Exactly. It's like safety regulations in car racing. Racers get put into a hard position where they have to choose between safety and winning, because safety equipment costs weight and money that could be used to go faster. Regulations eliminate that choice and allow people to compete while maintaining some baseline level of safety.
I was just thinking F1. Think of doping as part of the man-machine system and regulations to limit all aspects of it. From developments at top levels of competition we can get trickle-down chem-tech that is of benefit for all.
We could just start new sports leagues that allow doping. It would be interesting to watch the NFL if people were bigger and angrier than they already are.
> We could just start new sports leagues that allow doping.
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.
Are you suggesting that most professional leagues don't allow doping? The NFL is full of drugs they just sweep it under the rug until the public notices. Kind of like Professional Bodybuilding. Everyone knows they are on drugs but we just kind of ignore it. It seems like even the DEA ignores it until you make it so obvious they have to respond. I always finding it shocking when people think pro athletes don't do as much as they can get away with to be competitive.
I agree that it is similar to security theatre. The federations want to give the impression that they are clean without the pain of declaring their star athletes dirty. No-one has an interest in a failed test. They do have an interest in appearing to be clean.
I don't necessarily have a problem with professional athletes doping in a black box, i.e. free of influencing others. Professionals should be fully aware of the health effects of "riding the bicycle," and it's hard for me to argue against telling people what they can do to their own bodies.
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.
Exactly, you shift the goalpost for attainable performance and the minimal performance necessary to be professional. A good example of this is e-sports, where it's well known, especially among FPS players that people competing are using stimulants -- and this has been the status quo for more than a decade. Which might be neutral, if things like steroids/stimulants weren't so terrible for you, but they have noticable consequences for your health.
I don't buy the 'think of the children!' argument for a second. If a person wants to use, they're going to use, regardless of what drug or their age. What really causes problems is all the lies, misinformation, and unrealistic expectations about what they can achieve with or without drugs. People think that the drugs are magic and will close the gaps in their training. It really is all about training- as the article says, the drugs are used because the human body isn't able to recover quickly enough from the volume of training required of professional athletes; in most sports it has nothing to do with adding more muscle. In fact most athletes don't want to add muscle willy-nilly because it makes it harder to move. If professional athletes were able to honestly discuss the drugs that they use and their dosages I think it would make things safer for young athletes, because most people don't understand how low the dosages that they take are and it would PROVE that you can't replace hard training with drugs. There are young athletes now taking dosages that far exceed what even world class athletes would consider because there's no honest discussion around them, they can't make informed decisions.
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.
Low dosage will have a placebo effect, at best.
Good nutrition and sleep is far more effective.
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.
Certainly influence on the young is part of it, but it's also a matter of keeping the sport at a level that everybody agrees to and understands. In some sports, doping is accepted- there are separate leagues for natural athletes. So my only issue is that if everybody agreed to not dope, and the understanding is that the athletes are clean, yet some dope, then those who are doping are cheating.
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.
I tried to find the original reasoning for banning doping and couldn't do so. According to Wikipedia the IOC banned doping in the 1960s after some sports federations began to do so. It was widespread at the time.
I don't have a source, but possibly a rationale you might agree with: It tarnishes records.
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.
I imagine the original reasoning was mostly due to the notion that "it is against the competitive spirit and destroys the integrity of the game". Honestly that is still the best reasoning for banning doping in my opinion. Maybe it is just personal opinion but doping in baseball almost destroyed the sport because of a tarnished reputation. If I knew doping was allowed in say gymnastics for example I wouldn't watch it at all, it would become boring. Sure, I am likely overvaluing the effects of doping in gaining an advantage but I think the biggest problem is that of attribution.
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.
Drugs don't increase "skill," though. And on the contrary, if everyone was doping I think the event might actually be more interesting to watch since the average fitness of the players would be increased.
> ... it's hard for me to argue against telling people what they can do to their own bodies.
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?
It's not just the children but anyone outside the realm of a "pure competitor" who winds-up harmed unfairly by doping.
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.
I am not quite clear what the difference is between your examples and, say, startup CEOs who choose to use stimulants to deal with a crushing workload.
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.
People in all sorts of different positions take performance enhancing drugs. We as a society tend to focus on athletes for some reason. How many of the programmers you work with are taking some kind of stimulant or nootropic? Everyone is looking for an edge. How many famous CEOS "cheated" at some point to get to where they are?
Because we don't have a lot of rules for musicians. Of the rules we do have, they are a social contract rather than a binding rules committee. And of those rules, none of them govern drugs. Plagiarism, yes, but drugs, no.
Going along with your postulation outright, I'd note that most of the drugs consumed by musicians wouldn't be called "performance enhancing" in the context of general terminology - alcohol, grass, hallucinogens, downers, stimulants - pretty much mess with mental capacity and function, not really "enhance" them. A couple cases can be made for certain uppers, but I kind of look at the relationship of drugs and musicians as one rooted in self-medication moreso than performance related. I have heard of orchestra/symphony types using beta blockers.
I am not aware of any system of morality in which "but everyone else did it" is considered to be a watertight argument.
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".
This is how I've felt for a long time, but I think how a lot of PED apologists argue is that they believe they have a right to interpret the rules as they see fit, to find corner cases that the established rules do not cover and exploit them to their advantage. They are letter-of-lawyers versus spirit-of-lawyers.
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.
In the case of PEDs, there's no grey line. The WADA rules and lists are very comprehensive, and include numerous catch-all clauses. You can determine what you are forbidden to use, under which circumstances.
The main issue I see is how do we allow adults to dope while keeping children/teens away from it? Or would doping even increase with children/teens if it were more widely acceptable amongst adults? When I was in high school there were plenty of athletes using steroids - so already happening. Although I do believe that number would increase especially within high schools.
"Think of the children" is always the worst argument possible. This is about education as with all drugs and not that stupid "roid rage" video they made me watch with Ben Affleck https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3FvlIwuQBO8
Yeah, but honestly if doping was allowed in pro sports its a much strong assumption that college and high school kids would dope more then if kids would smoke more legal weed.
You cannot escape the reality that if doping is allowed then doping is required.
> but honestly if doping was allowed in pro sports its a much strong assumption that college and high school kids would dope more then if kids would smoke more legal weed.
My perspective on performance-enhancing drugs has changed because of my involvement in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and mixed martial arts.
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.
As "Faster, Higher, Stronger..." author explains, doping wouldn't level the field for everybody since drugs affect people very differently. The concept of "fairness" is arbitrary, he mentions the use of altitude tents for example (banned only in one country, it favours richer countries), but somewhere we need to draw the line.
The bigger fallout from doping and WADA is the "drugs are bad" story it pushes. This leads to things like "anti doping" in e-games. Or calling students using mind-enhancing drugs cheaters. We should wholeheartedly embrace people using medical technology to improve themselves, rather than being slaves to genetics and limited by the money they have for exotic training methods.
It's a simple information problem: identify who the dopers are and put them into their own events, with separate record keeping. We can have a world record for a 100 meter doped sprint, and one for the undoped sprints.
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.
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.
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[ 5.2 ms ] story [ 118 ms ] threadThe 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.