On Wednesday, Scott Blackmun . The public rationale: health problems. Blackmun had been recently diagnosed with prostate cancer.

But anyone following the news surrounding this beleaguered organization knows that this was nothing more than an inevitable public relations move. The organization has been taking heavy fire of late, for both its chronic mishandling of sex abuse scandals in several Olympic sports and for the lavish salaries and bonuses it hands out to employees, while leaving athletes to essentially fend for themselves. The ranks of critics calling for Blackmun’s resignation had only been growing. Parting ways with the face of the organization was a good move, but the USOC has yet to do anything serious enough to change its culture or signalÌęthat it’s committed to protecting American athletes. Doing that will require a complete reimagining of the entire structure of U.S. Olympic sports.

First, let’s review the tape. Top leadership of the USOC, as well as the leadership of USA Gymnastics, that sport’s governing body, knew in 2015 that team doctor Larry Nassar was suspected of sexually assaulting young female gymnasts. Yet both stayed quiet even as the F.B.I. began eyeing Nassar in July of that year. It was only the reporting of the Indianapolis Star that finally dragged Nasser out into the light. The paper’s exposed rampant abuse of athletes that included vaginal and anal penetration with his fingers, touching breasts, and rubbing genitals.Ìę. The shame of the USOC, and of Blackmun, can never be smoothed away.

But the ripples of shame go far beyond USOC headquarters. USA Gymnastics not only kept silent about Nassar. It possessed . When the parent of a gymnast accused Nassar, its then-president, Steve Penny, allegedly urged her to tell no one and allow the organization to alert authorities. It was the Boston Catholic church abuse scandal all over again. In late January, , far too late to help any of the victims.

The corruption doesn’t stop with the USOC or gymnastics, either. In 2014, two years before Nassar was exposed, this magazine published a searing story by Rachel Sturtz detailing how USA Swimming, that sport’s governing body, stymied sexual abuse victims and wove a culture of cover-up going back decades. Four years before that, ESPN ran an on its șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű the Lines show.

The rot underlying all these scandals is built into the structure of the so-called “Olympic movement,” a teetering edifice managed by the International Olympic Committee. Legally, the IOC is a non-profit, private organization based in Switzerland. In reality, it’s a giant sports entertainment production company that, like many businesses, would like to enforce a monopoly. It cares deeply about its brand. Stories highlighting rampant sexual abuse, doping scandals, and corrupt business practices damage thatÌębrand. And so, like all companies, the IOC engages in an enormous amount of ass-covering and revisionist history, everything from hiding the to the papering over of the biggest doping scandal since the days of East Germany—the state-sponsored cheating by Russia that was exposed at great personal risk by whistleblowers. What did those whistleblowers get for that courage? The IOC’s “Olympic Athletes from Russia” farce during the Pyeongchang games. That, naturally, was followed by Russia’s

The USOC is also a private organization, but it’s helpful to think of it more as the American subsidiary of the IOC. The American government, however, does not treat it like a business. With the 1978 (now called the Ted Stevens Olympic and Amateur Sports Act), Congress chartered the USOC and gave it monopoly powers. The act was a Cold War-era response to the Iron Curtain’s sports superiority. It appoints the USOC to “serve as the coordinating body for amateur athletic activity in the United States directly related to international amateur athletic competition”; to “recognize eligible amateur sports organizations as national governing bodies for any sport that is included on the program of the Olympic Games or the Pan-American Games”; and to “facilitate, through orderly and effective administrative procedures, the resolution of conflicts or disputes that involve any of its members and any amateur athlete, coach, trainer, manager, administrator, official, national governing body, or amateur sports organization
.”

The word “amateur” is now anachronistic——but the rules established by the act nonetheless still hold. If you’re an American athlete with elite international ambitions, or even elite national ambitions (outside of the NCAA), you have to deal with both the USOC and whatever national governing body the organization designates to rule over your sport, like USA Gymnastics or USA Swimming. That includes wearing whatever brand said governing body signs a lucrative deal with during Olympic competitions, even if it’s unlikely you’ll see much of that money or if it conflicts with the deal you’ve made with another sponsor that actually subsidizes your training.

The law also appears to allow the USOC and member governing bodies to investigate themselves. That’s how a tragedy on the scale of the Nassar abuse happens. Abused American athletes face a Catch-22. If you make noise, and enemies, inside USA Gymnastics, where will you go to compete in your sport? What happens to all the years of training, the money spent, the sacrifices made? So when the attorney from your governing body shoves a non-disclosure agreement under your nose—or your parents’ noses—and demands silence in exchange for a little cash under the threat of taking away your dream if you refuse, what do you do?

Replacing USOC’s chief executive does nothing to fix these problems. The solution? As : “Knock it down.” If the USOC really wants reform, it should give up itsÌęabsolute power and dissolve itself. Congress should also get out of the business of appointing sports monopolies and rescind the Ted Stevens Act. The U.S. competed in the Olympics from 1896 through 1976 without an institutionalized USOC or a sports act. We’ll be fine without them.

Such bold actions aren’t likely, of course, but smaller revolutions are possible. One excellent step has already been taken. A new for sports personnel to not report suspected sexual or other abuse. It also designates the United States Center for SafeSport, a creation of former Olympic swimmer Nancy Hogshead-Makar, as an independent investigator and clearing house for complaints.

The USOC could also ban non-disclosure agreements between individuals affiliated with clubs, governing bodies, and the USOC itself. It could give up its reliance on binding arbitration and allow American athletes to access the U.S. court system when disputes arise, as should be their right. That way, athletes would be better protected against retaliation from governing bodies for reporting suspected misbehavior.

In addition, USOC needs to put an end to its athlete ombudsman system, which is currently a sham. The ombudsman is , a clear conflict of interest. Instead, allow and encourage athletes to unionize with wholly independent unions to which they can go with suspicions of sexual assault or any other abuse. is already underway, but there could easily be a U.S.-only union for Olympic sports athletes, akin to the NFLPA or the MLBPA.

IOC and USOC leadership like to portray themselves as selfless do-gooders toiling for the sake of brotherhood through sports, . Chuck Wielgus, the former executive director of USA Swimming, who, abuse victims allege, acted to protect the organization and not the athletes, made more than $900,000 a year. . Those are the salaries of big business, putting the lie to the Olympic kumbaya pretense and underscoring yet again that athletes are “content” for a sports entertainment complex. Speed skaters, skiers, swimmers, runners, pole vaulters are part of Against that complex, they have too few rights and protections. Which is how girls can wind up in the hands of a Larry Nassar. Don’t expect any of that to change just because Scott Blackmun has resigned.

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Despite its long history of controversy and scandal, politics and hard-nosed business, the one thing that has always been true about the annual Tour de France is that it’s one of the toughest physical tests in all of sports. This year, the peleton will travel 3,360 kilometers, or about 2,087 miles, over three weeks in temperatures that push 90 degrees Fahrenheit. As the race winds down to its mostly ceremonial cruise through Paris, we wondered what exactly happens to Tour riders’ bodies during their push to the cork-popping.

Weight

Grand tour competitors weigh roughly between 155 and 165 pounds, ,Ìęwith time trial specialists typically weighing a bit more than climbers. Surprisingly, during the three weeks, racers actually retain most, if not all, of that weight. This is to their advantage, as losing weight could mean losing muscle, which means losing power. Modern teams stuff riders with calories—about 6,000 per day, according to the 2012 study. Specifically, they eat about 840 grams of carbohydrates, 200 grams of protein, and 158 grams of fat.

“Looking at the group we have at the moment, nobody has lost or gained any weight in nearly three weeks,” writes Nigel Mitchell, head of nutrition for Slipstream, which owns the Cannondale-Drapac team, via email from France. “Everybody is within a kilo and a half of how they started the race.”

In fact, some riders even gain weight early on in a tour “because of the total stressing nature of that kind of racing,” says Neal Henderson, who coaches . Henderson explained that stress and anxiety can release stress hormones like cortisol and cause inflammation, which can lead to fluid accumulation and weight gain.

The Immune System

On Tuesday, and both pulled out of the race due to illness, which is surprisingly common among riders. By the time they get to Paris, “I would say 30 or 40 percent of racers are sick with some type of upper respiratory tract infection,” says Allen Lim, an exercise physiologist, former consultant to Team Garmin, and founder of .

While it’s well known that , intense exercise over periods of several weeks drives down the blood’s germ-killing lymphocyte population, . The resulting state has been called “the open window” to infection.

Now throw in up to six hours of deep breathing while riding on crowded French streets (where racers inhale bits of diesel exhaust, dust, and cow dung particles), post-race handshakes, and living in close quarters with the team, and it’s almost a recipe for illness. “During the Tour,” Henderson recalled, “we used to say guys were only as strong as their guts.”

The Bones

Since cycling is a non-weight-bearing exercise, racing a grand tour is a little like living in space: Riders are working incredibly hard, but their bones are under very minimal stress. In the mid-1990s, the bone densities of weight lifters, boxers, and Tour de France riders and compared them with age-matched controls. They found that the weight lifters and boxers had overall higher bone densities than the controls, while the cyclists’ spines were 10 percent less dense, their hips 14 percent less dense, and their Ward’s triangle, at the neck of the femur, was 17 percent less dense.

During training, riders lift weights and run to build bone mineral density. But during the Tour, they are only riding, while sweating out enormous amounts of fluids that contain bone-building minerals like potassium and calcium.

Saddle Sores

The idea that a rider could be done in by a sore butt might seem ridiculous—but it happens. When Henderson was coaching Taylor Phinney during the 2013 Giro, Phinney had such a bad sore that . He even contemplated surgery. While most riders have built up a tough bottom, there’s just no way to replicate the Tour. Riders put greater loads, and for much longer durations, onto the saddle and their rear ends than they do at any other point. Any slight variation—say, adjusting posture to relieve a sore back—can alter the riding position just enough to wear a sore.

Hair follicles can also become infected, which is called folliculitis. A little pimple on a bum wouldn'tÌębother most of us, Lim said, but for a rider, “it could be devastating.”

The Mind

All races are stressful, especially for riders who make a living off the sport. But the Tour is often considered the most mentally and emotionally exhausting event in cyclingÌębecause of the increased media coverage and the crowds, as well as the intensity of the race. “You have 160 people riding at 30 miles an hour, and with one touch of the brakes, bad things can happen,” says Henderson. “People can go down. Bones can break. And that level of anxiety is sustained through the entire race.”

After stage six this year, , “A day like this for me is not so difficult on the body. It’s more the head, the stress of fighting for position, to avoid crashes or splits in the bunch
We’re going so fast, and everything happens much quicker than you can imagine. It’s very stressful for everybody.”

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On February 28, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) announced that respect for human rights will now be encoded into the , the document that binds the conduct of winning games bidders. The new contract language broadly addresses discrimination, abuse of human rights, fraud, and corruption. Host cities and, by implication, host nations must “protect and respect human rights and ensure any violation of human rights is remedied in a manner consistent with international agreements
.”

Human rights organizations have been battering the IOC for years over its neglect of such language. “We see the contract as a major step forward,” says Brendan Schwab, head of Uni World Athletes, an arm of , a Switzerland-based workers’ rights group umbrella. Uni World Athletes is part of a coalition called (SRA), which includes Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the International Trade Union Confederation, and other organizations that have been agitating for the explicit inclusion of human rights protections as part of the IOC’s criteria for host cities. The new contract will first apply to cities hoping to host the 2024 Summer Games, which will be announced in September.

But the development raises a serious question for those hoping Los Angeles will win the 2024 bid (): Would the United States pass the test?

In the context of the IOC’s dark human rights history, the case would seem to heavily favor the United States as a shining beacon of liberty. In 1935, despite the recent passage of Hitler’s racist Nuremberg Laws that year, the IOC insisted the 1936 Summer Games in Berlin go on as scheduled. Avery Brundage, then the chief of the American Olympic Committee, declared the movement to boycott the games a “.”

The IOC rewarded Brundage with an IOC seat after it expelled former U.S. Secretary of the Navy Ernest Jahncke, who favored a boycott. Despite being an anti-Semite, Brundage’s fellow members elevated him to lead the IOC in 1952. He ran it for 20 years. From 1980 to 2011, the IOC was led by , an unrepentant fascist and admirer of Spain’s murderous Generalissimo Francisco Franco.

The people (usually men) who manage the IOC, and the member sporting federations, also have a history of awarding the games and various world championship events to cities governed by repressive regimes. The 1980 Summer Games went to Moscow at a time when the Soviet Union was sending people to gulags and invading other countries. The 2008 Summer Olympics went to Beijing despite warnings of ongoing human rights violations. When the Chinese ignored their own pledges of press freedom, the .

The IOC has refused to criticize the forced dislocation of city residents whose homes are inconveniently located, like the who stood in the way of Olympics-related projects in Beijing and the who were forced out before last year’s Summer Games.

The same has proven true of other big international sporting events. FIFA’s insistence that soccer’s World Cup go to Qatar ignored the sheikdom’s lousy human rights record (not to mention its sizzling weather). The exploitation of laborers building the Qatari World Cup led Amnesty International to dub the event “.”

In light of the new rights language, however, recent actions and proposals by Donald Trump, especially his executive orders on immigration and travel to the United States, the L.A. bid could be endangered. After all, the new contract explicitly prohibits discrimination “with regard to a country or a person on grounds of race, colour, sex, sexual orientation, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status.” Both Trump and the U.S. Olympic Committee have responded by saying that the president supports the games coming to Los Angeles. This week, L.A. bid organizers insisted that Trump to accommodate the needs of the games.

In the reality of the games’ bidding contest, the human rights language likely won’t matter much for 2024. Other possible candidate cities backed out of the bidding after their citizens rejected the high cost and inconvenience of hosting. Only Los Angeles and Paris remain, so the IOC does not have a wide choice.

America could even be the lesser of two evils: France may soon elect as its president. Le Pen has campaigned for laws that many view as racist and xenophobic—including a tax on foreign workers, ousting Muslim dual citizens with “extremist views,” and favoring native French over foreigners for public services like welfare and housing. Los Angeles also represents a very lucrative media and advertising market for the IOC (which declined to be interviewed for this story, instead referring șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű to a press release).

Even without any of those considerations, the United States probably would pass the new litmus test. The contract seeks to incorporate by reference the , a 2011 document that lays out general principles for conducting business around the world. As is true of many heavily negotiated international guidelines, its language is vague. The Host City Contract language also defers to the national law of host countries. Saudi Arabia, for example, would not have to allow women to drive or attend events unaccompanied by a male relative if it hosted the Olympics.

“The new provisions are barely worth the paper they’re written on, unless there is some form of robust independent enforcement, which I doubt there will be,” says Adam Talbot, a doctoral researcher studying mega sporting events and human rights at the University of Brighton.

“Without any clear system for enforcing these rules, they will only be useful as a stick for activists to beat the IOC with,” Talbot says. “When human rights allegations are happening, activists like the SRA and people on the ground will be able to point to these rules and call on the IOC to act. But in terms of actual respect for human rights, this guarantees very little.”

Skeptics suggest that the IOC actually prefers to hold events in countries with repressive governments—the better to control dissent. Anti-games protests in potential host cities like Rome, Boston, and derailed those bids, and the IOC said nothing during the Sochi Winter Games when Russia stifled protest groups.

Schwab, though, is more optimistic. The IOC runs on the games’ commercial potential. Now that the language is part of the contract, major brands like Coke may find it harder not to respond to pressure from rights campaigners. Those brands, in turn, could pressure the IOC by cutting off its money lifeline.

Regardless of whether or not the United States would pass the implied human rights test in the contract, Trump’s actions and words could thwart L.A. promoters’ 2024 dreams anyway. Many of the IOC’s voting members come from countries with religious and political views that Trump has antagonized, from Mexico to Pakistan. Some may see a vote for Los Angeles as a vote for Trump. Especially if Le Pen loses the late April–early May French election, they might choose Paris instead.

Longtime șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű contributor Brian Alexander is the author of the new book .

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After enough pleading and promises to make a desperate boyfriend seem hard to get, the International Olympic Committee thought it had the final list of candidates that would compete to host the 2024 Summer Olympics: Paris, Rome, Hamburg, Budapest, and—a last-minute substitute for Boston—Los Angeles. But then, late last year, Hamburg said no thanks, leaving four organizing committees in four cities who say they really, really want the Games. So now we wait. And wait.Ìę

In the meantime, there will be two years of politicking, schmoozing, and wining and dining. (The IOC promises there won’t be any outright bribery this time, unlike with past Olympic beauty contests like Salt Lake City.) Then, two years from now, in September of 2017, IOC pooh-bahs will meet in Lima, Peru, and, to great fanfare, announce the lucky winner. There will be scenes of jubilation among the assembled campaign workers from the city that prevails.

The heartache of remorse will take a while to settle in.

Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti is absolutely sure there will be no heartache if L.A. ends up winning. He says he’s thrilled about the idea of subbing for Boston, whose citizens wisely balked at the enormous financial uncertainty of hosting. In what must be some sort of record for speedy government action, a motion was introduced before the L.A. city council to authorize Garcetti and council president Herb Wesson to . Before Angelenos could react, the city was off to the Olympic races. Exactly how, or if, residents there will have a say about the idea remains murky, but here’s hoping that, inspired by Boston’s and Hamburg’s good sense, Angelenos ultimately reject the Games, too. And while we’re at it, let’s forget about hosting the Olympics in the United States at all—not just in 2024, but forever.

This is not a call to boycott U.S. athletes’ participation in the Games. You want to go skiing on fake snow in a country that’s a human-rights nightmare? Go right ahead. But the U.S. should stop doing the IOC’s dirty work by hosting, because the Games are a losing proposition.

As the “competition” to host the 2022 Winter Olympics showed, citizens of the world, or at least those parts of the world in which citizens have a meaningful voice, have finally begun to catch on to the Olympic scam. The IOC begged Norway to host the 2022 games, but the Norwegians—people who invented ways to have fun on snow—rebuffed IOC entreaties, citing both the cost and outrageous IOC-member demands for rock-star treatment.Ìę

The IOC reacted like a petulant schoolboy. Christophe Dubi, executive director of the Olympic Games, scolded the entire nation, saying, “This is a missed opportunity for the city of Oslo and for all the people of Norway.” He blamed Norwegian politicians for accepting “untruths and factual inaccuracies” about the Games’ costs and the IOC’s demands.Ìę

That left only two countries that wanted to host: Kazakhstan and China. Both have lousy human-rights records, and neither has much of a winter-sports tradition. But both promised to do just about anything to host, including, in Beijing’s case, creating skiable slopes where there are neither ski slopes nor snow. Beijing won the Games and has already started . The IOC obviously thinks it can weather the political problems that will follow as the Chinese, who broke promises of greater freedoms for both visiting media and domestic citizens made before the 2008 Summer Olympics, inevitably do the same in 2022.Ìę

The Winter Games have always been a harder sell than the summer edition. More than 40 years ago, the IOC awarded the 1976 Winter Games to Denver. Organizers graciously offered U.S. taxpayers the chance to pay one-third the cost of the Games, with Colorado taxpayers absorbing much of the rest. But in a 1972 referendum, Colorado voters decided they had better things to do with their money and rejected the overture. The Games were moved to Innsbruck, Austria. Winter sports in Colorado seem to have survived.

The Summer Games have shown signs of sputtering, too. In the run-up to 1984, no cities submitted bids, and the Olympics seemed close to death. Then Los Angeles offered to host. The IOC was so grateful, it allowed L.A. organizers to Ìęthat called for the city to be responsible for any debt resulting from the Games. No other city has gotten such a break from the IOC, and the IOC says L.A. . That’s one reason why San Jose, California; Rochester, New York; Minneapolis; Nashville; San Diego; and even Chicago, the USOC’s choice to bid for a 2016 games in the U.S., declined to even consider one for 2024.

There are any number of squishy-sounding reasons why the U.S. ought to get out of the hosting business forever, many of them having to do with IOC corruption, moral blindness, and an absurd sense of entitlement. But lots of people seem willing to overlook all that. So let’s talk money instead.

“The Games overrun with 100 percent consistency. No other type of megaproject is this consistent regarding cost overrun,” concluded a 2012 study by Oxford University economists Brent Flyvbjerg and Allison Stewart. Think about that for a moment. Every Olympics, from 1960 through 2012—and that doesn’t even count the massive Sochi boondoggle of 2014—has run over budget. And not by just a little.Ìę

“With an average cost overrun in real terms of 179 percent—and 324 percent in nominal terms—overruns in the Games have historically been significantly larger than for other types of megaprojects, including infrastructure, construction, ICT, and dams,” the report notes. “The data thus show that for a city and nation to decide to host the Olympic Games is to take on one of the most financially risky types of megaproject that exists, something that many cities and nations have learned to their peril.”

Boston’s would-be organizers had to settle debts incurred by just trying to start a bid. They settled them by asking creditors to take a financial haircut, . More recently, , an L.A. city councilman pointed out that it would take about $2 billion just to buy and remediate the railÌęyard proposed as the location for the athletes’ village for the 2024 Summer Games.

The IOC insists that hosting is a huge honor for any city. The Games, it argues, lead to all sorts of wondrous . This isn’t true. Stephen Billings, an economics professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, who has studied the economic impact of hosting the Games, says that even when hosting isn’t an economic sinkhole, as it was for Montreal—which didn’t pay off its debt for the 1976 Summer Olympics until 30 years later—having an Olympics in your city is, at best, “a wash.”

Even that best-case scenario turns out to be bad for a city and country. When economists James Giesecke and John R. Madden of Monash University —with a view toward asking what would have happened if the money had been spent in other ways—they found that “in terms of measurable economic welfare, the Sydney Olympics came as a cost to Australians, reducing the present value of real private and public consumption by $2.1 billion.”

The only Olympics in modern times that officially didn’t lose money were the 1984 Summer Games in L.A. Despite cost overruns, chief organizer Peter Ueberroth sold the hell out of them to TV and corporate sponsors, and L.A. bragged that it made more than $200 million on the deal. But that’s creative accounting. When city organizers tally up costs versus income, they conveniently leave out the government’s—that is, taxpayers’—share. According to studies by the General Accounting Office (now called the Government Accountability Office, a nonpartisan research arm of Congress), in the case of Los Angeles, the federal government paid $78 million (in 1999 dollars), 11 percent of the Games’ total cost. So while the 1984 Games did finish in the black despite cost overruns, they got a free boost from federal taxpayers. Federal costs for subsequent Games soared to $609 million for the 1996 Summer Games in Atlanta and to $1.3 billion for the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Games.

Boston2024’s bid created a rosy picture to promote the idea of hosting, claiming that its budget “does not rely on a single tax dollar.” This is also untrue. A few pages later, that “all transportation and security costs are assumed to be covered by the United States federal government and have not been included per guidance from the USOC.”

In other words, tax dollars would have helped pay for the IOC’s Boston party, just as taxpayers have helped pay for every domestic Olympics. And by security they’re not talking about a few overtime cops.

Boston2024 would have required “at least” $1 billion, congressman Bill Keating told the Boston Globe. He was probably underestimating. London’s security costs alone were about $1.6 billion.

As then Utah Senator Bob Bennett said at the time of the Salt Lake Games, without U.S. taxpayer money, “no American city will ever host the Olympic Games again, because no American city can ever afford the kinds of things that are required.”

As another example, let’s say federal tax-dollar costs for security at the proposed 2024 L.A. games amount to $1.5 billion, a low estimate that doesn’t account for other costs incurred by a number of state and federal agencies, from the FAA to the State Department.

A drop in the budget bucket, you might say. Still, you could, for the same amount of money, install solar-energy packages on 100,000 Los Angeles homes. You could build 100 new elementary schools in Los Angeles County. You could do an awful lot to alleviate the homelessness problem that caused L.A. to Ìęin September.

If the IOC was some poor charity feeding hungry kids around the globe or curing malaria, maybe that kind of taxpayer subsidy could be justified. But the IOC isn’t the idealistic movement it pretends to be. It’s a huge multinational entertainment corporation, and a rich one at that.

In July, the IOC unveiled new deals, Ìęfor broadcast rights and sponsorships, made since the conclusion of the Sochi Games. NBC Ìęfor U.S. rights through 2032.

Olympic “partners” like Coke, Dow, GE, and McDonald’s pay about $200 million each for “exclusive global marketing rights and opportunities within a designated product or service category,” according to the IOC. They also get the full courtship experience from the host committee, including increasingly elaborate “marketing partner hospitality centers,” VIP retreats where companies and their executives can entertain guests and reward clients.

IOC chief Thomas Bach has issued what he calls Agenda 2020, promising reforms, transparency, sustainability, and financial help for hosting cities. But the IOC has been reforming itself for decades, notably after the Salt Lake City bribery scandal. And awarding the Winter Games to Beijing is hardly sustainable. The fact remains that cities willing to promise the moon to the IOC will continue to win hosting rights.

Cities prepared to do that are increasingly cities located in countries wishing to show off, while residents have little chance to object.

This, then, could be the future of the Olympics: insane locations where governments are happy to risk a sizable chunk of city and national treasure to host what amounts to a prepackaged reality show for TV. Don’t be surprised to see a Winter Games in a Middle Eastern sheikdom. Qatar has shown that it’s willing to ÌęFIFA’s World Cup, and Dubai has .

You might object by arguing that if countries like the U.S., Norway, Canada, Australia, and other democracies don’t offer to host, then we’ve left the IOC no choice but to accept offers from places like China.Ìę

Let them have it. Let them build white-elephant stadiums and Potemkin villages. We’ve got schools and bridges to raise, teachers to pay, parks to create and maintain. The United States doesn’t need the Olympics.

Brian Alexander () is a frequent contributor to șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű.

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The most serious scandal since the infamous East German doping program of the 1960s and 1970s exploded this morning when an investigation by an independent commission formed by the World Anti-Doping agency (WADA) announced it has found pervasive state-sponsored doping in Russia, and a conspiracy within the governing body for track and field to cover up instances of doping by Russian athletes.

Yet, despite the wealth of evidence, the repercussions to Russia might be slight, with only a short-term suspension of its track and field athletes from international competition. ÌęDuring a press conference to announce the findings, Richard Pound, a former head of WADA and a current International Olympic Committee member, outlined a Dorian Grey picture of Russian sports, especially its track and field program—the only sport the commission had a mandate to investigate.ÌęBut Irish reporter David Walsh spoke for many when he pressed Pound about what repercussions Russia might face. Though the commission recommends that the Russian track and field body be suspended from international competition, the report leaves open the door that quick “reform” would enable Russia to compete again, possiblyÌęin a few months.

According to the WADA code, if an individual athlete, like, say, Lance Armstrong (who Walsh pursued via his own investigations for years) did what Russia is accused of doing, he or she would be banned for life to say nothing of a two or four-year ban commonly handed down in doping conspiracy cases.Ìę“The IOC’s commercial values” exceeds its stated ethical sport values, Walsh said, referring to the importance of Russia to the Olympic games.

Pound pushed back, denying Walsh’s premise, but went on to say that compliance was the goal, not “eye-for-an-eye” punishment. He explicitly left the door open for Russia, and Russian track and field, to compete in Rio less than one year from now.ÌęAs for the individuals, mainly coaches and doping officials, implicated in the report, the commission recommends sporting bans up to life. WADA will investigate and pursue the cases if it agrees with the commission’s findings, which seems likely.

Other implications are enormous. While this investigation focused on Russia and track and field, suspicions have long swirled around Jamaica, Kenya, Ethiopia, and other countries and other sports. The headline attractions of the IOC’s Olympic Games are all now suspect, and the overall efficacy of the 15-year-old anti-doping system, a system put in place by international treaty, has been found severely inadequate in the face of organized doping.

Here, some details you need to know:

This Isn’t a Secret in Russia

Starting with the Russian federal security service, the FSB, and trickling down to individual coaches and athletes, Russian doping has been well-organized and well-known within athletics, Russia’s own anti-doping lab, Russia’s track and field federation, and the Russian ministry of sport, , released this morning, concludes. The program was allegedlyÌęenforced through intimidation, bribes, and payoffs.Ìę

One doping control officer told the commission that he had to sneak out a hotel window to deliver samples taken at a training facility in the town of Saransk. The police monitored the officer in Saransk and awaited the arrival of the officer’s train from Saransk to Moscow. So the officer “…left the hotel by the window during the night in order to take another train. (I left the light and the TV working in a room, so they could imagine I’m inside).” In retaliation, the officer’s mother received threatening phone calls.

The Cover-Up Runs Deep

Russia’s WADA-accredited doping lab in Moscow not only received direct instructions on the testing of samples, including covering up possible positive doping tests from the Russian Ministry of Sport, but the FSB embedded agents inside the lab itself. “Specifically,” the reports states, “Moscow laboratory personnel have reported, under confidentiality, regarding the continued presence of the Russian security (FSB). ‘[L]ast time in Sochi, we had some guys pretending to be engineers in the lab but actually they were from the federal security service; let’s call it the new KGB; FSB.’”

“The [Independent Commission] concludes,” the report states, “there was direct intimidation and interference by the Russian state with the Moscow laboratory operations.”Ìę

Allegations of Bribery

In a conversation secretly recorded by 800-meter runner YuliyaÌęStepanovaÌęwith Vladimir Mokhnev, a coach from the All Russia Athletics Federation, the country’s track and field governing body, Mokhenov describes a payoff.

MOKHNEV: In Russia catching on blood passport as well. Khaleyeva isÌęnow, again was caught. Did you know that? There were many of them.

STEPANOVA: She said that she is warned and not sanctioned; supposedly,Ìęit’s ok for the first time.

MOKHNEV: They paid a lot. I think they all paid about 50,000 rubles.

He later discussed how Russian officials learned to avoid trouble with the Athletes’’ Biological Passport, a record of physiological parameters meant to indicate doping, especially with substances like EPO, the hard-to-detect red blood cell booster.Ìę

MOKHNEV: Well, we passed it on the 30th day, we tried and we passed.ÌęParabolan
 With Kupina on Parabolan last year we passed doping controlÌęon the 15th day. Everyone was doing it on the 21st day and we did it on theÌę15th day. Well, I had to pay 7,000 rubles for the sample.

“In particular,” the commission report concludes, “this investigation has revealed that deceit, corruption, collusion and extortion were the rules by which ARAF played the doping game.”

IAAF Will Be Forced to Walk Back Denials

WADA was prompted to investigate the Russian system after the German TV network ARD released a devastating investigative report last December. The IAAF refuted the ARD report, with newly elected chief Sebstian Coe calling it an “attack” on the sport. Russia flatly denied it. It has already called these latest findings Ìę

But the sheer accumulation of nuggets uncovered by ARD, and now the independent commission make for damning reading.Ìę

Other highlights of the investigation, which was sparked not by WADA itself, but by a December 2014 report from the German TV network ARD, include the following:

1. There is a second doping lab in Moscow. The commission suspects this lab is used to analyze samples before the samples are forwarded to the official WADA accredited lab as a pre-screen to check for any positives.
2. Russian doping control officers routinely accept bribes from athletes and coaches.
3. The director of the official Moscow lab, Grigory Rodchenkov, was paid “indirectly” by an athlete to cover up a positive sample.Ìę
4. The Moscow lab destroyed 1,417 samples in an effort to stymie the commission’s investigation.
5. Russian athletes who should have ben banned wound up competing in the 2012 London Olympics. For example, race walker Olga Kaniskina won a silver medal in London in the 20 km walk.Ìę
6. Unnamed leaders of the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) have displayed “a consistent disregard for ethical bhavior.” They have engaged in “a conspiracy to conduct and conceal corrupt behavior.”Ìę

The commission did not name those leaders, though leaked information, now widely reported, points to former IAAF chief Lamine Diack and his son Papa Massatta Diack, a former IAAF marketing consultant for accepting payoffs to cover up positive tests. Lamine Diack has denied the accusations. The commission has forwarded its findings to French police and the international law enforcement body Interpol.Ìę

Ìę

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Is doggie love real? While it may seem obvious to you that your dog loves you, there’s been very little scientific data that dogs feel theÌęequivalent of love for their owners. Some have argued that humans, who crave love and social bonds, see what they want to see when they ascribe “love” to their dogs,Ìę.

Now, from a team of neuroscientists in Japan, comes compelling evidence, released today in the journal Science, that dogs really do love their owners.

In two different experiments, the team, led by Takefumi Kikusui of Azabu University, measured levels of a hormone called oxytocin in response to dogs and owners gazing into each others’ eyes.Ìę

Scientists have previously shown that touching between dogs and people increases oxytocin levels in both humans and their pets, but this new research expandsÌęon these findings and extendsÌęit to include wolves that were hand-raised by humans.

The experiments focused on eye gaze. In the first experiment, dogs and their owners were assigned to interact for 30Ìęminutes. Those dog-owner pairs that engaged in the most in eye contact showed the highest increases in urinary oxytocin levels in both partners. Touching also raised oxytocin levels.Ìę

When the experiment was repeated with wolf-owner pairs, the wolves rarely eye-gazed, and there was no correlation “with the oxytocin change ratio in either owners or wolves.”Ìę

Next, the scientists gathered 27 dog-owner volunteer pairs andÌęspritzed either oxytocin or saline into the dogs’Ìęnoses. Then they brought individual dogs into a room where a group of people, including the dog’s owner, sat silently under strict instructions not to interact with the dog at all. The dog could touch the ownerÌębut not vice-versa. Female dogs that received the oxytocin spray looked into their owner’s eyes far longer than dogs that received saline. Urinary oxytocin increased in the owner of each dog in response, even though they could not interact normally. (Male dogs did not show the same response, but more about thatÌębelow.)Ìę“Thus,” the authors wrote, “oxytocin administration enhances the gazing behavior of female dogs, which stimulates oxytocin secretion in their owners.”

What does all this mean?Ìę

Well, oxytocin is often oversold as the “love hormone,” but it’s just one of several neurochemicals, such as dopamine, at work in the complex brain circuitry of social bonding.ÌęAmong its functions, however, oxytocin can trigger a brain region called the nucleus accumbens. That’s the brain’s reward center, which getsÌęactivated when we eat something deliciousÌęor have sex.

Reward is a key part of social bonding. When a human mother gives birth, she receives a big hit of oxytocin. This helps milk flowÌębut also prompts her to look into her baby’s eyes. Looking into her baby’s eyes lowers the mother’sÌęanxiety and triggers a reward, so it feels goodÌęand makes her want to do it again and again. The baby looks back and also experiences a rise in oxytocinÌęand feels the reward. This helps forge mother-infant bonds.

Emory University professor Larry Young (with whom I wrote a book about love, sex, and bonding called ) isÌęone the world’s leading experts on these brain systems. HeÌębelieves that both human loveÌęand dog-owner love are rooted in the evolutionarily ancient mother-infant bonding mechanism.Ìę

“This is very cool,” Young said. “Now that they looked at wolves raised like dogs by humans, we see the wolves do not show this gazing, so they do not elicit this oxytocin response.” This may have to do with the distribution and numbers of oxytocin receptors on neurons in key brain regions, something Young showed that explained the difference between monogamous and nonmonogamous vole species.Ìę

“What that suggests is that during co-evolution of humans and dogs, we have selected for behaviors in dogs in which they gaze at us and make eye contact as a form of social communication,” Young said.

Young cautioned about making much of the fact that male dogs given intranasal oxytocin did not respond as powerfully as female dogs. Male dogs clearly bond with owners;Ìęthe lack of an effect could be due to sample sizeÌęor the fact that oxytocin has effects in males of other species, such as increased vigilance, that are somewhat different from females.

Evan MacLean, a senior research scientist at Duke UniversityÌęand co-director of the Duke Canine Cognition Center, who wrote a commentary on the Japanese research for Science, agreed. Both he and Young suggested that doggie bonds with people may be an example of neoteny, the retention of youthful traits in adult animals.

“There’s long been a theory that dogs are neotenous wolves,” MacLean said. “We see these traits in wolf puppies, but it disappears as they age. Dogs maintain some of these traits throughout their lives, like tail wagging. They have a baby-like temperament that does a lot to stimulate a parenting-like response.”Ìę

Dog’s permanent puppydom, speculated Young, may stand in counterpoint to human love losing its excitement. Over time, human lovers, like drug addicts who stop truly enjoying the drug, lose the thrill of being together. But since adult dogs retain their “puppyness,” they’re always excited to see us. Young’s dogs are just as happy to see him come home from work as they were when they first paired up.Ìę

“My dogs show me love more than my wife does!” he said, joking.

Wolves do not love us even when we raise them. But is this effect in dogs really love?Ìę

“Yes,” MacLean said. “I mean, to me, if you asked, do dogs love us? I say yes. And do we love dogs? Yes. If love is an enduring social bond between individuals, I think we have that with dogs.”Ìę

Kikisui agrees. He’s studied formerly abandoned adopted dogs that showed all the elements of PTSD despite receiving proper care and feeding. “This shows that breaking the bond caused impairments,” he stated in an email to șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű. “I personally think that dogs can love the owner.” Ìę

is a writer and author based in California and a frequent contributor to șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű magazine. His most recent book is , written with neuroscientist Larry Young.ÌęFollow him on Twitter at .

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Last year, when University of Brighton professor announced Sub2-Hrs,Ìęan organized effort to break the two-hour marathon barrierÌęwithin five years—a milestone akin to the four-minute mile or the ten-second 100 meters—a chorus of naysayers sprang to their feet in protest. Exercise physiologist Ross Tucker even called the effort “” on his sports science blog.

Any number of theories have been floated as to why the effort will fail, but all of them may be missing the point. The object of the exercise, according to team member , a professor of applied physiology at Southern Methodist University, is to assemble a team of experts in various segments of human performance including genetics, physiology, training, nutrition, medicine, biomechanics and see what happens.

The exact details of the Sub2-Hrs project aren't yet available. It's unknownÌęat this point, for example, if there will be some compound where athletes will train and live together under the supervision of clipboard-carrying scientists.ÌęWeyand said the plan isÌęto screen runnersÌęwho have dominated distance running (likely East Africans), for genetic variants that might predispose them to success, then apply the skills of other experts toward improving those elite athletes’ running efficiency, diet, avoiding injuries, and so on, so that one of them may break that two hour barrier within the next five years.

“There are a number of basic questions about why people run the way they do,” Weyand explained. “What movement patterns are best for performance? Are they the same patterns that prevent injuries? There is a sea of unanswered questions.”

The genetics of distance performance are also mysterious. Jason Moore, professor of genetics within the department of community and family health at Dartmouth Medical School, who is not affiliated with the Sub2Hrs effort, pointed out that while the science of gene analysis has progressed in leaps, scientists are still struggling with how to make sense of the resulting data flood. The biological chemistry of genes and gene activation is extremely complex and influenced heavily by environment, diet, exercise, and epigenetics (the degree to which genes are dialed up or down depending on such factors).

“We need computational, statistical tools to put all those layers together and that is the real barrier to understanding how pieces and parts work together to influence athletic performance,” Moore says. So he’s skeptical of the effort to screen for success.

He argued that even if a runner associated with the Sub2Hrs team should break the barrier within five years, the achievement wouldn’t prove anything. “Somebody will break the barrier naturally as a result of people trying to break it. In science we look for replication. One runner will not be enough for any scientists to believe” that the Sub2Hrs team’s techniques led directly to breaking the mark. If five or ten runners associated with the team did it, that would be a different story.

The Sub2Hrs organization doesn’t necessarily disagree with such analysis, or even the doubts of its critics. Rather, Weyand said, the critics may be looking at it in the wrong way.

While the team is serious about trying to break the record within the five-year deadline, the goal is a lot like the goal John F. Kennedy set of going to the moon in a decade. There wasn’t much point in going to the moon. Nobody was sure if it was possible, or even how to go about it. But saying you were going to do it hastened the technology and engineering that eventually made it happen, built the American space program, and spun out any number of useful innovations. Ìę

“You know, I think probably most people with a science background do not see [breaking the two-hour barrier] as a be all and end all, all right?” Weyand said. “So you broke the two-hour marathon. So what? Pat yourself on the back. What’s it good for?” The answer he said, is that the effort, and the collaborations it may build, could “answer questions of broader public good
. It’s hard to know what you do not know. The whole minimalist footwear movement raged because there were so many unanswered questions: Does running barefoot or in minimal shoes improve performance? The condition of muscles and tendons? There are no clear answers.”

So the point isn’t so much to break the two-hour mark as it is to try to break it and reap the rewards of the fallout that might result.

is a writer and author based in California and a frequent contributor to șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű magazine. His most recent book is , written with neuroscientist Larry Young.ÌęFollow him on Twitter at .

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Polly Crawford is in a happy snooze, utterly knocked out, her head lolling, her mouth an ambiguous smile, her chest rising and falling in slow rhythm as the industrial-noise whoosh and whir of a motor pumps air in and out of the enclosed pod she has crawled into—a ridiculous-looking contraption straight out of Woody Allen’s Sleeper.

Crawford, a petite, blond 44-year-old whose body is roped with the sinewy muscle of a triathlete, stepped off her bicycle 20 minutes ago after a long training ride. Now, as she tries to do at least two times a week, she has come to a Temecula, California, business park that serves as the headquarters for a tiny company called CVAC, an acronym for a fitness system called . For an hour she’ll sit inside this fiberglass egg, which is crammed into a back storage room and supervised by CVAC’s chief athletic officer, a former triathlete named Jim Chapman. Crawford has been doing this for the past 18 months, because she believes the pod, a super-rapid alternating-barometric-pressure chamber, improves her performance by giving her more endurance and shortening her recovery time. This makes her either deluded or canny.

Crawford swears by CVAC, but people swear by a lot of things. There’s always some new gizmo—offering electro-stimulation, whole-body vibration, infrasound, cryotherapy—that promises to ratchet us beyond our sad, quotidian limits. Often the companies selling these devices fail as time and trendiness pass and the machines are shown to provide only slight or nonexistent benefits. Sometimes promoters cynically tout miracles, knowing the devices are phony, and then, when the luster fades, they skip off with whatever profits they’ve made and start over again somewhere else.

If that was CVAC’s plan, it has flunked the execution. Not only are CVAC’s founders and employees not getting rich, sometimes they’re not getting paid. Despite some big publicity several years back, and the sale or lease of about 30 CVAC units to businesses and rich, hopeful early adopters, the company has had trouble just keeping the lights on. When the CEO, Allen Ruszkowski, first started working at CVAC 11 years ago, he had more than $1 million squirreled away, after a career in the medical-device industry. His net worth now is negative $500,000. His house was foreclosed on and auctioned off in July of 2014, and he worries about getting evicted from the condo he’s been living in, because he can’t pay the mortgage or association fees. He and his romantic partner, Mary Steinman, CVAC’s director of marketing communications, dumpster-dive for recyclables to sell for cash.

Chapman lives in nearby Escondido, in an RV parked on a property belonging to Susan Cooper, a former national- and world-champion time-trial cyclist who works as CVAC’s product manager for training and education. Chapman lost his house after he put his last nickel into the company to keep it afloat.

But the pod people are tantalized by declarations like Crawford’s that CVAC really does improve performance, and by some still-sketchy science that says she just might be right. They’re so convinced that their device is a boon to the health and fitness of humankind that they’ve become like Victorian missionaries knocked low by malaria who keep on proselytizing anyway. In the face of disaster, they’ll tell anybody who listens that the machine’s benefits extend far beyond making Polly Crawford go faster on a bike. “It would be immoral to abandon this,” Ruszkowski says.

They believe they’re on a quest to fulfill the life’s work of the pod’s inventor, Carl Linton. A friendly 65-year-old with gray, thinning hair, a paunch, and a limping gait, Linton is a largely self-educated philosopher-tinkerer given to expounding “Carl-isms”—nuggets encapsulating his esoteric worldview, a head-spinning mĂ©lange of the American Patriot movement, Hindu Vedas, Hermeticism, quantum physics, and music theory.

The pod is the essence of Carl-ism. Sounding like a parody of a California human-potential guru circa 1975, Linton claims that the pod is a harmonic tuner that aligns our bodies and minds to the pulse of the universe. “CVAC has to do with the way any living system expresses itself in the world,” he told me, “and that includes how it expresses itself in creation and creation expresses itself in the body.”

“As above, so below,” Linton likes to say, quoting a Hermetic slogan. “The small is the large, the large is the small. It’s a holographic universe. You can see everything at once. It is also possible to be everywhere at once. Your body is holographic. It’s quantum.”

Linton used to be an active part of the Patriot movement, but he left that behind years ago and moved forward with a few of the associated ideas—for example, he believes the United States is secretly governed under what he calls “martial-law rule.” Even with our broken system, he says, the pod can help. Not only will it give us health, but it will make us sane, so that we can “start thinking clearly and start solving problems, and what happens to the government then? It becomes a different world.”

Fine, shake your head and laugh. But leave room for the possibility that there’s more than Carl-speak happening inside the pod. That maybe, without fully understanding how, the true believers of CVAC have stumbled onto something real.

As Crawford naps in the pod, an external pump adjusts the barometric pressure inside, simulating increases and decreases in altitude. As the pressure goes down, the amount of breathable air available to her decreases, too. In this controlled environment, she’s taken through a range of altitudes, from sea level to 22,500 feet, with intermediate heights along the way. Then she’s taken down again, and back up, as a computer screen outside the pod charts peaks, plateaus, valleys, and sudden drops. The standard pod session last 20 minutes, but Crawford stays inside for an hour. The kinds of maladies that can afflict ascending and descending climbers aren’t in play, because the amount of time spent at each altitude is short.

Athletes have long used hypobaric chambers; as far back as 1922, British climbers tested themselves in an Oxford University pressure chamber while preparing for an Everest expedition. In 1966, Roger Bannister predicted in a New York Times essay that “more ruthless coaches may well attempt to use low-pressure chambers in order to acclimate or ‘train’ athletes artificially.”

[quote]In the summer of 2011, The Wall Street Journal reported that tennis star Novak Djokovic had been “using something truly weird: the CVAC pod.”[/quote]

Hypobaric chambers work by forcing beneficial adaptations. The reduced oxygen at higher altitudes—real or simulated—creates a state in humans called hypoxia, an oxygen debt. The body compensates by producing more erythropoietin (EPO), the hormone that stimulates production of red blood cells, releasing a hypoxia-inducible factor (HIF-1, which sparks vascularization) and causing other changes in the body that scientists are still trying to figure out.

The pod differs from a standard hypobaric chamber in its design and mode of operation. The typical stay inside a chamber lasts much longer, often an entire day, and usually the pressure doesn’t change while you’re in there. (Most athletes use chambers that are set to simulate conditions between 8,000 and 10,000 feet.) CVAC’s backers argue that it’s the constant and rapid pressure changes that account for the pod’s benefits.

As I watch Crawford sleep, Chapman is standing beside me, and I mention Novak Djokovic to him. Before I can complete my thought, Chapman quick-draws his smartphone and starts swiping across the screen to show me pictures of the Serbian tennis great sitting in the pod. Then he shows me the terrific seats Djokovic arranged for Chapman at the 2011 U.S. Open.

All this is tied in with a brief period of past glory: when Djokovic was publicly endorsing Carl Linton’s creation. Back in the summer of 2011, that Djokovic had been using “something truly weird: the CVAC pod.”

“I think it really helps—not with muscle but more with recovery after an exhausting set,” Djokovic told the newspaper. “It’s like a spaceship. It’s very interesting technology.”

The tale of Djokovic’s pod immersion spread quickly, and after years of frustration, CVAC readied itself for the limelight. Then Djokovic, sounding spooked, backtracked. He said he’d only used the pod a couple of times. Soon after the 2011 U.S. Open, , “I’m going to repeat it for the last time: It doesn’t have any influence on my success.” Reporters started debunking the pod—which you can lease for $150,000 over five years or buy outright for $129,000—as an expensive gimmick.

“Everyone is looking for Djokovic’s secret,” Benjamin Levine, a professor of medicine at University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, at the time. “I think every athlete is looking for an edge, but I don’t think you’ll find it with CVAC.”

CVAC’s critics, then and now, insist that the constant cycling between pressures, and the short duration inside the chamber, will not trigger the adaptations athletes are looking for. What’s more, the short-term hypoxia mimics sleep apnea, which can lead to cardiovascular disease and other problems.

When I tried my own session in a pod—one that sits in CVAC’s small reception area—I was mainly worried about throwing up. Years ago I was brought to my knees by altitude sickness in Peru, and even before Steinman closed the hatch I remembered the feeling and clenched the walkie-talkie that she’d handed me so we could communicate. She started me out with the tenderfoot package, used to test whether somebody can handle more advanced CVAC training. Aside from some agitated jaw wriggling and nostril holding to equalize the pressure in my ears, I didn’t feel too bad. It was like taking off—over and over again—in a passenger jet.

Ruszkowski is a handsome fellow of 60, silver haired, blue eyed, smooth skinned, looking every bit the successful businessman, so long as you don’t stare too closely at his worn shoes and ragged trouser cuffs. Right now he’s standing in the conference room of a San Diego Hyatt, getting ready to PowerPoint his way into the hearts of would-be investors. But the start time has come and gone, and it doesn’t look like many, or any, moneybags are among the dozen people seated around the long table. Most of them are muscled trainers and managers from the Sporting Club, a fancy gym adjacent to the hotel where CVAC has set up a pod for a trial run ($40 for a 20-minute session).

If Ruszkowski is fazed by the weak turnout, he hides it well. “We think CVAC is a super form of exercise,” he says enthusiastically. “Just look at what we did with Novak Djokovic!” Djokovic may have jilted the pod, but CVAC never misses an opportunity to claim credit for helping make him a star.

The man saying this is the same man who, when he first heard about the pod in 2003, thought it sounded like a scam. But, as a favor to a friend of the then CEO, a biotech entrepreneur named Helmut Loch, Ruszkowski visited a pod location and listened to all kinds of amazing statements about what it could do. There was no supporting data, so he shared some free marketing advice and went on his way. CVAC contacted him again and again, though, until he finally met with Linton personally and did a pod session.

The next day, he says, “it was like somebody had cleaned the windshield on my brain.” He went to the gym. The weight machines seemed easier. Ruszkowski’s partner, Steinman, was suffering from Sjögren’s syndrome, which can lead to painfully dry eyes. Linton put her in the pod, and according to both Steinman and Ruszkowski, her eyes began to irrigate again. They considered the possibility of a placebo effect but kept coming back for more sessions, until Ruszkowski finally bought into the company. CVAC, he told me, “ceased to be a business and turned into a mission.”

As Ruszkowski moves through his presentation, he tells us that the pod can clean out the lymph system, the body’s garbage dump, thanks to the repeated squeeze-and-release effect of changing air pressures. He attributes his baby-bottom complexion to CVAC. He talks about the piezoelectric effect and cell membranes.

When Carl Linton explains the pod to people, he prefers to play the role of swami, not salesman. We met one day in the office he calls his lab, across the freeway from CVAC headquarters. He told me how he created the pod’s pressure variations—there are more than a hundred—to work like musical scores.

“All creation has to do with the nature of music, of sound, and it’s a dance, because you are moving vibrations, pressure waves, all over the place,” he said. “These constantly changing waves are sensed through every pressure sensor in your body.”

Then he stared into my eyes and said: “Your face denotes that you understand a lot of Eastern philosophy.”

The only Eastern philosophy I know comes from a college professor’s forced march through the Upanishads, but Linton is well steeped in it. He’s spent decades doing “work” on himself—rebirthing, Vedic studies, spiritual questing, and constant perusal of science and technical magazines—and he has all the confidence of the autodidact.

The pod concept grew out of a more practical experience Linton had. He had trained as a respiratory therapist at a Virginia community college, and then, starting in 1984, he helped conduct a Georgetown University research project that tested whether exposing people to brief periods in a hypobaric chamber could help treat asthmatic patients. The technique didn’t appear to do much for their breathing, but participants generally said they felt better. Linton sensed that the treatments affected every system in the body, making it “more viable all the way around.”

Convinced that he’d made an important discovery, Linton launched what became CVAC, using $100,000 collected from various backers. He moved to San Jacinto, California, and, in an effort to gin up publicity, crossed the border to Tijuana, where he tried to turn nag racehorses into track champions inside a steel shipping container that he’d converted into a huge hypobaric chamber.

“They gave me the horses that were really bad, bleeders usually,” he recalled. “But the bleeders stopped bleeding. They got more wind. The ones that were really nervous and flighty got stronger and more focused.”

Having proven his theories to himself, Linton hired a fabricator to construct a crude, coffin-like fiberglass pod and set it up in his garage. He cruised gyms and cycling centers looking for human guinea pigs. Susan Cooper, the time-trial champ, was one of his first. She drove over to Linton’s house in 1996 and stepped into his machine.

“He had a pad from a patio chair to sit on, and you held an altimeter,” Cooper says. While you were inside, Linton sat outside, adjusting the air pressure with a hand valve. Cooper became a believer and feels certain that time in the pod was critical to her success on the bike. “I was on good nutrition and CVAC,” she says.

I’ve heard a lot of stories like Cooper’s. Crawford told me that, before CVAC, she “could climb with the guys and stay with them” but would eventually fall back near the top of hills. After CVAC, she said, “right out of the gate, within a few weeks, I was able to go the same speed and not get dropped and sometimes even pass people.”

Cyclists, endurance racers, wrestlers, and weight lifters have all told similar tales. But athlete testimonials are the wooden nickels of scientific evidence. Study after study, using everything from corn starch to sodium bicarbonate, has proven that if you tell a jock that something will make him stronger or faster or tougher, he’ll believe you and actually perform better.

Ruszkowski understands this, and to his credit, he admits that the company has very little data to support its claims. “We do have a number of theories,” he tells the members of his Hyatt audience.

He navigates to images of three academic papers from research groups that have tested the pod. A University of Hawaii experiment in test subjects, signifying acclimatization to altitude. A study at the University of California at San Diego in people suffering from a rare body-fat disorder called Decrum’s disease. A Stanford University study in middle-aged men at risk for metabolic disorder. These studies were very limited, with small numbers of people, and they say nothing about juicing up an athlete. But they do show that the pod does
 well, something.

That’s the thing about the pod. Something does indeed seem to happen when people use it, but despite Linton’s hand waving, nobody, including CVAC, knows exactly what. There are, however, hints from ongoing research into the effects of hypobaric hypoxia.

Hypoxia by itself isn’t really mysterious. Runners and cyclists sleep in tents that mimic the low oxygen levels of high altitude, or use masks to deliver hypoxia-inducing air mixes, and they produce more EPO as a result. All these devices ignore the role of pressure, and when scientists talk about what that role might be, they can start sounding a little like Linton.

“Hypobaric is different from the reduced-breathing devices and gas mixtures,” says lieutenant colonel Ted Meeuwsen, a researcher with the Dutch air force and one of the world’s leading experts on the physiological effects of high altitude. “We think, my scientific colleagues all over the world, that atmospheric pressure does a lot in the body.”

[quote]Something does indeed seem to happen when people use the pod, but despite Carl Linton's hand waving, nobody, including CVAC, knows exactly what.[/quote]

Frank Powell, a professor at the UC San Diego Department of Medicine, who studies hypoxia’s effects, says that exposure leads to “a whole range of responses, from the whole body, reflexes down to the cellular level, and changes in gene expression.”

Experiments in Spain done by professor Gines Viscor of the University of Barcelona have shown that four hours of daily hypobaric hypoxia , and that passive, intermittent hypobaric hypoxia has a protective cardio effect.

Meeuwsen and colleagues put Dutch endurance athletes into a hypobaric chamber for short periods each day for a year, then observed the effects. “What we saw in our European runners,” he says, “is that having them do consecutive days inside the chamber led to improvements that were ridiculous.”

So hypobaric hypoxia does appear to improve athletic performance, just as CVAC says, but none of this research involved the pod, and the experts, especially Viscor, are skeptical of CVAC’s theories. They all acknowledge, however, that science is just beginning to understand how intermittent hypobaric hypoxia works.

For example, while the post-Djokovic critics worried that the pod might mimic sleep apnea, new research has shown that the same kind of short-term, cycling hypoxia can improve walking endurance and speed in people who have suffered spinal-cord injuries. “Intermittent [hypobaric hypoxia] is at a crossroads in our research,” UC San Diego’s Powell says. “Now we’re saying, ‘Well, there may be some good.’ ”

“I can imagine [CVAC] activating signaling pathways, turning off and on different genes. That is scientifically believable to me,” Powell adds. “I cannot tell you how it happens, but we do have clues enough to make it believable.”

Wrapping up his hotel presentation, Ruszkowski almost pleads with his audience. “We don’t have enough units to do research,” he says. CVAC is stuck in a frustrating situation. It needs to finance real studies to attract investors, but it can’t do those studies until it attracts investors.

So he asks his listeners to take the same leap of faith he took. Concussions! Everybody’s been reading about football concussions. Well, there was a study by a guy, and he found that high schoolers playing at higher elevations had fewer concussions. “So you might be seeing CVAC pods on the sidelines of NFL games!”

CVAC is, he promises, “a multi-billion-dollar opportunity.” The personal trainers nod their heads. They, at least, seem convinced.

One day, as I sit at a small, crowded table in a cubby of an office with Linton, his wife, Jean, and daughter, Stacy (who both work for CVAC, also often without pay), Steinman, Chapman, and Ruszkowski, I can’t help rooting for them all. There’s no Plan B: either the pod succeeds, or they all start diving into dumpsters. As disembodied voices of other CVAC team members echo over the speakerphone during the weekly conference call, it’s clear that they’ve learned to live on Ruszkowski’s boundless optimism.

The Seattle Mariners might be interested in looking at a pod. A doctor might try to place a pod in a diabetes treatment center. A retired MMA fighter named Jim Savage might buy one.

In their times of need, CVAC employees sometimes find themselves dealing with dicey operators. When Linton and I climbed into a company pickup for the short drive to CVAC’s offices from his lab, I mentioned a Chicago-area chain of weight-loss centers that promote the pod as a slimming device.

“Oh geez, I know,” he said, clucking his tongue with disapproval.

I mentioned the Beverly Hills Rejuvenation Center, an anti-aging hormone mill where Mel Gibson supposedly uses a pod. The center says the pod creates “changes that one could experience through weeks of conditioning through strategically planned runs or other types of workouts, but the CVAC allows for this conditioning to take place with no exertion necessary.” CVAC specifically says the pod will not replace exercise.

Linton looked at me a little sheepishly, as if to ask what I expected CVAC to do when paying customers show up with money to lease a unit. “Sometimes we get desperate,” he said.

That worries Karen Herbst, a University of Arizona endocrinologist who conducted the Decrum’s pain study and who now serves on CVAC’s scientific advisory board. She’s convinced the pod works, but she told me: “This is such a novel technology that you’ve got a high risk for fitting in with voodoo and having people think we’re all crackpots.”

CVAC faithful deeply believe they have seen results, but until somebody performs experiments, they’ll have to rely on Ruszkowski’s cheerleading. In the conference call, he tells the troops about a guy who knows a guy who’s an angel investor in New York.

Also, he says, he attended a big biotech convention in San Diego recently and engaged with some promising prospects. When he mentioned that the pod might affect an enzyme called nNOS, a hot topic of recent research, French scientists seemed very interested. He met a pharmaceutical-industry consultant at a cocktail party. When Ruszkowski said that the pod might increase the production of mitochondria in cells, the man’s “body language changed completely.”

About a month after the conference call, Ruszkowski will send an e-mail to me. “Our investor prospects continue to be promising,” he’ll write. “But no money yet. Reportedly, at least one is waiting to see if the NFL funds research regarding the CVAC process.”

You never know.

After the meeting, as I’m leaving CVAC, I try to find Ruszkowski to say goodbye. He’s in the pod in the reception area. He’ll go dumpster-diving for cans and bottles later, but as I wave at him through the pod window he’s smiling, and his skin is perfect.

Brian Alexander () writes frequently for șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű about the science of human performance.

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Has the charity race craze—all those walks, runs, rides, and mud runs done to raise money for good causes—begun to fizzle? The numbers for 2014 aren’t in yet, but a survey of the top 30 programs showed a total drop of $44.5 million in 2013.

Make no mistake. Despite the declines, charity races and endurance events are still big business. In 2013, the top ten powerhouses affiliating with, or holding, such events raised more than $1 billion, led by the American Cancer Society’s at $380 million, followed by the Susan G. Komen for the Cure’s at almost $107 million, according to Peer-to-Peer Professional Forum. But six of those top ten events saw income declines, continuing a trend despite the improving economy.

Industry pros say the overall participation rates are flat or down only very slightly. So what accounts for the decline in total revenues? It may be that newer, jazzier events are cannibalizing participants from the older, established pioneers. Three day walks are out, mud runs are in.

“People don’t want to do a 5K,” says Tim Brockman, CEO and founder of , an event production company that works with charities, including Komen and the AIDS Healthcare Foundation. “They want to go to a neon disco blacklight 5K at night, and the vampire run, and an undie 500.” Events like the Komen three-day walk helped pioneer the business, Brockman says, but many younger people—the ones with extra income and the drive to do something active for charity—don’t want to spend that much time out on the course. “They want to do it on a Saturday morning. It’s more about instant gratification.”

Brockman’s company has seen growth in a new 5K mud run event it has operated with the Multiple Sclerosis Society called . The MuckFests ran in ten cities and drew just over 30,000 participants in 2014. The company has added an eleventh city for 2015.

Events like MuckFest are contributing to the ’s declining participation numbers, says Amy Boulas, the JDRF’s National Walk Director. “We did not have that competition before,” she says. “And the younger generation says ‘A walk’s great. I’ll do it once. But it’s kinda boring and lame.’”

The silver lining for walks, however, is that walkers may be more dedicated to the actual cause, and be somewhat older and therefore have more money, and possibly time, to donate, Boulas says. Her retention rate, or the numbers of people who do a walk and then make the charity part of their life, is pretty good, though exact numbers were not given. “Anybody can do it,” she explained of the walks. “There are not a lot of barriers to entry. What I need to do as a fundraiser is ensure my organization has another way to engage you after you have done the walk for two or three years.”

Toward that end, Boulas is exploring so-called “customized” endurance adventures in which smaller groups of people can do many kinds of events, from kayaking to canal skating. “You’ve got to stay relevant the audience,” she said. “And yeah, it’s the younger generation. What do they want and expect? They say ‘What appeals to us?’”

, a charity that funds cleft palate surgeries around the world, has taken a slightly different approach to fundraising innovation. Instead of focusing on a short, sweet event like a morning mud run, or an array of different adventures like JDRF, they’re making charity racing a VIP lifestyle.

Smile Train has , paying a fee to the race to be the exclusive charity beneficiary (except for the Ironman Foundation itself). According to Sarah Coulam, senior manager of athletics for Smile Train, in the three years since initiating the partnership, the gross dollar amount raised has grown. In 2013, Smile Train grossed $425,000. This past year, it grossed over $800,000 thanks to the charity’s unique customer service practice: treating donors like Vegas high rollers. “Your job as the charity is to give them that extra VIP experience,” she said. “That’s why some [charities] are successful and some struggle.”

Smile Train engages its Ironman racers for nearly a year before the event by hosting both race training seminars and fund raising plans on the website “so that every day they are thinking about your organization. They literally bike, swim, run, eat your organization.”

As the race approaches, Smile Train triathletes don’t just get shorts and a T-shirt. The charity hosts webinars with the race director, VIP tours of the course with Ironman staff—including racers’ family and friends, who are shown where the best spectator spots are located—an on-course training camp, and a post-race party. “We have to be ahead of the curve to figure out what motivates people and how to get people to sign up and believe in the program,” Coulam says. If that means being catered to like Kimye at a Vegas hotspot, so be it.

is a writer and author based in California and a frequent contributor to șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű magazine. His most recent book is , written with neuroscientist Larry Young.ÌęFollow him on Twitter at .

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ÌęA few days ago, Saturday, October 25, Roger Ackerman, a 68-year-old triathlete from Georgia, in Wilmington, North Carolina.

The cause of Ackerman’s death looked like a heart attack. Though he had been medically cleared to race, and was in good shape, he did have signs of past heart disease, including a stent. So, probably, it was indeed a heart attack.

But it’s also possible it just looked like a heart attack, but was actually rooted in pulmonary edema—fluid accumulation in the lungs that can prove lethal if unchecked, says . Edema can reduce the oxygen available to the body, which can lead to heart damage thus elevating markers used to diagnose a heart attack.

In recent years, triathlon race organizers have been worried that there’s something uniquely risky about the swim portion of races. From 2003 through 2011, 45 people died during races, 31 of them in the swim leg. Typically, the cause is linked to the heart, but David MacIver, a cardiologist at Musgrove Park Hospital in the United Kingdom, believes at least some of these cases are the result of what’s become known as swimming-induced pulmonary edema (SIPE) and that SIPE may be much more common than once thought. Endurance swimming, paradoxically by very fit people, appears to present a set of conditions ripe for just this series of events.

There have been a number of SIPE reports over the past decade that back up MacIver’s and Bates’ suggestion. For example, during a training exercise, young Israeli special forces soldiers swam 2.4 kilometers. , edema. Unfortunately, nobody is sure just why this happens.

But a proposes a mechanism.

MacIver and his team hypothesized that the pumping efficiencies of the left and right sides of the heart become unbalanced under the conditions of swimming in a triathlon. Both the left and right sides can be perfectly healthy, even highly efficient in a triathlete. The right side pump accepts blood from the body, then sends it to the lungs to be oxygenated. The left side pump accepts it back from the lungs and pumps it through the body.

Swimming in a triathlon can throw this balance out of whack. First, there’s extreme exertion, which raises blood pressure. That may not be a problem for most athletes, but in chilly water, blood and its fluid parts, like plasma, are drawn from the limbs and into the core, raising core blood pressure. MacIver also suggested that a tight wetsuit could further restrict blood vessels and raise pressure. Now the left side of the heart would have to pump even harder to keep up with the volume put out by the right.

“We then have a situation where the [right] pump is exceeding the [left] pump’s output and pulmonary edema develops” because the excess fluid leaks into the lungs.

Bates suggested that this may indeed occur in some cases but might not be necessary for pulmonary edema to develop in a swimming triathlete.

The blood vessels in our muscles can expand with exercise, but not break because the muscle tissue gives them structural support. But the lungs are on what Bates called “a low-pressure circuit.” Lung blood pressure has to be low because in the alveoli, where carbon dioxide and oxygen are exchanged, the interface between capillaries and alveoli cell membranes is only two membranes thick, less than 1 micron. (The width of a human hair is roughly 75 to 100 microns.) Too much pressure could burst the tiny vessels and leak blood and fluid into the lungs’ air spaces.

Since core blood pressure is already elevated by being in chilly water, piling on the hard work of swimming can be too much for that fragile system. Even under normal conditions a little fluid leaks into our lungs, Bates explained, but it’s cleared by the lymph system—which relies on ventilation—and we never notice it. Since swimmers are prone, with their faces in the water, and take longer intervals between breaths, they can’t ventilate like a runner. That makes the lymph system less efficient. Hence, edema.

“There are no good signs” somebody might be susceptible to SIPE, she said, “until it happens. It happens in people who are very fit, not just swimming in a pool, but high level athletes or scuba divers” who are exposed to far greater pressures even if they aren’t breathing as hard.

Existing heart and blood pressure problems might be risk factors. Some have suggested that if it happens once, an athlete is more likely to have it happen again, but that’s mostly a guess, too. MacIver listed warning signs of edema, like frothy or pink sputum and excessive breathlessness out of proportion with the normal heavy breathing of intense exercise. ÌęÌęÌęÌę

If an athlete experiences any of those symptoms, of course, the thing to do is stop and ask for help.ÌęBoth of the cases MacIver described in his study ended well because the swimmers received treatment and observation right away.Ìę

Because nobody knows exactly how often it happens, it makes studying and preventing SIPE difficult. But even if a small minority suffer it, the raw numbers can add up. As of 2013, USA Triathlon registered 174,787 members. If just one percent of them were to suffer swimming-induced pulmonary edema, that would be 1,747 people, though only a fraction of the cases may prove to be deadly.

While there’s not much anybody can do to prevent it, the phenomenon should be one more incentive for race organizers to beef up monitoring, safety protocols, and deploy rescue boats that can spot a swimmer in distress.

is a writer and author based in California. A frequent contributor to NBCNews and șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű magazine, his work has appeared in The New York Times, The New York Times magazine, Wired, Esquire, The Los Angeles Times magazine, and many others. His most recent book is , written with neuroscientist Larry Young. Follow him on Twitter at

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