When the intersection of sport and patriarchy turns ugly.
December 9, 2015 4:08 PM   Subscribe

"When I started taking EPO, he told me, 'if you say that to anyone I'm going to kill you" In an exclusive Cyclingnews podcast, Canadian cyclist Geneviève Jeanson details the abusive coach-athlete relationship that she alleges led to her career-long doping.

Professional cycling has a well documented drugs problem. Lance Armstrong's story is well-known and ongoing. In the early 2000s, Geneviève was a bright young star in a growing sport that needed standout athletes as it struggled to achieve equal airplay and sponsorship to men's cycling.
posted by lonefrontranger (45 comments total) 11 users marked this as a favorite
 
God this is so fucked up. I wish I could say that I was surprised at this kind of story, but there are so many. I'm glad she found a way out of this abusive relationship. Fuck this guy and anyone like him.
posted by Fizz at 4:17 PM on December 9, 2015


EPO has always struck me as being a borderline case, because there's another way to get the same result, which doesn't leave any drug residue to be detected by a test.

The cyclist can have a pint of blood drawn a couple of months before a race and have the red blood cells separated out and frozen. Then a week before the race the red blood cells get thawed and transfused back into the cyclist. By the time of the race, the needle hole has healed, so there's no trace left.

I think that's supposed to be against the rules, too, but absent a confession there really isn't any good way to tell this has happened.

Even more to the point, you do all your training at high altitude (Denver or Mexico City or the Andes in Peru). A human body naturally responds to low atmospheric pressure by increasing production of red blood cells. And doing that isn't against the rules.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 4:19 PM on December 9, 2015


Chocolate Pickle, you're talking about autologous blood doping, and it is indeed detectable and illegal, actually.
posted by lonefrontranger at 4:21 PM on December 9, 2015 [8 favorites]


The extra layer of fuckedupness here is that women cycling pros make very little money, even when they win races. So you are being pressured to drug yourself to keep your incredibly strenuous low paying job, because you're living the dream, right? But don't even consider television coverage or a grand tour because that's for the men.
posted by selfnoise at 4:28 PM on December 9, 2015 [11 favorites]


LoneFrontRanger, the page you link to doesn't say that autologous blood doping can be detected.

It could conceivably be detected through a blood count, but only if there's a baseline to which to compare. So if athletes were required to submit blood samples every month, say, for the year before a race, it would be possible to detect a sudden rise in red cell count.

But without a baseline, and if there's no evidence of the needle, how do you detect it?
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 4:29 PM on December 9, 2015


yeah isn't that how they nailed Tyler Hamilton all those years ago?
posted by indubitable at 4:30 PM on December 9, 2015


also I am going to say that I, personally, know of at least one other standout female cyclist from the Rocky Mountain region who also came out of relative obscurity, had a similarly meteoric rise, a similarly overbearing and strange relationship with her (much older) male coach, and she also disappeared without a trace, all between the years of 2002-2005. I'm not saying anything odd was going on, except the part where as a Cat 4 (first year beginner) cyclist, this rider famously finished within a minute of Kim Bruckner (an elite world-level professional) on the Mount Evans Hillclimb. As a knowledgable cyclist and former official, this is the epitome of "results that make you go hmmm".

let's not even begin to discuss Jeannie Longo...
posted by lonefrontranger at 4:31 PM on December 9, 2015


Tyler was homologous doping (blood from another rider).

The baseline is the rider passport, without which these days, you do not race. Anyone with a basis in O-chem will tell you that trending is a thing that's well understood. Also it has been widely discussed that WADA actually does know how to detect autologous doping (there's a specificity in the ratio of newer-to-older RBCs) but they have not made it official as this is yet another way to stay ahead of the dopers in the never ending war.
posted by lonefrontranger at 4:34 PM on December 9, 2015 [4 favorites]


I simply assume that all people in all sporting events are cheating and I just don't care.
posted by telstar at 4:35 PM on December 9, 2015 [2 favorites]


Autologous blood-doping can absolutely be detected, either through the "biological passport" program that is now compulsory for all participants in elite competitive cycling (and which does exactly what you describe- that is, establishing a metabolic baseline, and comparing it to existing norms for athletes at the same level, while also observing anomalous variations during competition), as well as through evidence of plasticisers related to blood storage and transfusion, detected in biological samples.
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 4:40 PM on December 9, 2015 [3 favorites]


I simply assume that all people in all sporting events are cheating and I just don't care.

I don't care about the event, but I do care about what this does to the athletes. Like the East German women swimmers (during the Cold War) who were using steroids to build up their muscles. They're stuck with those bodies for the rest of their lives.

The training that women's gymnastics athletes go through is really extreme. It's more like "girl's gymnastics" these days because women can't compete. (I think it's been 50 years since a woman competed in the Olympics.) And the girls train like mad -- and then puberty mugs them in a dark alley, and they're discarded like an empty beer can. What happens to them afterwards? It gets precious little coverage in the media, but what little I've seen indicates that they don't tend to have happy lives.

Giving performance drugs to cyclists is the same kind of thing. This kind of training pushes people to exceed any kind of normal development, and leaves their bodies distorted and freakish. It also affects their minds and personalities.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 4:55 PM on December 9, 2015 [8 favorites]


Tyler was homologous doping (blood from another rider).

!!!

Is that part of the job questionnaire for domestique?
  • Previous races and finishes:____________________________
  • Salary or winnings history:___________________
  • Blood type:____________________
posted by notyou at 5:06 PM on December 9, 2015 [1 favorite]


actually the story on Tyler is that everyone on the team was autologous doping, what popped him was when they fucked up and switched the bags. Allegations of conspiracy aside, this sort of thing was not unknown to happen and riders did get very sick and nearly die because of shitty doctors and carelessness all throughout the '90s and early Aughts.
posted by lonefrontranger at 5:13 PM on December 9, 2015


Tyler was homologous blood-doping by accident. His doctor fucked up and it made him sick (note: his doctor wasn't Michele Ferrari).
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 5:14 PM on December 9, 2015 [2 favorites]


But without a baseline, and if there's no evidence of the needle, how do you detect it?

Most serious competitions these days use biological passports so there is baseline data. Lots of it.
posted by srboisvert at 5:15 PM on December 9, 2015


hal_c_on some coaches and people much closer to the pros than I have said that during the heyday the sports agents were looking for "talents that could succeed clean" at a Cat 1 (elite amateur) or higher (local/continental pro) level.

They would take those clean stars and dope them. I think it was Ferrari (Armstrong's doping Dr) who famously said "you can't make a donkey into a thoroughbred".
posted by lonefrontranger at 5:15 PM on December 9, 2015


Chocolate Pickle: Giving performance drugs to cyclists is the same kind of thing. This kind of training pushes people to exceed any kind of normal development, and leaves their bodies distorted and freakish. It also affects their minds and personalities.

Well, plus blood doping (even your own!) and EPO can just straight up kill you. In fact I would classify EPO as one of the most dangerous performance-enhancing drugs.
posted by Mitrovarr at 5:15 PM on December 9, 2015 [3 favorites]


Mitrovarr's absolutely correct. See also an odd rash of young healthy riders who mysteriously died in their sleep in the late '90s through about 2003.

EPO can thicken the blood to the point where the heart cannot function anymore at baseline (sleeping) levels.
posted by lonefrontranger at 5:18 PM on December 9, 2015


Interesting that all the conversation here so far is about the doping and cheating and not the abuse and manipulation, beginning when she was thirteen and he was forty. This is not primarily a doping story, but I guess that's the thing that everyone loves to have an opinion about...
posted by klanawa at 5:20 PM on December 9, 2015 [19 favorites]


Interesting that all the conversation here so far is about the doping and cheating and not the abuse and manipulation, beginning when she was thirteen and he was forty.

It's a lot harder to be all self-righteous and blame the woman when that little detail is included. Of course that's also a technique that's used in regular abuse cases as well.
posted by happyroach at 5:24 PM on December 9, 2015 [2 favorites]


The doping is not separate from the abuse and manipulation. Abuse and manipulation is how the doping is perpetuated in the sport, from elite levels down to junior and amateur riders. Armstrong was a bully, and bullying keeps the doping in the sport. I do not blame athletes who get pulled into it at a young age, but it is the reason why doping needs to be driven out of the sport once and for all.
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 5:35 PM on December 9, 2015 [1 favorite]


In recent years there have been some other troubling stories about male coaches and team directors and sexual abuse and manipulation of professional women in cycling. It's awful.

Things are getting better in terms of compensation and exposure - rarely to parity, but getting better - and then stuff like this comes to light and ugh.
posted by entropone at 5:42 PM on December 9, 2015 [3 favorites]


In recent years there have been some other troubling stories about male coaches and team directors and sexual abuse and manipulation of professional women in cycling. It's awful.

Not just cycling. I've heard of similar abuse stories in other professional/amateur sports: swimming, gymnastics, soccer. And Entropone beat me to it with the comment.
posted by Fizz at 5:48 PM on December 9, 2015


I simply assume that all people in all sporting events are cheating and I just don't care.

You're wrong.

Cycling, and many other sports, has had major problems with doping. In cycling, even during the "everybody was doped to the gills" years, there were people who stayed clean. People who got pushed out of the sport; people who got threatened; people who abandoned their very promising careers because they saw what it would take to continue, and chose not to. Or people who kept going and rode anonymous careers.

For cycling, right now, there are lots and lots and lots of people at all levels, from amateur to professionals at the highest level, who are committed to racing clean. Think of them as being like musicians for whom the idea of lip syncing would never cross their mind - it would be stupid and pointless, with the added outrage of it being dangerous, unethical, against the rules, and destructive to a culture that they love.

Look at Anthony Clark - a kid who was discovered under unlikely circumstances by one of the best bike racers in the country , went pro a few years later, and just won his first high-level race, celebrating across the finish line with a big CLEAN tattoo visible on his leg.

I'm not gonna argue that cycling is clean (though I'd maybe get suckered into saying that it gets a worse rap than other, dirtier sports, and is doing way more than other sports to eradicate its cheating), but I will happily argue that it is cleaner, and I will go to the mat to say that there are clean riders at high levels.

Shit - I'm one of them.
posted by entropone at 6:21 PM on December 9, 2015 [9 favorites]


The doping is not separate from the abuse and manipulation. Abuse and manipulation is how the doping is perpetuated in the sport, from elite levels down to junior and amateur riders. Armstrong was a bully, and bullying keeps the doping in the sport. I do not blame athletes who get pulled into it at a young age, but it is the reason why doping needs to be driven out of the sport once and for all.

Hey look, I understand the athlete-coach relationship is sometimes completely co-dependent and abusive. I sympathize with athletes in this position. However, and I say this as a former nationally-ranked distance runner, if you're doping as an athlete you're part of the problem.

I would have rather walked away from it and not said anything than compete for one second as a doped athlete. She could have gone in a lot of different directions. She chose to stay and chose to dope. This is not an armed hostage situation, despite the inexcusable death threat. There are things that can be done about that which don't involve riding a bike.
posted by jimmythefish at 6:44 PM on December 9, 2015


Interesting that all the conversation here so far is about the doping and cheating and not the abuse and manipulation, beginning when she was thirteen and he was forty. This is not primarily a doping story, but I guess that's the thing that everyone loves to have an opinion about...

Absolutely agree. The cycling is a distant second to the abuse, and yet the relationship remained. I know many athletes who stay in those relationships because of their own singular drive rather than any real safety issue. It's messed up on all sorts of levels.
posted by jimmythefish at 6:51 PM on December 9, 2015


She could have gone in a lot of different directions. She chose to stay and chose to dope. This is not an armed hostage situation, despite the inexcusable death threat. And later: I know many athletes who stay in those relationships because of their own singular drive rather than any real safety issue.

I guess you missed the part where: "Andre always told me that he was going to commit suicide if I left him and that he would kill me and then he would kill himself,” Jeanson told Cyclingnews in the podcast. " or the part where:
She told him that Aubut punched her in the face because he was not happy with her training (p. 75 and p. 81). That he hit her several times (p. 175), and that he was physically violent (p. 81, p. 108, p. 178 and p. 184). She gave two specific examples of violence: a punch in the face that resulted in a black eye during a training ride in Arizona in 2004 (p. 218) and a violent episode in a hotel bathroom in Italy in 2004 (p. 185). She noted that she told no one about the abuse, but several people saw the black eye and that she made up a story to explain why she was bruised to keep the violence a secret (p. 185).
Or the part where she was in her mid-teens when the EPO started and that her own parents knew about it.

Yeah. She just had so many choices and people to go to and no real safety issue at all. /s
posted by barchan at 7:10 PM on December 9, 2015 [28 favorites]


Yeah. She just had so many choices and people to go to and no real safety issue at all. /s

It's messed up for sure. I'm not disagreeing that this was an incredibly shitty situation. She's 40 and he's 13, sure he's a piece of shit. Nobody is questioning that. There's way, way more here that should have happened that didn't, and the levels of complicity are astounding.

Having said that, I have serious doubts in these cases that an athlete that rises to the level of world champion is just doing it all with a gun to their head. This is a decade. There are other things going on.
posted by jimmythefish at 7:20 PM on December 9, 2015


I have serious doubts in these cases that an athlete that rises to the level of world champion is just doing it all with a gun to their head. This is a decade. There are other things going on.

Yes, there are a lot of things going on:

• physical stress
• physical abuse
• threat of violence
• guilt
• depression
• worry
• pressure to conform/live up to cultural expectations
• money
• drug abuse

And probably a million other things. These are just a few of the things I tagged in my head while reading the article. This is someone who is young, away from her family, friends, and in a position where she relies on an adult who has power, influence, and privilege. I cannot imagine the kinds of things she was experiencing. The article also references several other people who were close to her who sensed that something was not right and that she wanted out.

Maybe lets not just blame a culture or sport and instead focus on supporting the survivor and listening to their story. Let's ask them how we can help and provide support so this type of shit doesn't keep on happening.
posted by Fizz at 7:32 PM on December 9, 2015 [10 favorites]


Yeah I agree, and it's probably not the best place to make the point that I was making. However, the notion that the abusive coach is always 100% the problem simplifies an issue which is often not so straightforward. I've seen so many female athlete/male coach relationships that are so toxic precisely because both individuals are getting enough out of it to stay. I don't believe that for the vast majority of these relationships that the athlete is staying just out of fear.
posted by jimmythefish at 7:41 PM on December 9, 2015


You're poop-flinging at someone who was trapped into an abusive relationship with a guardian when she was 13 and you're asking "Why didn't she get out? Anyone sensible and moral would just walk?". And faulting the person who was the child.

My only knowledge of such things is from reading columns in the paper and so on but I think it's more complicated than that and that you need to have more compassion and understanding for the victim here.
posted by sebastienbailard at 7:53 PM on December 9, 2015 [3 favorites]


No, I don't think I was doing that in the context of all my comments here.
posted by jimmythefish at 7:56 PM on December 9, 2015


Perhaps I was reading too broadly for which I apologize; I'm a bit off tonight.
posted by sebastienbailard at 8:02 PM on December 9, 2015


I think it's always wise to stop before the "however". In my general life experience everything I put after the "however" is not me explaining to others what I'm getting that they are failing to understand, but rather something they are saying that I'm failing to understand.

YMMV of course, that's not a life maxim. I guess for me I'm not sure that we need to pick apart the victim's side of the story here? Seems like it's a pretty complicated story with a lot things going on and picking apart the victim's story is just more of the same culture that got her into the mess she found herself in in the first place?

That's just my 2 cents?
posted by Annika Cicada at 8:06 PM on December 9, 2015 [3 favorites]


No it's fine, I came out saying doping is bad and it's not the right tack here. She was abused, no question. It's a sad, messed up story. More broadly, though, I may be ill-advisedly pointing out my own experience in watching similar (but far less extreme) stories which are far more complicated.
posted by jimmythefish at 8:10 PM on December 9, 2015 [1 favorite]


I think it was Ferrari (Armstrong's doping Dr) who famously said "you can't make a donkey into a thoroughbred".

This may be an apocryphal quote. First time I heard it was Billy Martin.

"You got your mules and you got your racehorses. And you can kick a mule in the ass all day long but he ain't ever going to win the Kentucky Derby."

(Source is Bill James who has all his shit paywalled and google can not fetch me a citation.)
posted by bukvich at 8:15 PM on December 9, 2015


Interesting bit of context here, in Canadian sport. Beckie Scott was once waved off by Dick Pound, then the head of WADA, for claiming that Olympic cross-country skiing was dirty on the heels of the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Games. She should, as he said at the time, just accept the results of her competitions at Salt Lake City. She would later be awarded the gold medal because the gold and silver medalists later tested positive for banned substances.

Had they not, however, Dick Pound would have been successful in waving her off as a woman who was complaining about drug abuse in her sport.

So Scott, a clean athlete with a clean conscience complains to the guy running the highest anti-doping authority in the world and gets told she's delusional (Dick Pound did this to her on live Canadian TV at the time - can't find a clip but I distinctly remember seeing this - it was offensively hand-wavey on his part). Pound would later be proven seriously wrong once test results from Scott's competitors shook out.

Now, in Jeanson's case, an athlete who's young and doping gets told she will be killed if she says anything...I think that removes quite a bit of agency from the equation.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 8:18 PM on December 9, 2015 [7 favorites]


To me that's the shocking thing, that an abuse so extreme would continue for such a long time. It's an unpopular question to ask in this situation, but one must wonder if the reporting of such extreme abuse was so extreme if it lasted such a long time in such a public way. Perhaps. The stories of wanting to get hit by a car certainly suggest that. It's something which would be broached in a criminal investigation, certainly.

The suggestion above about the 'whatever' not being a good thing...yeah in this case of a person who was a minor, let the blame fall squarely on the adult.
posted by jimmythefish at 8:34 PM on December 9, 2015


mandolin,

That adds quite some context to Dick Pound's recent efforts at WADA outright suspending Russia from major sport.
posted by effugas at 10:18 PM on December 9, 2015


To me that's the shocking thing, that an abuse so extreme would continue for such a long time.

All I can say is that you must have been incredibly sheltered from any women who have been abused. I'm doing my best here to be diplomatic, but I really recommend you do some research.
posted by happyroach at 10:35 PM on December 9, 2015 [4 favorites]


It's more like "girl's gymnastics" these days because women can't compete. (I think it's been 50 years since a woman competed in the Olympics.)

Totally agree with you that the gymnastics training system is screwed up and abusive, but there are nevertheless a number of women who have competed in the Olympics in the last 50 years. One example.
posted by JanetLand at 5:29 AM on December 10, 2015


The extra layer of fuckedupness here is that women cycling pros make very little money, even when they win races. So you are being pressured to drug yourself to keep your incredibly strenuous low paying job, because you're living the dream, right? But don't even consider television coverage or a grand tour because that's for the men.

Hey, men are "natural risk takers," right? The sport could've blown up and he would've looked like a rich genius. But it's a win-win for this guy. She makes a lot of money, he gets rich. She doesn't make a lot of money? He still gets to have a great time.
posted by amanda at 6:34 AM on December 10, 2015


So much of sports seems to be about the exploitation of young people for the entertainment of the rest of us that it's started to make me wonder about whether it's possible to have ethical professional sports. So much money, so much celebrity, and the kids who get hurt/drop out/burn out are largely invisible to us. And it's kids, because you have to start young and be at your physical peak, and who is less able to defend themselves than a kid who eats and breathes their sport, far away from home, under incredible pressure to perform?
posted by emjaybee at 7:34 AM on December 10, 2015 [2 favorites]


Mod note: Couple of comments deleted. Earlier comment was deleted since it seemed to be continuing a derail into a everybody vs one person dynamic here, which isn't great for the conversation; better to just let it rest there with that exchange, and let other people take up the thread of the conversation.
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 7:56 AM on December 10, 2015


Pro cyclists can have careers into their early 40s. It's not at all like girls gymnastics in that regard. You peak at age 28.
posted by jetsetsc at 10:19 AM on December 10, 2015


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