the blood becomes thick Very and it forms clots easily. The danger increases especially during sleep, when the endurance athlete's already low heart rate (which reaches a little over 30 beats per minute) drops. Two Dutch cycling champions died of heart attacks after experimenting with r-EPO. Some riders are said to sleep with a heart monitoring device connected to an alarm that is supposed to go off when the heart rate drops too low.
Caught in an arms race
Just as in evolution there is an arms race between predators and prey, so in sports there is an arms race between drug users and drug testers. In my opinion, the testers are five years away from catching the takers - and always will be. Those who reap the rewards of fraud will always be more creative than those who enforce the rules, unless the enforcers have proper incentives. Since there was no test for r-EPO in 1997 (it didn't hit the market until 2001), the World Cycling Union (UCI), the governing body of this sport, set the acceptable hematocrit limit for men at 50%. Not long after, the drug users learned to overcome the limitation: they raised the HCT above 50% and then diluted their blood for the test with a technique that was allowed and accepted in routine use: infusion of physiological salt solution to restore fluids to the body. The desired result is immediate.
Willie Watt, the head handler of the "Pastina" racing team in the 90s, explained how the testers were warned in his revealing book, "Breaking the Chain":
In case the UCI doctors arrive in the morning to check the hematocrit levels of the riders, I prepared everything necessary to give them the tests... I went up to the riders' rooms with infusion bags of sodium solution... The whole infusion lasted twenty minutes, the saline solution diluted the blood and lowered the hematocrit by three units - Just as much as needed.
Setting up the infusion took no more than two minutes, which meant we could do it while the UCI doctors were waiting for the riders to leave their rooms.
How have the new rules of the drug use game changed the strategies of the players? I posed the question directly to Joe Papp, a 32-year-old professional cyclist who is now banned from competing because he tested positive for synthetic testosterone. Papp, recalling the day he was given the "secret black bag," explains how a moral choice becomes an economic decision: "When you join a group that maintains an organized program of drug use, you are simply given the drugs along with a choice: take them and stay in the race, or don't take them And there's a good chance you won't have a career in cycling."
When Papp confessed, he was suspended by professional cycling for two years. But the social consequences were more serious than that. "The branch spat me out," he wailed in my ears. "A group becomes a band of brothers... but in a group of drug users there is another bond - a shared secret - and with that comes a code of silence. If you get caught, you keep your mouth shut. As soon as I confessed, my friends shunned me, because as far as they were concerned, I was putting them in danger. One of the guys called me and threatened to kill me if I found out he was taking drugs."
But Papp has never been a rider at the level of the Tour de France, so perhaps the matrix of the game - with its implications for the future of the rider's career - is different in the elite teams. No, as I learned from someone who was in the know. "For years I had no problem doing my job and helping the team leaders," said Frankie Andre, who was the lead pacer supporting Lance Armstrong for most of the 90s. "Then, around 1996, there was a dramatic increase in the speeds of the competitors. Something happened, and it wasn't just training." Andre resisted the temptation as best he could, but in 1999 he could no longer do his job: "It became clear to me that there were quite a few riders in Dabuka [the main group of riders in a bicycle race] who used the drug and I had to do something." He started injecting himself with r-EPO two to three times a week. "It's not like 'Red Bull', which gives immediate energy," he explains. "But it allows you to dig in a little more, stay with the group a little more, move at a speed of maybe 50.5 kilometers per hour instead of 48 kilometers per hour."
The benefits of performance enhancing drugs
The benefit of r-EPO in a long and brutal race like the Tour de France is not only in raising the level of HCT but also in maintaining the high level. Jonathan Waters, a former member of Armstrong's team, explained the numbers in my ears: "The great advantage of blood doping is the ability to maintain a hematocrit level of 44% for three weeks." A "clean" competitor who starts with an HCT of 44%, Waters noted, can expect to finish after three weeks of racing with 40%, due to natural blood thinning and red blood cell breakdown. "Stabilizing [the HCT level] at 44% therefore gives a 10% advantage."
The scientific studies on the effect of performance-enhancing drugs are not many, and are usually conducted on people who are not professional athletes or are not athletes at all. But the studies agree with Waters' assessment. (For obvious reasons, elite athletes who use drugs tend not to disclose their data.) The sports physiologists I interviewed believe that r-EPO improves performance by at least 5% to 10%. When you combine it with a cocktail of other drugs, you can squeeze another 5% to 10% out of the human machine. In events where the decision comes down to less than one percent, this is a huge advantage.
The Italian sports physiologist Michele Ferrari, whose reputation as a doping expert in competitive sports is controversial (due to his association with top athletes caught or accused of doping), explains it this way: "If the volume [of red blood cells] increases by 10%, the performance [The rider's net addition of useful kinetic energy output] improves by about 5%. This means an addition of about 1.5 seconds per kilometer for the rider pedaling at 50 kilometers per hour in a race against the clock, or about eight seconds per kilometer for the rider climbing at 10 km/h up a 10% gradient."
In the Tour de France, these numbers mean that a rider who raises his hematocrit by 10% will shave 75 seconds off his time in a 50km race against the clock, a race usually decided by a few seconds. In each of the many 10-kilometer ascents in the Alps and the Pyrenees, at gradients of up to 10%, the same change in blood will give the rider a huge gain of at least 80 seconds per ascent. If among the big riders there are those who use the material, their weaker competitors cannot afford to give up such profits. This is where the game matrix enters the mode of betrayal.
Nash equilibrium
In game theory, if no player gains from changing strategy, the game is said to be in a Nash equilibrium. Mathematician John Forbes Nash, Jr., whose character is depicted in the movie "Wonders of Reason" recognized the concept. To eliminate the use of drugs in sports, the structure of the drug use game must be changed so that competition according to the rules is in a Nash equilibrium. This means that the governing bodies of the sports must change the expected profit in the different results in the game matrix. First, when other players play by the rules, the payoff for their playing should be higher than the payoff for cheating. Second, and perhaps more importantly, even when other players are cheating, the payoff for fair play should be higher than the payoff for cheating. Players who obey the rules must not feel like "suckers".
In the prisoner's dilemma game, reducing the temptation to confess and increasing the reward for silence if the other prisoner confesses increase cooperation. Giving players a chance to talk to each other before the game starts is the most effective way to increase cooperation. In sports, this means breaking the code of silence. Everyone must recognize that there is a problem that needs to be solved. Then drug tests need to be conducted and the results disseminated to the public on an ongoing basis, until clean results are obtained. This way every player will see that the profit from a fair game is greater than the reward of cheating, and it doesn't matter what the other players do.
Here are my recommendations on how to bring cycling (and other sports) to a Nash equilibrium, where it would not be worthwhile for anyone to cheat by using drugs:
Immunity should be granted to every athlete for past frauds (before 2008). Since the whole system is corrupt and most of the competitors used drugs, nothing will be achieved if the titles of the winners are taken away from them after the fact, since it is almost certain that those who came in second and third places also took drugs. If granted immunity, retired athletes may help improve the anti-doping system.
The number of tested competitors must be increased - during the competitions, outside of the competitions, and especially immediately before or after a race - to prevent obfuscation. The tests should be carried out by independent companies that have nothing to do with the supporting bodies, the riders, the sponsors or the teams. The teams should also hire independent companies to test their athletes, and start each season with a performance test of each athlete to create a baseline profile. The sponsoring corporations must increase financial support to ensure strict testing.
Rewards should be offered, such as the X awards (a financial grant offered for a variety of technological achievements), to scientists who will develop tests to detect drugs, drugs that currently have no means to detect them. The incentive of the drug testers should be equal to that of the drug users.
The punishment for those caught should be made considerably worse: once, and you're out - forever. To protect the athlete from false positive test results or incompetent examinees (both of which exist), the arbitration and appeal system must be fair and reliable. However, if a decision is made, it must be significant and final.
The participation of all group members in the event must be disqualified if drugs are found in even one of them. The convicted athlete will be obliged to return to the sponsor all the salary money and prizes he received. The threat of this punishment will result in a strong social pressure of "fraternity" psychology on all members of the group, and will give them an incentive to enforce their own rules against drug taking.
The recommendations may sound utopian, but they can change the situation. Waters, who is now the director of the Slipstream/Chipotle American Cycling Team, has already begun a program of extensive and regular intra-team testing. "Remember, most of these guys are athletes, not criminals," he says. "If they believe that the others are stopping [taking drugs] and feel it quickly, they will stop too, with a deep sigh of relief."
All that remains is to hope. And through these changes I believe it will be possible to shift the psychology of the game from betrayal to cooperation. If so, the sport could return to the tradition of rewarding and valuing excellence achieved solely by the athlete's will to win.
Baseball games: why players use drugs
The game theory model for drug use in cycling is also suitable for other sports, especially baseball. To get an expert opinion, I spoke with Lance Williams, an investigative reporter for the "San Francisco Chronicle" and one of the authors (along with Mark Fainro-Wada) of the book "Shadow Game," which reveals how BALCO, a San Francisco Bay Area Laboratory Cooperative, provided baseball players and athletes Others are performance enhancing drugs. When I outlined my ideas about game theory's explanation for widespread cheating in sports, Etty Williams agreed with me in every way: “Athletes have a tremendous incentive to take drugs. There is a huge benefit to using drugs, and there is only a small chance that you will be caught. So often, depending on your sport and stage of your career, the risk is worth it. If you are accepted into the group, you will be a millionaire; If not, you'll probably go back to driving a truck."
Once the best competitors in a sport start cheating, breaking the rules spreads to all levels and the whole sport deteriorates. According to Williams, based on extensive reporting and numerous interviews with athletes, instructors, coaches, drug suppliers and drug testers, approximately 50% to 80% of all professional baseball players and athletes use drugs. Faced with this reality, Williams explained, for many athletes taking drugs is not only not a fraud, but it is also a necessity of reality. To illustrate this, Williams quoted Charlie "The Chemist" Francis, coach of the sprinter and (briefly) gold medalist in the 100 meter race at the 1988 Olympics, Ben Johnson, who was arrested for taking drugs and lost his medal. Taking the drugs was "for self-defense," Francis told Williams. "It was hit or miss."
How can leagues and governing bodies change the incentives in baseball's game matrix? Williams proposed heavier penalties, both for individuals and for the group as a whole, alongside tougher legal sanctions. Ironically, Williams and Fainero-Wada were themselves burned by the law for refusing to reveal their sources to federal authorities: "We were going to spend more time [18 months] behind bars than any of the steroid suppliers convicted in the BALCO conspiracy and any of the athletes we reported on, including [the veteran hitter of San Francisco Giants] Barry Bonds.” You know a system is corrupt when the messenger is shot and the makers of the gun go unpunished.
key concepts
An alarming number of sports - baseball, football, track and field, and especially cycling - have been rocked by drug-taking scandals in recent years.
Among the many prohibited substances in the cycling medicine book, the most effective is recombinant erythropoietin (r-EPO), a synthetic hormone that increases the production of red blood cells and thus increases the amount of oxygen supplied to the muscles.
Game theory explains why it makes sense for a professional cyclist to take performance-enhancing drugs: the drugs are highly effective and difficult to impossible to detect. The reward for success is high, and the more riders use drugs, the more difficult it is for a drug-free rider to remain competitive and he risks being removed from the team.
The game theory analysis of cycling is also applicable to other sports. The results show quantitatively how the governing bodies and anti-doping agencies can effectively concentrate efforts and cleanse their sports of drugs.
About the author
Michael Shermer (www.michael shermer.com) is an editor and writer at Scientific American and the author of the regular column "The Voice of the Skeptic" (page 44). Shermer is also an avid cyclist. In 1982 he was one of four riders who competed in the first Trans-American race (then called the "Great American Bicycle Race") for 4,800 km. He finished third in a time of 10 days, 19 hours and 54 minutes. Shermer authored several books, including two on cycling. His latest book deals with evolutionary economics (The Mind of the Market, Times Publishing 2007). He is the founder and publisher of the magazine "The Skeptic" (www.skeptic.com).
Long live the little difference
The average speeds of Tour de France winners rose sharply in 1991, probably when recombinant erythropoietin, r-EPO, came into widespread use in cycling.
To eliminate the effect of annual differences due to track and weather changes, the chart shows the average speeds over 14-year periods, before and after 1991.
the drug game
Why do cycling competitors cheat? Analyzing the phenomenon of drug taking using game theory (below), which relies on the Prisoner's Dilemma game, shows why cheating through drug taking makes sense based on the incentives and expected gains currently built into the competition (expectancy is the value of a successful outcome multiplied by the probability of achieving that outcome). The profit values listed here are not unrealistic, but they are given for illustrative purposes only; The labels "high", "temptation", "sucker" and "low" in the matrix correspond to the common names of strategies in the prisoner's dilemma. Also, it is assumed that if the competitors play by the same rules (all cheat, or all obey the rules), each will receive a million dollars, No additional corrections to the advantage of taking the drugs. [All numbers in millions of dollars.]
For previous information on the subject: a new test for the easy detection of drugs in sports
