The first part of this series can be found here.
The Façade of Sport vs. Inside of Sport
Elite sport is like that George Clooney doppelganger coworker you realize is less stimulating than a comparative study on lawn mowers as soon as he opens his mouth. If you just look at him during your coffee break, you can keep dreaming about him at night. If you drink your coffee with him, your life becomes a nightmare pretty fast.
In other words, there’s a deep divide between sports’ inner and outer beauty. Who are drug bans for? Are they for the spectator, who sees mostly the sports’ outer beauty and is subjected to its inner ugliness once in a while (like when Flo Jo dies in her sleep at age 38, when Plaxico Burress shoots himself in the leg or when Mitchell comes up with a report)? Or are drug bans for the athletes, whether the aspiring youths or the dedicated Olympians, so as to preserve the ideals they hold dear?
Elite sport as an occupation deviates widely from the appreciation of elite sport from a fan’s perspective. As fans we want to know that achievement in sport is hard, though not unhealthy. We want to know that, in an unfair world, there exists a realm where individual hard work and determination perfectly correlates with success. We don’t care to hear that “hard work and determination” really mean “hip replacement by age 37”. We want to know that athletes are a more driven, gifted, capable version of ourselves. And we see athletes as spinach-eating Popeyes, not serum-addicted Green Goblins. Of course, what we want to know, and what is really the case, are two different issues.
Let’s define this spirit of sport, look under the hood of this claim of athletics as a healthy enterprise, discuss how human inventions constantly change sporting practices, and examine the pressures athletes face to perform. In doing so, we get a clearer picture of just what is involved in this debate on performance enhancement; of just what is involved in this sport we obsess over.
Defining The Spirit of Sport
For the mere mortal, sport “fulfills a perpetual masculine wish: a state of total war without death or serious injury.”[i] The fellow Oxford students I heard screaming at the University club the other night; those losing sleep hours over their country’s abysmal football performances (view Daily Show’s British Senior Correspondent John Oliver for more on such a disposition), enjoy sport, and often solely from the spectator perspective. They identify with this relatively peaceful war. Their jingoism is aptly reified through 90-minute battles between muscular men who enjoy faking ACL injury as much as they like taking their shirts off.
Drug bans, according to the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), protect the spirit of sport. Sport is not just war. Sport is really a spiritual being in need of care, nurture, and a shitload of regulation (namely, 130$ per sample for EPO recombinant tests[ii] and fancy biological passports). Sport’s spirit embraces nice, rosy-cheeked values like fair play and honesty, health, excellence in performance, fun and joy, dedication and commitment, respect for the laws, community and solidarity, courage, and respect for self and other participants[iii]. The spirit of sport explains why athletes first enter a sport; first fall in love with one. The question is, does this same spirit keep them going fifteen years later, when they’ve made rather limiting life choices? In all fairness, I do believe that athletes embrace these values. Yet they get a whole lot of competition from much less noble ideals along the way.
What Health?
WADA’s “spirit of sport” definition, when applied to elite sport, is slightly hypocritical at times. Ever tried the Ironman? Ranked second in the worst thing one can do to one’s body after childbirth. And though events like the World Cup maintain the comforting illusion of such a spirit; one that is reinforced by everything from mind-numbing post-game interviews to burger advertisements, elite sport, for the participant, is often as far removed from such values as possible.
WADA partly bans performance enhancement drugs because their health risks to the athlete jeopardize the spirit of sport. Interestingly, it’s been demonstrated that more sports injuries occur each year than casualties incurred in all American wars combined (though W. Bush might have screwed up that stat circa 2001).[iv] Mark Sisson, a former anti-doping official in triathlon, has mentioned that the consequences of training at the highest level is the often the polar opposite of physical well being. “The definition of peak fitness means that you are constantly at or near a state of physical breakdown.” And this isn’t a new phenomenon. Prominent Ancient Greece Physician Claudius Galenus, good buddy of Hippocrates, described the lives of athletes as “similar to that of pigs, except for the fact that pigs do not work beyond measure or eat under force.”[v] To plagiarize Wikipedia:
‘Once, the ski-jumper Hans Georg Aschenbach said: “For every Olympic champion, there at least 350 invalids. There are gymnasts among the girls who have to wear corsets from the age of 18 because their spine and their ligaments have become so worn… There are young people so worn out by the intensive training that they come out of it mentally blank , which is even more painful than a deformed spine.’
We would like sport to be healthy. But it often becomes the opposite of healthy. If elite sport really were about a healthy lifestyle, perhaps less than 50% of Olympic runners would have answered “yes” when asked by Dr. Gabe Mirkin whether they would consume a “magic pill” that would both guarantee them Olympic gold and also kill them within the year”. (Read, also: anything by Dr. Andrew Pipe for an adequate picture of injuries in elite sport.)
People like these Olympic runners are our role models. And when it comes to our drug policies as safeguards for “health”, it’s okay for those models to be anorexic, but they just can’t take diuretics (from: Sally Jenkins, Washington Post). That makes sense.
If we’re going to solve any issue related to performance enhancement drug policy, we should decide whether we want to frame the question around those who participate, or around those who watch, clap, and buy foam fingers… although of course the answers we might find then might slow up the sales for such items.
Cozying up with Creativity
This saccharine spirit of sport, this hopelessly ironic quest for the healthy and enjoyable modus of Citius Altius Fortius, perhaps misses a key element, defined by Savulescu (also a participant in the Oxford Debate) in a brilliant journal article on doping in sports: creativity. Human sport is creative. And perhaps because of its popularity, sport has turned into some kind of weird arms race.
Two years from now, in London, the winner of almost any Olympic event will be the person (team) with a combination of genetic potential, training, psychology, network, equipment, money, and judgment. Finding the right balance will require creativity. Modern day elite athletes rely on a wealth of scientific advance and technology, not just on their determination and muscle fibers. Of course, we’d like to overlook this fact, until we decide to play a round of golf ourselves and get pissed off when that annoying guy in our foursome carries a driver the size of Russia.
Give Lance Armstrong the rusty, squeaking bicycle I commute with on daily basis. He’ll finish last. Give Federer the Walmart Tennis racket I purchased in ’04. He won’t make it past the first round. Give only one pair of skis to a world-class cross country skier. Same story. In fact, I was recently speaking with one such athlete, who mentioned how the Finnish national team prohibits anyone from entering its waxing premises before competitions. Why? Its experts hold secrets passed on from generation to generation, giving the athletes a “well-earned” advantage. In cross country skiing, the sport is not only an evaluation of whom has the strongest lung capacity or will to win, but of whom has the best supporting cast; the best skis, best waxing technique.
Examples run on and on. Engineers designed parabolic skis. Scientists at the University of Florida empirically tested Gatorade. Michael Phelps showed up with a polyurethane LZR racer suit. Biomechanics specialists showed how specific plyometric training could improve the performance of long distance runners. Vijay Singh used a golf psychologist to improve his swing. Ben Johnson juiced. Gene doping is on its way. In each case, creativity was applied to sport, individuals searching for a small advantage in this athletic arms race. This process is evidently not revealed to the outsider (most of the time), who only sees the end result.
For better or for worse, as in many other lucrative domains, science & technology have partly hijacked the mystical art of performance, transforming it into an expensive, precise, machine of logic and efficiency. The biochemistry and pharmacokinetics involved in drug development is only one facet of this phenomenon.
In placing bans on certain devices and drugs, governing bodies essentially try to balance conflicting values within sport in order to optimize it (for the spectator, for the TV contracts, sponsors, and um, for the athletes involved). This optimization isn’t perfect. Which is partly why FINA eventually banned the LZR racer swim suit, but why cross country skiers can carry up to 30 pairs of skis and tons of wax combinations to enhance ski glide on race day, or why athletes can’t use EPO, but can use hypoxic chambers at $7,000 a pop.
Human sport is more than just a genetic race for the fastest, or most skilled woman or man. It reaches far beyond the strictly Darwinian and into the world of human creativity. Creativity is why, as philosopher Peter Heinegg puts it, “the record-book, out of date as soon as published, shelters in its banal pages the myth of infinite perfection.” Creativity is why we keep coming back for more. Yet, interestingly, when it comes to drugs, we still want to believe that athletes are self reliant, solely responsible for their successes and failures, just like horses or dogs rely on their speed.
The Incentive Structure
Athletes work tirelessly to reach the top steps of the podium, to win championships, to shatter records. The charitable explanation for this, of course, is that athletes are disciplined individuals who love their sport and couldn’t live without it. These are individuals who are inhabited by the spirit of sport.
Beyond a certain level, athletes also depend on sport for their livelihoods, or struggle significantly to keep on following their dreams. As stated in an article on Olympians’ finances on CNN, “for every Shaun White and Lindsey Vonn, two gold medalists who have scored multi-million dollar endorsement deals, there are hundreds more who struggle with everyday jobs.” The same article mentions how Nicole Joraanstad, an Olympic curler, piled up over $150,000 in costs just to qualify for the Olympics. “Creativity” means there are increasing costs for keeping up with the competition. Case in point: in preparation for the Athens Olympics, Australia spent $547 million on sport funding. That’s around 32 million per gold medal won (from: Savulescu, BMJ). I could go on and on with financial figures, which would only further demonstrate that a) sport is costing more and more and requiring more and more infrastructure so that it is quickly losing its universality (if there was ever such a case for it), and b) the costs to pay for gaining any form of advantage in competition is almost always outweighed by the potential gains resulting from that advantage. This logic, among other things, explains why most doping in baseball occurs in the minor leagues.
Though I’m not chalking this up as sound justification to dope, understanding the pressures and incentives placed on athletes to perform explain why they would choose to do so. And understanding those pressures leads to a better understanding of just what sport we tirelessly cheer for. In the end, the divide between sport’s outside appearance and its inner working become evident when looking beyond mere performance, and into the process of reaching that performance, as well as the incentives and pressures for performing.
Tune back in tomorrow for some kind of a conclusion.
[i] Heinegg, P. (2003). Philosopher in the Playground: Notes on the Meaning of Sport. In J. Boxill, Sport Ethics: Anthology (p. 351). Malden: Blackwell Pub
[ii] Abbott, A. (2003). What price the Olympian ideal? Nature. Sept: 407; 124-7.
[iii] WADA. Sport Anti-Doping Code, Montreal. World Anti-Doping Agency, 2003: 3.
[iv] Michener, J. A. (1976). Sports in America. New-York: Random House.
[v] Mathias, Michael B. “The competing demands of sport and health: an essay on the history of ethics in sports medicine.” Clinics in Sports Medicine, 2004: 195-214.
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Ok, mais tu amènes des solutions ou tu chiales comme toujours…:P