The Olympic Games begin in Athens tomorrow, bringing together 10,000 elite competitors from around the world - and a host of officials trying to catch drug cheats. But is it really so wrong for an athlete to use performance-enhancing substances? Sports academic Lincoln Allison argues that those who strive to be the best should do so by any means necessary.
Forty years ago we applied rules on amateurism to top-class athletes. By the end of this century, our current official stance against drugs in sport will look every bit as risible. The orthodox view is that doping is cheating, that it is a minority activity and that the system of testing that operates under the auspices of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) can, and must, succeed in eradicating drugs from sport. But many academics who study sport are now at odds with this stance.
There are costs to opposing the official position, however; if you are to get any official research co-operation from WADA and the International Olympic Committee (IOC), blanket opposition to drugs is the only view you are allowed to take. Three of my colleagues in the academic study of sport were threatened with legal action by two different international sporting organisations last year, simply for stating aloud some truths about the extent of drug use in top-class sport.
At a conference in Sweden last year, I challenged Arne Ljungqvist, head of the IOC medical commission and a member of WADA, when he poured venom on Ben Johnson as a "traitor" to the athletic ideal for the steroid use that saw the sprinter stripped of his 1988 Olympic gold medal in the 100 metres. I argued that it was reasonable to believe that most of Johnson's peers had used steroids in some form and at some stage in the development of their bodies. Ljungqvist responded that I had no proof about the others. But I was surprised by the number of people who said to me afterwards they were glad that I had stated the obvious, because they themselves were in no position to do so.
Some of the arguments about doping go right to the core of our concepts of sport and its values. Let me put the deepest of these issues in personal terms. I value two aspects of sport. The most important is participation: I have played a huge variety of sports and games all my life, and the experience of them has added greatly to the meaning and satisfaction of my life. Second, I like to watch and take sides in games such as cricket, football, tennis and snooker; it is important to my interest that these games involve such characteristics as skill, tactics, judgment and courage.
In participatory sport, these values are not threatened by doping. A sportsman or woman who seeks an advantage from drugs moves up to the level appropriate to his or her underlying ability. When I watch games I want to see the demonstration of virtues such as vision, risk-assessment and strategic thinking.
Sports scientists talk in terms of the "vulnerability thesis" (as it is called by Sigmund Loland of Oslo University), which suggests that the essence of some sports is far more affected by doping than others. Performance-enhancing drugs mainly fall into two categories: those that increase stamina, and those that increase power. Where performance consists almost entirely of the possession of one of these two characteristics, the principle that "if you don't take it, you won't make it" comes into play. Weightlifting and shot-putting, for instance, are almost pure power, while distance cycling and cross-country skiing are almost pure stamina.
Even if you believe that these sports are "clean", isn't admiration of them undermined by the knowledge that the performers would be beaten easily by competitors on a properly designed drug regime? Crudely, we can say that the sports that are "vulnerable" to drugs are animal activities, which, in many cases, such as running and jumping, creatures other than humans do better.
There are no drugs to enhance the human characteristics of judgment and leadership. If there were, would we not want the prime minister to take them? And if there were drugs for hand-eye co-ordination, would we not pay more to see a performer who had taken them than one who had not?
Challenges to the official anti-doping view come also from academics beyond the confines of sports studies. John Hoberman of the University of Texas, has questioned the reality of an international consensus against doping, using his expertise as a scholar of Germanic languages to illustrate the contradiction between the aspiration to human physical improvement (perhaps most clearly represented in contemporary sport by Ekkart Arbeit, who, as a leading athletics coach in East German sport, was once identified with some of the most intensive doping regimes) and the Anglophone idea of fair play.
Claudio Tamburrini, an Argentinian philosopher now working in Sweden, and the Dutch philosopher, Ivo van Hildoorde, have debated whether depriving a child of growth hormone or genetic insertion, which might improve its capacities, could ever be said to be increasing their welfare or freedom. A number of Scandinavian sports scientists have stressed that the debate about drugs will be radically changed when it becomes possible to insert performance-enhancing genes into human beings. A haemoglobin gene to improve stamina is an example of what we can expect to see.
From a spectator's standpoint, the anti-doping camp often suggests that followers will desert sports they believe to be tainted by drugs. The evidence is a great deal more complicated. When French police tried to expose the widespread use of drugs in the 1998 Tour de France, it became clear that cycling fans both knew and accepted that there was almost universal use of EPO-type drugs (EPO is erythropoietin, a naturally occurring hormone that stimulates the bone marrow to produce more red blood cells, allowing uptake of more oxygen, and therefore increased energy). Their sympathies were with the competitors.
In February, when Shane Warne returned to international cricket in Sri Lanka after an a one-year ban for using a diuretic that couldn't have benefited his leg-spin bowling, he was given a standing ovation.
In America's major league sports, particularly football and baseball, the widespread perception of drug use does not seem to have had a negative impact on audience interest. The fascination of watching Mark McGwire break the home-run record in 1998 was undiminished by his overt use of nandrolone (not a banned substance in baseball), which stimulates the body to produce more of its own steroids.
And do spectators believe that the number of US football players weighing 300lb, which has risen from 10 in 1986 to more than 300 today, is solely through muscle build-up achieved by eating the concentrated protein contained in egg whites? The estimate of a former professional is that at least 30 per cent of US major-league football players are taking steroids; most people say that the figure is much higher. Fans are not put off by this, and players say they would trade a longer life for a chance of glory.
Track and field athletics has remained an overt bastion of anti-doping nobility, but there is a provocative thought experiment that is conducted by Ellis Cashmore of Staffordshire University. He gives a race commentary on a fictional Olympic 100-metre final in which the athletes are described at the line-up in terms of their drug regimes and their drug company sponsors. I've seen rooms of academics and students split down the middle when this scenario is put to them, some thinking it would be the death knell of the sport, others that it would make it more impressive and more interesting. We cannot simply assume a priori what the reality for fans would be.
Those who think we can and should continue to ban drugs in sport should ask themselves some questions. If a player for the football team you support were to risk his health to gain strength or stamina, how hostile would you really be? Suppose a member of the England rugby team that won the World Cup in 2003 had built up his body with steroids on the advice of coaches early in his career because, for all his speed and skill and courage, he was considered too slight. Should he be banned? Should the trophy be taken away from England?
American athlete Michael Johnson currently risks losing his gold medal for the 400-metre relay at the 2000 Sydney Olympics because a team-mate tested positive a year earlier for steroids. Is that fair? Should young athletes be banned from basketball because they were given growth hormone as children, when they or their parents felt that they were too small (it is estimated that more than a million Americans have received growth hormone as a result of such parental decisions).
The orthodox view, as argued by Ljungqvist, in Britain by Lord Coe, and, in Ireland by the Sports Council, is irrelevant and out-dated. Coe's own record is impeccable: even in the active world of the rumour mill, he and most of his 1980s British middle-distance contemporaries are deemed to have been clean when some rivals from continental Europe were not.
But the codes of behaviour relevant to amateur sport do not apply to a professional world. I am a strong believer in real amateur sport, of the cultural superiority of participation, and the local club over the six-pack and the television. But you can't have it both ways: professional sport is about performance, its dominant idea is what John Hoberman calls "the performance principle", and performers are not gentlemen and cannot be expected to be. Professional sport should show itself for what it is; both amateurism and professionalism might gain from the clarity of the distinction between them.
The appendix to the orthodox view is that people must be protected from performance-enhancing drugs because they are damaging to health. No one should ever be coerced into taking drugs, as so many sportsmen (and probably even more sportswomen) were under communist regimes.
But we know that many performers are prepared to take the risks. It is also true (and rarely mentioned) that often the risk is slight and that sometimes there is an overall benefit to health. (As a 57-year-old athlete, I take anti-inflammatories that are probably on the banned list.) In general, the risk to health from performance-enhancing drugs is considerably less than that from tobacco or alcohol, and we ought not to apply moral assumptions to sport that we are not prepared to apply to the rest of life.
The most pressing arguments for abandoning the present policy are that it doesn't work and probably catches the (relatively) innocent more than the guilty. As Michael Johnson puts it: "All the organisations involved here are guilty of having rules that don't work." And genetic engineering is probably going to make drugs seem trivial in their impact on our ideas of fairness and performance.
Lincoln Allison was founding director of Warwick University's Centre for the Study of Sport in Society. His books include The Politics of Sport.