After reading an interesting perspective on doping from the Poli Tick'n Pundit, I feel that another angle should be analyzed in reply:
While I am not a cyclist, nor am I very knowledgeable about the world of competitive cycling, I was a competitive swimmer for many years and as such I strongly disagree with this post. While I can see where you are coming from, I would like to believe in a more optimistic view of competitive sports.
Competing at an elite level for many years, I know that the temptations are there. I have seen the careers of some of my close friends end because they were caught doping in some way. I can attest that there is nothing pretty about it. Yes, Lance Armstrong was able to get away with it during his time of competition, but now he is a disgrace. In being striped of all his titles he has essentially accomplished nothing in his entire athletic career. He will be remembered throughout the ages, this is true, but he will be remembered in infamy rather than with admiration and respect.
As an athlete, I could not even begin to think how disgraced and ashamed I would feel if everything I had trained so long and hard for meant nothing.
When an athlete decides to use a performance enhancing drug, they are no longer competing as themselves, but rather as a fake, synthetically enhanced mutation of what they could have been. While they may reap the short-term benefits those achievements do not belong to them, but rather they belong to the drug they were on. When looking back at their career they will see that everything they spent their lives training for has amounted to nothing, and as such, they have amounted to nothing.
As far as I am concerned, anyone using an illegal substance should be banned permanently. At the core of sportsmanship are the morals of honesty, integrity, hard work, and fair play. This is what makes the Olympics the pinnacle and highest honor of an athletes career. This is why athletic events, like the Olympics, have the ability to mend war torn nations and to bring together peoples, under the name of fair play, who have been fighting for years. If we allow for these core principles to be done away with, no matter what level of competition, then we are shooting ourselves in the foot. We are saying that it is okay to cheat and lie in life and I for one will not allow for these morals to be taught to my children.
Competing at an elite level for many years, I know that the temptations are there. I have seen the careers of some of my close friends end because they were caught doping in some way. I can attest that there is nothing pretty about it. Yes, Lance Armstrong was able to get away with it during his time of competition, but now he is a disgrace. In being striped of all his titles he has essentially accomplished nothing in his entire athletic career. He will be remembered throughout the ages, this is true, but he will be remembered in infamy rather than with admiration and respect.
As an athlete, I could not even begin to think how disgraced and ashamed I would feel if everything I had trained so long and hard for meant nothing.
When an athlete decides to use a performance enhancing drug, they are no longer competing as themselves, but rather as a fake, synthetically enhanced mutation of what they could have been. While they may reap the short-term benefits those achievements do not belong to them, but rather they belong to the drug they were on. When looking back at their career they will see that everything they spent their lives training for has amounted to nothing, and as such, they have amounted to nothing.
As far as I am concerned, anyone using an illegal substance should be banned permanently. At the core of sportsmanship are the morals of honesty, integrity, hard work, and fair play. This is what makes the Olympics the pinnacle and highest honor of an athletes career. This is why athletic events, like the Olympics, have the ability to mend war torn nations and to bring together peoples, under the name of fair play, who have been fighting for years. If we allow for these core principles to be done away with, no matter what level of competition, then we are shooting ourselves in the foot. We are saying that it is okay to cheat and lie in life and I for one will not allow for these morals to be taught to my children.
This may not offer any added critical meat to this post, but I simply wanted to commend you for articulating your position in this way. Too often, principles are overlooked simply because there isn't the rhetorical skill to defend them in a given situation. This position seems like the obvious one to take, but I enjoy how you have dramatized the situation. The purpose of regulating certain substances is so that the honor of the sport is, ultimately, kept intact. The incentive to stay clean is that, no matter how many hours of honest work go into your career, if it is influenced by a banned substance, it is, to some degree (based on the violation), tainted and unworthy of recognition. This must be the case in order to engender a competitive atmosphere that necessarily includes respect for others and personal integrity. This is a line of thinking we can all get behind.
ReplyDeleteYour closing sentence is a bit exaggerated, considering we are talking about making performance enhancing drugs (PEDs) legal, so it wouldn’t necessarily be cheating if it has been allowed. To some people, including myself, decriminalizing the use of PEDs in sports would still seem as cheating because PEDs give an unfair advantage. But if someone is truly morally convicted over fair play at the core of sportsmanship, because of the performance accelerating and enhancing effects PEDs provide, then they do not need regulation to tell them not to use them, they should react the same way. Perhaps the incidence of PED users would increase, but we have seen that regulation has not been able to stop some of world’s top athletes, and even in the PED-regulated world of sports, natural athletes still compete against PED users (and lose to them). Simply because regulation is dropped does not mean you have to abandon the core principles of sportsmanship, “morals of honesty, integrity, hard work, and fair play.” I just see it in terms of putting the time and resources wasted in regulating PED in sports, into something much greater where we can truly feel morally good about ourselves.
ReplyDeletePundit, I am sorry to say I disagree with your last sentence here. The argument that we should decriminalize or abandon PED regulation simply because it is always one step behind the next new drug, and those who use it undetected, undermines the concept of regulation and rules altogether. As someone who read the NYT expose on Armstrong and felt physically sick at the details (drinking liquid hormone instead of water while cycling, extracted blood and enriching it before reintroducing it via needle, etc.) I am convinced that it is precisely these regulations seeking to standardize competition that led to team members speaking up about Armstrong's behavior. Regulation isn't a waste of time, it supports the concept of fair play. If we abandon that, the "organized" part of sport and competition is gone, and we are left with nothing.
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