How to Get Away With Doping

It it is always the ones who get caught that trash the rest of their sport and team. This essay would have had more power if Mr. Millar would have owned up to his issue before being sent to prison. Funny how getting caught focuses the mind.

Shame it's taken a Brit cyclist to bring this up.....I'm still waiting to hear from George Hincapie.

That's why the Russians protested after the Olympics: the leaks by Russian hackers of WADA's data shows that American and British elite athletes basically have a license to use doping, thanks to the so-called "therapeutical exemption loophole".

As WADA became basically a Western soft-power device (after the fall of the USSR), it can simply emit therapeutical exemptions to Western athletes with high probability of medaling, and don't emit it to West's enemies. So, Russian athletes are basically forced to use doping to compete with their Western rivals, while being at constant risk of being banned depending of the geopolitical conjuncture.

Moral of the story is: American and British top athletes don't even need to bother cheating WADA: they can do it legally.

P.S. for the readers who still don't know the WADA hacking story (because the Western MSM basically blacked it out), Russian hackers stole a confidential list of WADA's athletes under therapeutical exemption. Turned out there were, among many others, circa 40 gold medals worth in Rio Olympics alone of American and British athletes, plus some illustrious ones that didn't medal in Rio, but won medal in past editions (Serena WIlliams being the most famous).

David Millar should be commended for this article and his continued advocacy for clean cycling. The obvious 'elephant in the room' that goes unmentioned is Bradley Wiggins' use of triamcinolone injections right before the biggest grand tours in his career (including the 2012 Tour de France where he ultimately became the first ever British winner). I recognize that this article was written for a general audience so such details might be seen as distracting from the message; however, I wish there were more outright condemnations of what Wiggins, Brailsford, and Team Sky appear to have done. The anti-doping culture in cycling needs to be supported and nourished, particularly by David and others with a PED history and direct experience. If memory serves, David has weighed in obliquely already but I wish there was a bit more discussion on the specifics. Wiggins' and Team Sky's responses to the triamcinolone TUE revelations were neither illuminating nor convincing, in my opinion. David's proposed solution would directly address such use of TUEs in the future and it is clear something must be done. We have seen time and again in cycling, in other sports, in paying taxes, in high finance, etc, etc, that if loopholes are left open, there will always be people to exploit them. They simply must be closed as well as possible to protect those who wish to compete according to the true spirit of the rules. Bravo David! Please continue to speak out...
- Robert Thorne, Madison WI

Coincidence that many who suffer ADD are also world class athletes? I don't think so and neither does anyone who employs reason as a guide to decision making.

If an athlete needs a drug of any sort on a regular basis it should be clear there is a fly in the ointment. No ands, ifs, or buts. Competitors may rail against the injustice, but if a drug is needed to allow a person to compete at any level that person should be eliminated as being unfit. TUE is a joke without a laugh line for those who compete against users

Any prize at any level which is awarded to any person who uses any banned substance for any reason, even sanctified, does an injustice to whoever competes on the basis of his or her body's and mind's natural unassisted ability.

If a line is drawn it should be drawn without any exception, ever.

At a glance, I thought the title was How to Get Away With Groping by our Republican candidate!

I was outspoken here on the NYTimes comments when they were reporting about the Russian's doping and critical of those who were supportive of Russia so I was really surprised when the TUE's came out for some of the US tennis players (I have boys training to try go pro). I absolutely agree with the author that if an althlete has a TUE they cannot play till the benefit of the drug has been negated to make it fair for everyone. If the althlete needs it all the time then just like a permanent injury, they need to leave the sport. I emailed the WTA to ask for more information on how they could allow top players to use TUE's in competition but never heard back (big surprise I know).

As someone who takes a chemical injection (a substance banned as a PED) to keep himself alive, I have zero sympathy for sports athletes competing to achieve world renown and cash awards who voluntarily choose to inject chemicals to enhance their performance.

All that money flying around pro sports and we still actually care about the supposed "purity" of the participants. Give me a break. Perhaps in baseball especially, you have millionaires complaining that the other millionaires have given themselves an illicit advantage. Boo hoo.

To believe that Olympic athletes are not using power enhancing substances is to believe in fairytales. All of those athletes are doping. There is way to much money involved, doctors know, and so Pharma companies, that are out there to conduct experiments. The Olympic games should be banned completely !

I don't think TUEs should be permitted. Everyone has limitations, and medical conditions are no different.

It's become quaint in this day and age to follow the rules of anything.
Being honest, a good sport, transparent, tax-paying, not cheating, just doesn't pay anymore. It seems the only way to get ahead or become very wealthy is to do the complete opposite. Honesty is for suckers.

Mr Millar,
Thank you for a thoughtful essay, for being willing to look your own guilt in the eye and help the rest of us learn from it. Those of us who follow sports and participate in them want them to be fair, because so much of life isn't fair. This is one area where humans hope to have a stage for what is best about our species. Its doubly painful when our hopes for this are dashed as they so often are.

Candid and refreshing.

Of course there always is the option of not doping or of using drugs acquired illegally. Is that too radical an idea to offer?

Great piece. MIllar's honesty is matched by his writing. The Team Sky TUE scandal is the latest wave in a sea of disappointment cycling fans have been adrift in for years. Millar talks about the powerful but slow-acting consequences of taking Kenacort, but the effect these reports have on fans of the sport are equally powerful and destructive. I watch as much cycling as I can, still, but whenever I see a breakout performance by a newcomer or a remarkable one by an aging veteran, the first thing I think now is "dirty."

If a sports star is on something like oxycontin, they also should not be allowed to compete. I was dismayed to see all the TUEs that the Williams sister had.

I mean, and Simon Biles with the Ritalin....I mean no wonder she is so focused and can execute her moves so well. If I was on Ritalin or Adderall (ugh I can't stand how the spellchecker capitalized Adderall) I'm sure I'd be a much better gymnast.

It's a symptom of a much wider disease. Everyone I know, including me. is on some sort of powerful drug all the time. The Williams sisters take opiates in order to compete into their late 30s and beat 20-somethings whose pain isn't numbed. My Dad, my brother, and about 20% of everyone I know is on adderall, and they are so productive. I want to be as productive as they are, but I'm a drug addict so I can't take anything strong or I'll become an addict to it. I've been clean for 4 years on Suboxone (the head med that saved my life and makes me conflicted on head meds), and I know I always one 15 min appointment away from an Adderall TUE....but if I do I'll be a drug addict.

It's not fair to clean drug addicts like me that all my peers can use Adderall and Xanax in order to work harder and better than I ever could. How am I to compete with someone who can stay awake for 20 hours a day working? The answer is that I can't.

What is the dividing line between a performance enhancing supplement and a drug?

This type of article mislabels asthmatics as junkies and dismisses genuine ADHD as malingering. Doctors already live in fear of the DEA as it is?

I appreciate this as a fan of the sport and a hack, back of the pack racer, even at the age of 58. I never had the ability to ride at an elite level, and even doping wouldn't have gotten me there. But to see so many destroyed by the need to cheat in order to achieve one's dreams, that's what is most dispiriting. The great irony is that if nearly everyone is doping, they could all quit and compete clean with little competitive realignment, but my sense is no one is willing to sacrifice their career, dreams and livelihood on the off chance that everyone else will do what's right.

I remember the 6 months I took Adderall to enhance my performance. I was at MIT and I was also oppressing the fact that I was transgender.

The Adderall (and prozac) allowed me to suppress my Transgender feelings and get straight As all semester. I could work all the time, and still party. I was able to maintain for 6 months, then I completely feel apart.

A year later MIT kicked me out because I was a drug addict. I had tried to quit all the drugs I was taking, and I had a seizure on campus. I got the letter saying I was kicked out when I woke up in the ICU. I went home and got a DUI a month later.

7 years later, and I've been clean for 4 years. I have a good job and a good life, as a Transgender woman. I didn't need adderall. I needed to transition. Too bad I had to ruin my life before I found that out. I was able to dig out of that hole, but it was so much harder.

I wish I had taken a year off instead of that prescription. I was premed. I'll never go to medical school now, and I have $186000 of student loans. Ugh.

Lance Armstrong had to have T.U.E. for hypogonadism. The testes are the major Testosterone producing organ in the male body and one of Mr. Armstrong's was surgically removed. The remaining testicle would have been badly damaged by his chemotherapy, a fact that prompted Mr. Armstrong to bank his sperm prior to therapy.

The factor that allowed exploitation was that there is a normal range for Testosterone of approximately 300 - 1000 ng/dl and predictable rates of drug clearance. Any physician, worth his salt, could maintain a level in the upper portion of the normal range and also be sure that supranormal levels had declined by the time of the next anticipated drug test.

I would venture that the "normal" range of Testosterone in the NFL ranges from 900 to 1000,

There are no sports heroes anymore. We simply don't know if we're watching the real thing, or the drugs.

I refuse to be played as a rube.

Agreed. Absolutely. I suffer from ADHD and have long been successfully treated with Adderall but I'm well aware that it enhances my physical performance as well as enabling me to function mentally. Competitors will use this advantage like any other unless it's prohibited, and there will always be physicians willing to go along. And it's not happening just in cycling, but in every sport. Gymnasts and tennis stars have both admitted they are taking medically-prescribed amphetamines.

As an endurance athlete, professional cycling enthusiast and physician, I think the entire TUE system is a farce. The best athletes on the planet appear 10-20 times more likely to suffer form serious medical conditions requiring these drugs than the general public - not very likely. How is it so many world champion riders suffer from allergies and asthmas so severe as to be given drugs virtually never prescribed to mere non-world champions. No one gets IM shots of triamcinolone for asthma, hay fever usually is treated with an anti-histamine, and testosterone is almost never indicated in anyone every.

This is an important and insightful article by a man, who knows what he is talking about having been there and done that. One can only hope it does some good. The sad fact is that most cycling fans know this stuff already, but many seem to feel that it is either OK to dope or their naive enough to believe that the drug is only being used to treat an actual affliction. Heaven forbid you suggest that Froome or Wiggins are dopers. Their fan boys will jump all over you as if you were Trump bait, but I say, if horses are not allowed to be drugged to ease a condition for a competition, why should humans be aloud to do so? If you have any kind of illness, one needs to make a decision to compete or not, not whether or not to use a banned substance. The rationalizations used to support the use of drugs for treatment have become in and of themselves just that, rationalizations. It is without question that the drugs are used for performance enhancing purposes, and professional cycling condones and encourages it. In essence, they are cheating the fans, period. One can not watch a single competition without wondering, or for that matter, root unabashedly for a favorite cyclist thinking that him or her too, are dopers. The use of pain killers in sports is inhumane and needs to be stopped, now. This is not all for sporting purposes. It is about the need for the sponsors to do well, and they want their stars to appear and to win, even if everyone loses.

In a world in which leaders actors and athletes often find it impossible to take responsibility for behaviour or apologize you're excellent article stands out. thanks so much for writing it.

I hope the cheats from The Rio games read this article.

Millar has been an excellent advocate for clean riding and I respect him a great deal for this. Oddly, he does not name Bradley Wiggins in this article, but Wiggins was the primary target of the Fancy Bear attack, and triamcinolone acetonide was the drug he received a TUE for right before his Tour de France 2012 victory.

Thanks, Mr. Millar for giving nuance to this TUE exception, of which most of us only recently became aware.
Millar's prescription for allowing TUE's seem reasonable.

Great article with honest information about David Millar's experiences. However, not for one second do I agree the top riders are clean today. The amounts, drugs, timing and routines may be harder to manage, but I assume it is no cleaner than the Armstrong and Pantani eras.

Great piece Mr. Millar. And I love your TdF television commentary. Incredibly insightful at every level.

But do you really believe the tours are being won by clean riders?

Cycling - and many other sports - seems - dirty, period. "Pro" team sports are clearly about business. While all of the athletes have extraordinary skills, they are not the epitome of fitness because of the havoc they are willing to wreak in their own bodies. They are not models for children because they would do anything to win. And it looks as if one level of doping once discoverable, will be replaced by more sophisticated doping.

Does 'cheating' matter? That's the question, and the answer is personal. On the pro and apparently Olympic level, it's become part of the game.

Thanks for writing about this and being honest. At the time you were racing, doping was endemic in cycling. For all I know, it may still be, despite everyone's efforts. It's sad because, as an amateur cyclist who competes a few times a year in races many tiers below where you were, I know the kick that comes from having trained well and getting a result that rewards your hard work. That feeling of seeing my hard work pay off is always much better than a drug-induced personal best could ever be.

For me the issue truly lies in what is a real cheat versus what is perceived as one. By a public, who don't know much, maybe even squat, about medicinal uses or abuse. As we saw with the recent "leaks". They were used, albeit to not much effect - thankfully - to once again accuse an athlete like Serena Williams of being a 'roid-head. That she could only be that big and strong, as a female due to the use of steroids. A complete and utterly false notion and one based solely in sexism, not science.

But professionals and amateurs should be able, under supervision and less risk to their careers, have access to the drugs that aid in their healing and recovery. Especially those sports that demand a weekly if not almost daily "performance" from its athletes. Football, hockey, basketball, tennis...sports where the athletes are always training nearly always competing.

Proper recovery/healing is what will prevent, and/or lessen the many problems athletes deal with in retirement. Even college or amateur athletes who injure-out, or simply aren't good enough for the pros, or their sports dont have a pro-league (think Olympian) need to have the best modalities available to them.

The flip-side of the whole PED issue and avoidance tactics is that more non drug modalities have been promulgated by trainers,etc seeking better treatments,which do benefit the general public when they trickle down into physical rehab, etc.

More important is a cultural shift in what we expect from athletes.

It's remarkable how many Olympians are asthmatics, need their albuterol. Funny how there were no athletes at all at the asthma doctors' offices I spent time in.

I'm amazed that professional athletes still have this mindset, that they think their success can found in a syringe. Is it really just the athletes? Or is it the coaching system that they enter into when they become professionals? Is it perhaps time for WADA to redirect its energies towards those who continue to take impressionable young athletes like Mr. Millar down the dark path?

Excellent essay. Good that you still have a career as a writer, David, and thanks for continuing to shed light on the complex and dark world of doping in sport.

One useful question might be whether the athlete would be taking the drug in question if s/he were no longer competing (i.e., had retired from the sport)? If it were medically necessary, the answer would be yes.

"How to get away with Doping"? Join a professional sports team, is probably the easiest way. They now seem to get away with undetectable potions and rabbits' feet.......

Courage so and important article. Thank you.
Sadly, there is only one other response: one would hope your information and honesty would elicit a large response. Disappointing indeed.

Well, From my days at the Drag Strip (early 1960's), there was a class for "Stock" cars and a class for "Gas" cars. The Gasser's were hopped up.
If folks are going to enhance themselves, maybe try that. Two types of competition. But be warned, sometimes they blew an engine.

Professional cycling is not a sport that is good for one's health.

Cheating is Sports is akin to cheating in business, as the end seems to justify the ends, however unethical it is to use drug enhancement methods to cheat on your adversaries and hope to make a 'steal'. We humans, all of us, are corruptible; all depends if the price is right; that is why sensible 'checking' is of the essence. Your confession is proof of our imperfections, and trying to 'compensate' for our failings.

Anyone can cheat on a test. Systematically planning to cheat and instructing your athletes to accept a 'cheating' program or to go home is criminal.

I've volunteered as a USADA official.

This is an important clarification on the limits of PEDS testing- in all sports. It is also possible that trainers can collude with MDs and dope athletes while giving them plausible deniability; they can say - we are treating an injury.
Millar makes clear that use of PEDS can be undetectable but can cause significant side effects. Testosterone can cause early balding, others promote more inflammatory joint syndromes.
The sad truth is that complex use o mutiple small biological substances as well as T.U.E.s may simply be impossible to police.

Thanks David for a very thoughtful and important article. I have raced as an amateur on and off for many years albeit never very successfully and never in Europe. I still follow the sport am but beginning to wonder to what lengths athletes will go to enhance their performances. Lately the medical "exceptions" TUE has come to prominence, asthma being used as an excuse. To those cyclists who use this excuse I say "prove it".