The block is hot

The neighborhoods where I live and work – San Francisco’s Lower Haight and Mission District, respectively – are not the safest, and they’ve been that way for decades. But in recent years, rising property values and changing demographics in The City have led to gentrification in both areas, so now we have these weird blocks where there are drug dealers on the corner in front of million-dollar homes with Volvos in the garage. There’s been rising gang tension and homicides lately, and it’s a generally nervous time around the way.

So when I found myself at the office after midnight recently, I had a tough choice to make. Should I ride home on a pre-WWII French roadster (shout out to ebykr.com) with questionable brakes and no lights or helmet? Or should I walk alone in the dark, on some streets where that’s not a good idea?

I figured it would be safer to walk, and I was halfway home when a couple bored-looking teenage gangstas tried to rob me. I discouraged them by showing that my wallet was, in fact, empty. “You’re an honest man,” one of them told me, “You should run for president!”

I forget which doping scandal broke the following day, but I was already pondering broader questions of crime and punishment when I saw the news. Sure enough, the same old voices came out with the same old quotes in favor of measures like DNA testing and lifetime bans.

But after what happened the night before, those anti-doping voices sounded a lot like the anti-crime voices that typically advocate the kinds of hard-line measures that failed to deter those kids from trying to rob me – even though I was walking along the best lit block in the neighborhood, around the corner from a police station.

Clearly, cycling needs consistent, accurate testing and appropriate penalties for those who choose to break the rules. But an anti-doping strategy limited to enforcement and punishment will be no more effective than an anti-crime strategy with police and prisons, but nothing to address the underlying social conditions that accompany crime.

Not all dopers are win-at-all-costs alpha males and not all criminals are Machiavellian kingpins. In both groups, the motivation to cheat might be simply to keep one’s head above water and pay the rent. A lot of sociologists would say that this kind of desperation is better addressed by proactive preventive measures than by the threat of reactive punishment.

If you believe that line of thinking, it’s not a stretch to say an effective anti-doping strategy ought to address athletes’ motivations and incentives as well as enforce the rules. But who should be assigned to develop cycling’s counterparts to the education-and-job-training side of effective anti-crime strategies?

Unfortunately, it’s not the people who are in charge of enforcement. The UCI, WADA and national federations owe their authority to a system where the International Olympic Committee sits atop a hierarchy of organizations that grew out of altruistic notions of the nobility of amateur athletics. But in the for-profit entertainment world of modern pro sports, those notions are awfully quaint. Yet, they’re still the foundation upon which we’ve built – or rather, allowed to be built – the anti-doping system whose success or failure may well determine cycling’s future.

The good news, though, is that the athletes have more power than they’ve tended to exercise. After all, they’re the actual entertainers that fans care about and identify with. A divisive organizational figure like Dick Pound or Pat McQuaid can spark negative feelings, but no kid is going to put a Pound or McQuaid poster in his bedroom. Only the athletes themselves can inspire the positive emotions that we want sports to provide.

Regardless of Floyd Landis’ guilt or innocence, or the outcome of his hearings, his defense has exposed this vulnerability in the system – that the athletes have a more meaningful connection with the fans than any agency ever could.

That connection gives the athletes a level of influence that the kids who tried to rob me don’t have. But if I take their advice and run for president when I’m eligible in 2016, I’ll promise to implement a comprehensive and balanced anti-crime strategy much like the anti-doping strategy that will hopefully have succeeded by then.