The Morning According to Us

Viagra is the next big thing in sports doping. Uh-oh.

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Side effects may be, um, noticeable.

History will mark these as troubled days, and not just because of a free falling global economy, rising world temperatures, and Madonna thinking a Christmas tree could be worn as a dress. No, the real sign of doom comes from athletes gobbling Viagra because they believe it gives them a competitive edge.

The World Anti-Doping Agency is financing a study at Marywood University in Scranton, Pennsylvania to see if the miracle pill dilates all of an athlete's blood vessels and unfairly increases his capacity to carry oxygen. There's sound science behind this. In 2006, researchers at Stanford published a study showing that, at a simulated altitude of 12,700 feet, Viagra improved the performance [snicker] of 10K cyclists by nearly 40 percent. In May of this year, at the Giro d'Italia, Italy's biggest bike race, a cyclist by the name of Andrew Moletta was suspended after authorities found syringes hidden in toothpaste tubes and 82 Viagra pills. Victor Conte, of BALCO fame, once boasted of having all his athletes on the stuff. (Given steroids' side effects, Viagra in this case may have been used for the purposes Bob Dole intended.) Statements like Conte's are why the University of Miami is currently investigating whether Viagra boosts performance at lower altitudes.

A few thoughts here. Number one: How badly must you want to win to suffer the lingering effects of one Viagra too many? Have none of these athletes seen Chris Rock's I Think I Love My Wife? The scene where even The Economist can't tamp down expectations? He had to go to the hospital for that, and doctors did something there that cannot be repeated in polite company. This scares off no one? Number two: Because the answer to that last question is no, and because WADA seems to be focusing its Viagra investigation on the spandex sports—cycling, cross country skiing, etc—how exactly do these athletes, you know, hide the evidence of doping? Number three, and let's just get real gritty here: If they are somehow hiding it, how painful is that? Surely that crosses out any gain from increased oxygen flow.

Marywood [and that's a snicker, too, now that we think about it] will complete its study next month. If the results are as WADA imagines, the agency will ban Viagra five months before the 2010 Winter Games. A shame for the rest of the athletes, as sex workers in Vancouver have planned a brothel.

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