Gar-meen Chee-po-tull!

I'm at the telescope tonight and not only is it cloudy, but it's raining, too. It didn't have to be like this. The weather forecasts had said all day that it would be cloudy tonight. I had planned on looking for furniture for my new office, hitting the "farmer's market" grocery store I discovered this weekend, and making myself a nice dinner tonight. But when I went out at 5:30 to check the weather and reassure myself that I didn't need to worry about observing tonight, the sky was about 80% clear. I still figured it would get cloudy later, but it was enough to sucker me into driving the 30 minutes out to the observatory in the hope of at least getting some data tonight. Halfway here it was getting cloudy. By the time I arrived it was about 90% clouds. Now it's raining.

Unfortunately this got me out of my rhythm of finishing the final corrections on my thesis, but since I'm stuck in a little room with nothing to do but surf the web (or work on those pesky corrections), I now have plenty of time to catch up on the internet. I found this article on ESPN. Yes, both of us hate what ESPN has become, but that's another post for another time. I had no idea it would be as long as it was, and if I wasn't stuck at the telescope I would never have taken the time to read it. I was going to send it to the Artist via email, but decided this was the impetus to start the blog.

It's basically an in depth chronicle of the Garmin-Chipotle cycling team during this year's Tour de France. I find this interesting for a number of reasons. The most obvious is that I like the Tour de France. Though I didn't get to see much of it due to a conference and moving across the country, I saw/read about enough of it to know the general arc of the story. And I knew half the riders names due to a certain Mr. Holladay.

I can remember being aware of the Tour in the 80s when Greg LeMond was winning it, but it wasn't until about 2002 when Lance Armstrong started dominating and I was at the beach for a few days in July with my cousin who cycled in college that I got hooked on it. I love racing as long as it's a test of human strength and endurance, not NASCAR. I'll watch every moment of swimming and running that I can find on TV. (Yes, I'm looking forward to the Olympics!) But until I started watching the Tour, I had no appreciation for cycling. Seeing the strategy (and having it explained to me) that goes in to winning not just the whole race, but individual stages, combined with the magnitude of the physical endeavor really caught my interest. So when the World Wide Leader deigned to have an article on cycling on the front page, I couldn't resist reading it.

I cheered for Garmin-Chipotle this year because they were an American team and especially because they were sponsored by Chipotle. Chipotle is another topic that is worth it's own post, if not it's own blog. My first couple of years of grad school I ate at Chipotle at least once a week, and on a few occasions, twice in one day. I contemplated wall papering my office with old Chipotle wrappers with the weight of the burrito and the date written on each one. Even though it's no longer my favorite item on the menu, I judge the burritos at all other places by how they stack up to the Chipotle chicken with black beans burrito. Once Chipotle gave out coupons for a free burrito on tax day. All you had to bring in was the coupon, which was just a one page printout on regular 8.5x11 paper in black and white. So I made photocopies of it and put them in everyone's mailbox in my department. I think about 30 people had free dinner that night thanks to me. Like I said, I like Chipotle.

It wasn't until later in the race that I realized that G-C had a strict anti-doping commitment. I find this really interesting. In a sport that has nearly killed itself with rampant doping, someone had the idea to form a team around the idea of competing without doping. They understand that it'll be harder to win and that their riders will be subjected to far more inconvenience than other riders. But they were able to find enough quality riders that they could seriously compete and once they proved that, they found sponsors who were willing to support it. And they did more than just participate in the Tour; Christian Vande Velde finished 5th!

This got me thinking to how the concept could be transported to other sports. Baseball has a reputation for performance enhancing drug use far more than any other sport. I find this reputation unfair because football has had far more and more prominent players be caught using PEDs (Shawne Merriman anyone?), and has a much more lax testing policy, but escapes the vast majority of the criticism that baseball takes for PEDs. Again, another topic for another time.

Getting back to the topic at hand, I'm a huge baseball fan, and have never heard a satisfying method for how to rid baseball of PED use. Probably the best suggestion I have heard is to have the players police themselves and make it solely a monetary issue. Guys who get caught have to pay hefty fines (like 90% of their salary) which are then distributed between all the players who test clean. There's more to it than that, but I'll direct you to J.C. Bradbury's blog and book to read the specifics of his plan.

So I'm wondering if the G-C idea could work in a major team sport? What if some moribund team, say the Washington Nationals, decided to guarantee that their players were clean? I'm sure the team would suffer for a while, as players would be hesitant to submit themselves to extra drug testing and potentially alienate themselves from the rest of the players union (which has always resisted increased drug testing due to their conflicting goals of protecting their member's rights and power vs. management while also wanting to "do the right thing" and protect their health). But I think the public would support the idea, and if marketed effectively, I think the team could really become popular and make a lot of money. With a higher profile and money to burn, they could afford to attract better free agents, even if they had to pay them a premium in return for their guarantee to be clean. I suspect that (some) players would be willing to play for them without a premium because it would be good for their image and might bring in more endorsements (David Eckstein anyone?).

If done correctly, the success of the "Clean-Nationals" might convince other teams to follow suit. It would take some time, and undoubtedly some teams would hold out and happily continue to hire anyone (I'm envisioning the Oakland Raiders), but I could see this ridding baseball of the stigma of PEDs in 10-15 years. That's not exactly instant success, but considering it's a $5 billion a year industry, its difficult to change the way it works overnight.

The risk in the plan is that the public wouldn't support a "Clean-Nationals" team any more than they support them now. But I think that would say a lot more about the conscience of the American people than it does about the integrity of baseball.