Category Archives: sports doping

Sports justice and King Solomon

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Of the 156 golfers entered in last week’s PGA championship tournament, only one—53-year-old former champ John Daly, was permitted to ride an electric cart to traverse the hilly 7,459-yard (4.2-mile) course. Because, the PGA’s American with Disabilities Act committee ruled, Daly has an arthritic knee.

Was that fair?

“Well,” 15-time major tournament champion Tiger Woods said, “I walked on a broken leg, so….” Woods was referring to the 2008 U.S. Open, which he won while playing with a stress fracture in his leg and a torn knee ligament.

Given that a core principle of sports is the so-called level playing field—theoretically a pure meritocracy, all competitors held to the same standards—there are some tricky dilemmas that are not so easily dealt with. Try this one:

Because two-time Olympic women’s 800-meter champion Caster Semenya of South Africa has a rare disorder of sexual development that produces high naturally-occurring levels of testosterone, she has been ruled ineligible in women’s events from 400 meters to a mile.

The international Court of Arbitration for Sport determined that Semenya’s condition provides a significant advantage in speed and endurance. And its not-so-great compromise is that Semenya may compete against men or in intersex categories not obviously available. Or she—and the tiny number of women with her condition—must reduce her testosterone levels either with drugs or surgery. (She is allowed to compete against women in other distances and has entered a 3,000-meter race at Stanford University next month.)

Not fair, Semenya said.

“Discriminatory,” the court in fact admitted. But “necessary, reasonable and proportionate” as a means of being fair to her female competitors.

All right: Define “fair.” Sameness? (Must Semenya have the same XX chromosome makeup as the female majority to be included in that group?) Deservedness? (Was John Daly entitled to special consideration because of his bad wheel?)

How about need?

In 2007, Oscar Pistorius of South Africa argued he should not have been excluded from running 400-meter Olympic qualifying events just because he had no legs. A double-amputee, Pistorius was producing times just a tick slower than the best able-bodied athletes in the world by using carbon-fiber artificial legs. Before he eventually was cleared for Olympic competition, there actually was some concern that Pistorius’ spring-like prostheses gave him an edge over runners with real legs.

Was that a worry about sore-loser complaints? Or the reasonable anxiety of well-meaning fairness-doctrine guardians so often confronted with performance-enhancing drugs, doctored equipment and other dastardly fudging?

For the equity police, there are no easy answers. Even well-intentioned drug testing—which has been used in Olympic sports for a half-century but came much, much later to American football, baseball and basketball pros—can only monitor chemistry. Not morality. What about doping sabotage? Inadvertent ingestion of a banned substance? Imperfect science?

“It’s a deep philosophical question,” swimming official John Leonard told me years ago. “Maybe we should say, ‘The hell with it. Let them use what they want and let’s just compete.’ But that’s not sport. That’s war. When you use any means available to win, that’s war. When you have rules that you agree to, to make things as equitable as possible, that’s sport.”

Still, “as equitable as possible” might not cover all aspects of genetics. Given all the gray areas, the incalculable bits of individuality, can even sincere attempts at sports justice truly balance the scales?

Julian Savulescu, a biomedical ethics professor based in Australia, posted an online proposal suggesting that, since Caster Semenya’s testosterone levels were natural and not the result of attempted cheating, she should remain eligible and her competitors should be allowed to add synthetic testosterone to “reduce any advantage Semenya may have.”

Problem solved. Cut the baby in half. (And golf carts for all.)

Why the Al Jazeera report on doping is not shocking

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peyton

This is not meant to cast aspersions on Peyton Manning or any of the other prominent athletes implicated for obtaining banned performance-enhancing substances in the recent Al Jazeera report. (Those named all denied the allegations, and two have filed defamation suits.) And this certainly isn’t intended to condone doping in sports.

But a matter-of-fact reaction to the Al Jazeera piece is to recall a 40-year-old declaration by two-time Olympic weightlifter Mark Cameron. It was around 1976 when Cameron suggested that if his fellow competitors were told that eating scouring pads would make them stronger, there would not be a clean pot within miles of the gym.

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About that time, on an assignment to cover the U.S. Olympic track and field trials, I was so bombarded with heavy hints of widespread doping that I began to wonder if it was possible for anyone to qualify for the Olympics without a prescription. In the weight events, particularly, American athletes were claiming that virtually all of the top international competitors were engaging in prohibited chemical activity. And so they must as well. Discus thrower Jay Silvester, who had won a silver medal in the previous Games, estimated that “99 to 100 percent of the world-class weightmen use steroids.”

When asked directly if he was in that category, Silvester said, “No comment.” The discus winner at those trials, Mac Wilkins, responded to the same question with this wink-and-nod quote: “Aren’t steroids supposedly illegal?”

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Some things are a mystery, but some things are abundantly clear. Irrefutable evidence of doping violations is difficult to pin down, but elite athletes have been seeking an edge—by almost any means—forever. And it has only been during the current century, when the high-profile sports of baseball and football finally began to take serious anti-doping measures, that real penalties—and therefore a stigma—were attached to juicing.

Long before Major League Baseball or the NFL paid attention to this stuff, the U.S. Olympic Committee hired its first drug-control chief, Dr. Robert Voy, recognizing in the early 1980s a need for aggressive testing. The first major drug busts in sports were at the Pan American Games of 1983, in Caracas, and 1987, in Indianapolis, and it was then that Voy said significant anti-doping progress only would commence “if the NFL would go back to fielding 235-pound linemen, instead of 285-pounders; if the NFL would face the steroid problem; if Division I college football would wipe out steroid use, which they could do for the same money they spend on tape.”

Now, 30 years later, New York Times columnist Michael Powell has made the same point in his sober reaction to the Al Jazeera undercover documentary naming Manning (among others)—that the “shock would be to discover that more than a few men in this morally compromised sport are completely clean. In the last two decades, the weight of NFL linemen has jumped by 50, 60, 70 pounds, and men the size of linebackers play wide receiver.”

Powell quoted University of Colorado professor Roger Pielke’s observation that “football and doping kind of go hand-in-hand.”

This is not the kind of information the typical sports fan—or the typical sports journalist—much cares to think about, and that has enabled sports authorities to mostly look the other way, especially since theirs is an endeavor in which “doing anything to win” is a maxim.

These days, at least, we have tentatively accepted that the first step in resolving the doping issue is to acknowledge the extent of the problem. So that stars fingered by Al Jazeera, as in the the BALCO and Biogenesis scandals, are inclined toward passionate repudiation—instead of instructive parables about scouring pads and clean pots.