Oh, Per

The great Swedish cross-country racer Per Elofsson announced his long-pending retirement this week. Only 28, Eloffson leaves elite XC racing with 2 overall World Cup titles, 10 individual World Cup wins, 3 World Championship medals (all gold), and a bronze Olympic medal from the 2002 Salt Lake City games, so it's a sad day for the sport.

Making it all the sadder is why Elofsson has hung up his skis: as a side effect of unchecked technological innovation in the form of blood doping. Elofsson trained himself to exhaustion after being beaten badly by the German/Spaniard racer Johann Muhlegg at the Salt Lake games - where it turned out Muhlegg was doping. Muhlegg was eventually stripped of his three Olympic golds, but as the story goes, in trying to keep up Elofsson trained so hard - three times a day, including race days when the race itself was just another workout - that he took his body beyond the point of recovery. The 30km race in 2002 Games was particularly destructive of Elofsson's abilities: heavily doped with a blood agent that enabled him to race at the high altitude, Muhlegg destroyed the field, winning by more than two minutes. Elofsson simply dropped out of the race, and never really competed at a high level again. (Muhlegg bizarrely claims that he was helped in his victories by extraterrestrial beings and that he had nothing to do with Elofsson's retirement.)

This angle throws harsh light on international endurance sport. While it's true that dopers like Muhlegg or, in cycling, Richard Virenque, do often get caught, in the meantime the clean competitors can only intensify their training and risk permanently ruining their bodies. As the technological flip side of better equipment (lighter, more aerodynamic bikes or skis with unusual flexes and bases), doping is a hazard and a horror that illustrates as well as RIAA zealotry or nuclear proliferation the difficult necessity of managing technological change.