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Monday's Mailbag: Boonen deserves honor; bring on the new era; and the Prisoner's Dilemma

Published: Dec. 26, 2005

The Mailbag is a regular feature on VeloNews.com. If you have a comment, an opinion or observation regarding anything you have seen in cycling, in VeloNews magazine or on VeloNews.com, write to WebLetters@InsideInc.com. Please include your full name and home town. Letters may be edited for length and clarity.

Boonen a worthy cyclist of the year
Editor:
Kudos on your selection of Tom Boonen as cyclist of the year. With his show of force from the beginning of the season to its conclusion, Boonen showed he was the strongest. It pleased me to see Boonen's young mug prominently displayed in the magazine and that of an older cyclist known for yellow receiving slightly less coverage than he usually does. Now that Lance is out of the scene and likely out of your pages, I'll be subscribing to VeloNews. Keep up the good work.

Daniel Kessler
Fort Collins, Colorado

Here’s to the new era
Editor:
Thanks for the great mag, web site, and books. Good call to add Tafi. Looking forward to how things play out in the new era.

Nick Stevens
Millington and Roseland, New Jersey

Held prisoner by cheats
Editor:
In your editor’s note following Mark Crosby’s letter (see Friday’s Mailbag: "Deny it all you want: Some riders dope"), you wrote:

"We keep hearing different stories about this poll, so we did a little snooping around the Web. We unearthed a variety of references to it, but only one that actually named a name: Bob Goldman, president of the National Academy of Sports Medicine in Chicago, in a Time.com post dated July 27, 1998. The paragraph reads as follows: "Every two years since 1982, Bob Goldman has conducted an informal questionnaire among Olympic-level U.S. athletes, asking: If you were offered an illegal substance that guaranteed you would win and not be caught, would you take it? In 1995, the answer from 195 of 198 athletes was yes. Asked if they would take a banned substance that would enable them to win every competition for five years but then kill them, more than half the athletes said yes. ‘With the money athletes can make now, the kids don't really care about taking drugs,' says Goldman." Not quite 80 percent, but plenty discouraging nonetheless."

This is a classic example of the Prisoner's Dilemma, or Game Theory as practiced by statisticians. Asking one athlete that question, the athlete must consider that the others will also accept the drug, therefore they must also accept to be able to compete on a level playing field.

Thus the claim that cyclists are "all dopers" is a realistic claim, as it is unlikely that "some" dopers exist. All or none. That said, we must continue to be vigilant, educate our youth, and support testing and WADA so that we may approach the state of no drug use.

Michael DeKelver
Racing director, Ottawa Bicycle Club
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

The Mailbag is a regular feature on VeloNews.com. If you have a comment, an opinion or observation regarding anything you have seen in cycling, in VeloNews magazine or on VeloNews.com, write to WebLetters@InsideInc.com. Please include your full name and home town. Letters may be edited for length and clarity.