Editor’s note: This op-ed is by Jim Higgins, a high school teacher in Barre who writes a sports column for the Times Argus. A version of this commentary first appeared in the Times Argus on Feb. 12, 2013.
“Doping is fundamentally contrary to the spirit of sport.”
Not many of us would quarrel with that statement from the World Anti-Doping Code.
As much as I loathe dope in professional sports, I am slowly and sadly accepting that pharmo-jocks are here to stay. These juiced up uberjocks have taken the sacred concept of the “level playing field” and reduced it to a joke.
Maybe I shouldn’t be so puritanical about fairness. Heck, enhanced athletes have been around since the ancient Greek Olympics. Back then it was herbs and ground-up animal testicles that were presumed to enhance performance. Fast forward to my era and many professional jocks were popping “dexies,” “bennies,” and other uppers, which now seem quaint, to perform well no matter how hung over they were.
But the distinctly un-quaint performance-enhancing potency of today’s “uppers” transform modern pharmacologists into landscapers of the most unlevel playing fields imaginable. These mad scientists are smart, rich, and will forever stay several pages ahead of the prohibitionists. Currently, for example, performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs) can be injected in such small amounts that they clear the body rapidly, and other PEDs of non-synthetic 100 percent natural growth hormones test exactly like the body’s own hormones.
The ethically challenged customers of these witch doctors are lovin’ it, of course, as they stampede to the awards podium. (Ask the Baltimore Ravens’ Ray Lewis about his accelerated rehab from a torn tricep. The miracle drug in question, IGF-1, is banned by the NFL.)
How loyal are these pharmo-jocks to their new miracle regimens?
Back in 1967 a physician and sports medicine expert, Gabe Mirkin, handed out a questionnaire to elite runners before they began a road race in Washington, D.C. Mirkin asked the runners: “If I could give you a pill that would make you an Olympic champion and also kill you in a year would you take it?” One hundred athletes responded to the questionnaire and more than half said they would take the pill.
So much for the aforementioned “spirit of sports.” Rather please hold your hats, elite athletes have a long history of being loyal first to the spirit of winning … whatever it takes.
Billions of bucks are at stake, and the next chapter of PEDs looks even more exotic and concealable: gene doping and stem cells to help with the regeneration of tissue.
Copy and paste that disturbing 1967 data to the 21st century where multi-million dollar contracts are the norm and we see an awfully bleak future for the level playing field in professional sports. How bleak? Disgraced 2006 Tour de France winner Floyd Landis called pro cycling “organized crime” two weeks ago.
So what is to be done?
In a word. Punt.
That’s because the techies of Big Pharma will certainly not roll over. Billions of bucks are at stake, and the next chapter of PEDs looks even more exotic and concealable: gene doping and stem cells to help with the regeneration of tissue. Further down the road, The New York Times reports, “neuroscientists are experimenting with noninvasive technologies that augment brain activity by bathing targeted regions in low levels of electricity (transcranial electrical stimulation) or a magnetic field (transcranial magnetic stimulation). Both appear to enhance cortical excitability and cognitive performance.”
There is no end, in other words, to our unrelenting need for enhanced performance drugs in sports and elsewhere: from “Mommy’s Little Helpers” to, er, Dad’s; from Ambien to HGH injections for aging Hollywood stars at $1,000 a pop. Unrelenting enhancement for all (bigger, better, richer) is, after all, one of the premises our country was founded upon. We’re all enhancement junkies, of one sort or another.
So let’s punt and legalize — and regulate — performance enhancing drugs for professional athletes. If they want to do the math (immediate benefits versus potential health risks) let them gamble. They’re used to it: they see 95 mph fastballs and 300-pound linemen coming at them regularly.
Also the accelerated technology we’re witnessing in this field, especially in tissue repair, will certainly have a ripple effect for us mortals, once the safety is demonstrated.
It strikes me as more sensible to attempt to legislate a level playing field in professional sports where everybody has the option to dope-up, rather than endure decades of asterisks and controversy, deceit, media blather, and the hypocrisy of seeming to care about drugs in sports. Hey, if we really cared we sports consumers would’ve insisted long ago on mandatory blood tests for athletes, not lame, highly beatable urine tests.
Allowing professionals their way with performance enhancement does, of course, beg sticky-icky enforcement questions with our amateurs athletes, especially the wannabe pros at the college level.
But last I checked, college scholarships did not include many thousands extra for PEDs, and the extravagant costs of performance enhancement may help us out there.
No question, our Brave New Pharmaceutical World is a nightmare for sports purists and other warriors for the level playing field mythology. But then, we purists are all dying off. Two generations from now who knows what high-tech solutions will arrive to maintain a modicum of fairness and balance in high level, performance enhanced sports?
Once thing is certain though, the “spirit of sports” will never be the same.
