How Doping Continues to Ruin the Integrity of Sports
Anyone
with younger siblings, tell me if this conversation sounds familiar. “Mommy,
Ryan cheated at Sorry!” “No, you cheated!” “No, you!” From at a young age, all
of us have a notion that even minor competitions like board games should be
played on a level field. Most of our major sports are even played on level surfaces.
Every game starts at 0-0. We naturally despise cheating in every form; why else
would scandals like Deflategate and Pete Rose’s gambling become so public and
drawn-out? Yet there is only one aspect of cheating in sports that threatens
the idealism that we so cherish in sport, and it may be the one we care the
least about. Performance enhancing drugs, or PEDs, have the potential to destroy
sports as we know them, not betting on baseball or deflated footballs. However,
all but the most shocking doping scandals, like Biogenesis in baseball, are
always overshadowed by Deflategate-esque events. Perhaps we find it difficult
to care because there is no easy fix; doping is a far deeper and more complex
issue than any other in the sports world. But even if stamping out PEDs
entirely seems impossible – and it is – to not make the effort is to allow
cheating to destroy the integrity of sports.
No
matter the level of competition, all athletes are always searching for the
competitive edge that gives them even the tiniest leg up. Artificially
enhancing the human body’s abilities through PEDs is an unfortunate manifestation
of that underlying truth. The lengths to which some athletes go to gain that
edge borders on the ridiculous at times. In the 1998 Olympics, Canadian
snowboarder Ross Rebagliati temporarily had his gold medal stripped by the
International Olympic Committee, after he failed a drug test. Some compared him
to Ben Johnson, the Canadian sprinter who lost his medal in 1988 after testing
positive for steroids. But the performance enhancing drug that he had been
caught using wasn’t steroids. It was marijuana. No, really. According to Robin
Williams, the only way marijuana is a performance enhancing drug is if there’s
a giant Hershey’s bar at the end of the run. But Rebagliati, for whatever
reason, thought using marijuana would help him perform, so that’s exactly what
he did. The IOC eventually reinstated his medal, presumably realizing that
declaring marijuana a PED was absolutely ridiculous. More recently, in 2009,
the World Anti Doping Administration, or WADA, commissioned a study at Miami University
The
real damage to sport’s integrity occurs when doping becomes institutionalized
and normalized. This process goes back to the time of the Cold War, when
state-sanctioned doping programs got their start. According to Thomas Hunt in
his book Drug Games, prowess in sport became a method of projecting power, both
in the US and in Russia . Just as
in individual doping cases, the desire to win led national sporting federations
to ignore positive results or even directly supply athletes with PEDs. Though
Hunt notes that governments have since become more involved in regulating PED
use among their athletes, Russia
seems not to have gotten the message. You may remember that the Russian track
and field team was banned from competing in the Rio Olympics due to an ongoing
WADA investigation. Some of the details were released within the last month,
and they are astonishing. According to the WADA report, the doping violations
of Russian athletes were ordered to “disappear” by the Russian Ministry of
Sport before and during the 2014 Sochi Olympics. Any positive test results were
tampered with and replaced with clean samples. The report also alleges that
Russian athletes were directly supplied with PEDs by the ministry. Around 1000
Russian athletes competing in both the Winter and Summer Games allegedly
benefited from the manipulation of test results. It is not unreasonable to
assume that this kind of blatant cheating at the national level is not limited
to Russia .
One hopes that the organizing and regulatory bodies, such as WADA and the IOC,
have the power and the inclination to halt institutional doping. The course of
the same WADA investigation of Russian doping suggests otherwise. WADA was
first alerted to the possibility of wrongdoing by whistleblower Vitaliy
Stepanov, who worked for the Russian anti-doping agency Rusada at the time. In
a 2015 interview for a German documentary, Stepanov claimed that in spite of
the overwhelming evidence he had submitted, WADA refused to investigate inside Russia at the
time. That kind of institutional apathy is the true threat to doping-free
sport. No amount of testing will stop the proliferation of PED use if even
regulatory bodies do not have an incentive to stop it. The individual dopers,
the national federations, and organizing bodies certainly have no incentive.
International embarrassment always follows doping scandals, and organizing
bodies lose money if their events are impacted by them.
To
this point, I have told you that not only will individual athletes always dope,
but also that doping is still institutionalized and viewed apathetically by
national federations and regulatory bodies. Doping seems to be so ingrained
into the world of sports that some have suggested giving up and allowing all
PED use. Health risks aside, that “solution” is a dangerous and easy cop out. The
idea of the level playing field is our most fundamental ideal in sport, perhaps
in our society as a whole. We believe in ability and training deciding the
victor, not artificial enhancements. Allowing PEDs merely ensures that clean
athletes will be forced to dope to keep up, utterly destroying any semblance of
that integrity in sport. Avoiding that fate means empowering the regulatory
agencies like WADA to contain and punish both individual and institutional
doping. But all the regulatory powers we can possibly confer will have no
affect at all if we remain apathetic about PED use. Make an effort to hate
doping as much as we all hated our siblings for looking at our ships during
Battleship. This is the greatest threat
to the fairness and idealism that makes sports so captivating. It’s time sports
fans start treating it that way.
Sources
Seppelet, Hajo. YouTube.
ARD, 27 Apr 2015. Web. Jun. 2016.
Hunt, Thomas and
John Hoberman. Drug Games: The
International Olympic Committee and the Politics of Doping, 1960-2008. Austin : University
of Texas
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