Sunday, October 14, 2012

Sports-Doping and Competition

A few months ago Lance Armstrong quit fighting the USADA. He  has been at the center of a doping scandal for a number of years. Teammates claiming he was doping his way to 7 Tour de France wins. Now it's October and Lance Armstrong is still popular, still has his fans. This respect is a carryover from his cancer fighting foundation as much as an unwillingness of supporters to give up on a hero.

We are entering a phase of the Armstrong saga where some ask "how does this effect his legacy". This is not a question I want to address. Armstrong will be judge on what he did; by the knowledgeable and the ignorant. I'm more interested in the notion being raised on the periphery, if everyone is doping what is the problem. The wide spread belief that competitions are rigged, either through doping or match fixing. Match fixing and doping are not the same kind of cheating. The former requires one or more players to lose a match or perhaps not to win by too wide a margin; money is involved, bribes or illegal betting; the latter, doping is performance entrancement, often dedicated to personal enrichment, better stats mean bigger paychecks, or in a team environment more wins. 

I approach doping in sports from the perspective of what competition means. What are the expectations of participants and spectators? Fairness, is at the core of any competition, the idea that what we are seeing is a true account of effort, and not a rigged show. Fairness does not mean equal, nature gives us talent, training hones that ability, and competition is where that hard in skill is measured against our fellows. 

In the long history of recorded competition, fairness has a role to play, not always as I define it. Two warriors in single combat, status is gained from fighting an opponent. The notion of fairness is tied to worth, a strong adversary is preferable to a weaker one. Winning is good but beating a clear inferior has little honour to it. This maybe an idealized version, expressed more in theory than in fact, but it had an impact in literature and so probably in life. Fairness, in a life death circumstances is likely to be observed more often in the failure to be applied than its observance. 

We enter the modern era and the rise of the sporting world, where competition is less costly, socially or physically. The idea of Fairness is able to find fuller expression through a life of sport. Two people or teams compete, only there skill and training will determine the outcome. My notion of fairness are human beings competing without biological enhancement. Coaching, training and dedication to the chosen sport provided the edge that gave victory. It's not perfect, the United States has an edge over most countries in sports technology. This may not seem fair, but money and equipment does not reach the level of cheating, implied by doping. 

So our expectation for any competition is that it be between humans without external chemical aids, anything else is fraud. That is my answer to "why not doping". Doping undermines our idea of fair competition, because it involves a lie. The non doping participants and the audience are being fooled into believing that what they are engaging in and seeing is authentic, fair competition. Nobody likes a cheater. 

So what are we to do about doping? Should we openly accept it, by placing it in the realm of training tools, just another piece of equipment? Probably not a workable solution, because chemical enhancement provides more of a boost than coaching or training facilities can to performance. Anyone person competing drug free will be at a disadvantage, save for the most talented people. 

We can split competitions into drug free and drug enhanced athletes. This gives us the transparency. Everyone involved knows that what they are witnessing is enhanced humans competing. There can be no outrage or fraud if everyone knows what is going on. Whether it is workable to create parallel competitions or even desirable is hard to know. Do we want to begin going down the path of legitimizing Human Enhancement? At a minimum the notion of what is fair remains somewhat intact, though greatly diminished in meaning.

I think we are left needing to maintain an Idea, however romantic, of what fair competition means.I support continued efforts to find cheaters where and when we can, and suspending them from competing. 














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