Jake Humphrey

Well, again, this is where I think you have to fall back on your own values.

This is the stuff that says, am I able to wake up in the morning and look at myself in the mirror knowing what I'm going to do?

And more importantly, when I put my head on the pillow at night, can I reflect on how I've behaved and still feel that I've been congruent to my values?

I think...

The conversation with James, and people, I really encourage them to tune in and listen to it.

When we speak to him about how do you stay hopeful having sort of immersed yourself in this world of cheats and people sort of blurring the lines,

The only real answer that he offers us is education.

Now, that's a bit of a cliche because we often say that education is the key to improving all situations.

But the essence of it is educating people about their values, what's important to them, how they want to be remembered.

We talk about there's plenty of athletes that have subsequently been found out later on and the shame, the stigma that sticks to them.

They talk about how it just wasn't worth it.

There's an interview with an Ironman champion who James went and interviewed for his book who admitted he was tempted by that decision of chasing shortcuts because he thought others were doing it.

And then when he got caught...

just held his hands up he made no excuses he didn't claim he'd been eating an excess of eggs he just said no no i was taking epo because i wanted to get to that number one spot on the podium and he talks about the like the social cost of that the shame the stigma that sticks to him long afterwards that like there's no shortcut that comes for free well we will hear from him in just a moment before we do i want to go back into the archives one final time

Yeah, but again, there's an interesting sort of dynamic that I think is worthy of us exploring here.

Like...

On the podcast, we often try and shine a light in the shadows rather than just necessarily fall into this binary way of if you're doping, you're bad, and if you do it clean, you're good.

I think when we understand the culture that so many people

people will often find themselves in, whether it's the comparison culture of convincing yourself that everyone else is on this, that for many years, it sounds like elite cycling had this sense of omerta, that everybody's cheating.

So if you're not going to join them, they're only going to beat you.