The Moral Argument for Doping in Sports
nautil.us
nautil.us
I always thought, however, that the big issue with steroids was the role that athletes play in the lives of children and teenagers. It's really not okay for high school athletes to use steroids. I was under the impression that professional athletes using steroids influences budding athletes to use steroids both directly ("I can get to where Barry Bonds is by using steroids") and indirectly (feeling pressured to use PEDs in order to compete). I seem to remember this being a controversial topic in the news 10-15 years ago.
Steroid use in professional bodybuilding isn't as big of a deal as steroid use in professional sports. While part of that is attributable to the goals of those respective fields, another part is attributable to bodybuilders not being widespread role models in the way that baseball or basketball players are.
Tl;dr: Hiding information never makes people safer. If Barry Bonds published his training program and drug stack, nobody would ever be stupid enough to think that "I can get to where Barry Bonds is by using steroids"; instead it would prove that the only way to compete with Barry Bonds is to train your ass off.
Ask anyone with a lot of experience (20 years of usage) and he/she will tell you that it's not worth it! (unless there's a monetary incentive).
Elite athletics (15+ training sessions/week) is not healthy, and we do not want to make it even more unhealthy by allowing athletes to train even harder.
If everybody agrees that doping is ok, and it is the understanding of the participants that to compete you have to dope, then I'm fine with it.
To me, it's really about your relationship to the other competitors more than the horrors your actions may inflict on society.
We see something similar in academia. There are performance-enhancing drugs that academics can take to have greater periods of intense work, and out-compete their competitors. It's up to the academics to set the standard for what is acceptable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doping_at_the_Olympic_Games#Re...
Could it be simply part of a conservative response to drug-taking in the 1960's? Reefer madness? I don't know.
Please comment if you can find a source. If we know the original reasoning, then it would be good to critique it 50 years later.
Mark McGuire destroyed the home run record, and then it was discovered he was using juice. Would he have broken it either way? Maybe, we'll never know.
You can argue that baseball stadiums shape changes over time, bat technology changes, we learn more about nutrition and training, etc. and they're valid points. That should be how records are broken naturally. It diminishes the achievement, to me, when those before you did it naturally, and you did not.
Would lance have won that many tours, and in a row? Maybe, but now we'll never know, and its a record that may never be broken naturally. Yes, I realize its not actually an official record anymore.
How do I correctly attribute skill to a player I know is doping, or a sport that is full of doping? If we ever get to the point where sports radio is filled with discussions about "Well, this guy is really good but Jordan didn't have XZ-87 injected into his body so you know how can we compare them?" then I think the integrity of sports is simply dead. Maybe sports become something else and we are all fine with it but in my opinion doping destroys the integrity and spirit of sports and that is still the best argument against it.
This isn't a broad dictation, though. This is athlete governing agencies working to protect the "purity" of sport. Participating in those associations means you follow their rules: don't want to follow their rules? Don't join.
You're more than welcome to start a competitor to Union Cycliste Internationale and announce that doping in your sponsored events is allowed. But in this group, you're required to dope (to be competitive). And now you're back to effectively telling people what to do to their own bodies.
> It's really not okay for high school athletes to use steroids.
At what point do we transition from "not ok" to "people can do what they want to their own bodies"? Age 18? What about parents who authorize plastic surgery for their 16 year olds—can they authorize doping regimens, too?
So then we're back to standards and sports governing bodies. The National Federation of State High School Associations (NFHS) says "no steroids". NFL/NBA/etc. says "A-OK". What about NCAA?
We can draw the line that says, "steroids for professionals only", but that sets up a chicken-or-egg scenario. To play on a professional level, you have to dope, but to dope, you have to play on a professional level. How does one become a professional, then?
The average professional cycling or the average professional American football player is not wealthy and is not competing purely for the love of the sport. Rather, they are only moderately well-paid, not terribly likely to reach the true big time and working extremely hard just to stay in the game. Often they come from impoverished backgrounds and view sports as their way out (and often it isn't). Essentially, competition is their work. It's fairly morally repugnant to create a work-environment that impels someone to use dangerous drugs just to literally stay in the game. It's not as bad as the factory owner that dopes his workers with speed to improve production but it's headed in a similar exploitative direction.
Or, ignoring drugs, every professional boxer runs a risk of long term brain damage, yet they still choose to do it, despite most of them meeting your criteria of not being especially wealthy/ solely doing it for love of the sport.
When I was a teenager, I started training at a gym where several UFC fighters spoke openly with me about their use of steroids. And in the decade since then, I have experienced the pains of rigorous training and competition without PEDs, while also interacting with lots of grapplers who discussed how PEDs helped them.
None of them believed that the competitive advantage from steroids comes from the additional muscular strength they provide during a fight or a jiu-jitsu match. Instead, the steroids allowed them to train with a frequency and intensity that is virtually impossible for natural competitors.
This recuperative advantage is still "cheating," but it feels morally different in the sense that the athlete is enhancing his technique by training more, not using steroid-enabled strength to compensate for poor technique. (The same is not true of something like blood doping.)
I'm not arguing that PEDs should necessarily be permitted in athletic competition. That would be my preference, but I recognize there are colorable reasons why we should avoid glamorizing the practice in the eyes of teens. However, as a sportsman, I respect a competitor who is willing to risk his health in exchange for the chance to train as hard as humanly possible.
I feel strongly about matter, having competed in weightlifting, because of the recent influx of steroid apologists into the weightlifting community. The question of whether PEDs should be allowed is distinct from whether they are allowed.
A sport is an arbitrary collection of objectively determinable athletic trials. It doesn't really matter how they start. Two people want to see who is the "best" at something, so they compete.
Eventually there is an argument about who won. Alex thinks Bob has cheated, because Bob used a technique or technology that Alex thinks grants an unfair advantage.
So Alex and Bob agree to rules. These rules create the space of permissible actions in which the arbitrary trials take place. For example, for sprinting, the rules create a space in which driving a sports car is excluded.
Eventually a name is attached. What is the sport?
The sport is the rules. It follows that actions taken outside the rules, even if unobserved, are not part of that sport. Consider the sprinting example: if the stadium lights go out and I drive to the finish line in 5 seconds, did I win, given that nobody detected my action? No: I did not win. I was incorrectly observed to be first, but I did not win.
If you argue that it's based on the observation, it still requires rules against which the observation is applied. If instead you argue that there are no rules, then you do not have a defined athletic trial -- you can sprint, I can throw, and both of us claim to be the best pistol shooter at the end of the contest.
That is, sports is a positivist legal framework. There is no "real" sport outside of the rules. The rules are the sport. If you break them, even unobserved, then by definition you cannot win and have not won, even when you appeared to.
The nature of modern professional sports being what it is, this means that most winners are the 20-something-th placegetter. But there's a reason we have separate words for "truth", "honour" and "glory".
Is "Moneyball" cheating? Is playing for overall points rather than wins cheating (for series competitions, like racing)?
So when it comes to the drug issue, if the rules say "no testosterone levels over a certain degree" rather than "no drugs", then the apologist would say using drugs is within the rules, if it doesn't raise testosterone levels above that predetermined degree.
I don't agree, but it's difficult to say where one draws the line between poorly written rules and cheating.
self-Godwinning sophistry
1. Cheaters are going to cheat, and you can't catch everyone, so just allow cheating. ("So what the current system does is enable that, because it places constraints that are impossible to enforce.")
This is a bullshit argument. If something's not completely enforceable (which nothing is), then just forget it. Some people don't pay taxes: dissolve the IRS. Some people commit murder: murder should be legal. You have to draw the line somewhere. People will push or cross the line, you will catch some, and life goes on.
2. Doping in sports should be a test case for human enhancement.
This is a more reasonable argument. I'm not sure it's right, but reasonable people can discuss whether the intent of sport is "measuring personal accomplishment" and "test-bed for medical intervention".
Note that a parallel argument is happening in Formula One: should teams be given more leeway to build cars so innovation occurs as a result of competition.
The experience of powerlifting federations is that cheating will continue to happen in the tested versions of a sport. The cachet for winning "naturally" is higher.
There was an assumption that legal weed in Colorado would lead to more children using but data suggest the opposite happened. http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2014/08/07/pot-use-among...
"I am rubber, you are glue" is a good contender. "Such-and-such argument is the worst" is probably pretty high in the running, too.
You cannot escape the reality that if doping is allowed then doping is required.
No it's not.
Already there are men's and women's separate records. In some sports there are additional categories, like weight range. Also age groups.
Doping itself then isn't cheating, but rather competing, while doped, in an undoped category. Analogous as a man pretending to be a woman.