Why test when there are processes you can’t detect?
Leaving aside the usual puzzling contradiction whereby the team – you know, the actual players on the field — were absolved by the TV pundits of responsibility for a dreadful performance, it was obviously a low point. Maybe even the lowest ever for Irish soccer.
But it wasn’t the lowest point of last week. That came a couple of days earlier, when Lance Armstrong’s reputation went into the sausage-grinder of a 1,000-page report by the US Anti-Doping Agency and came out the other end as a rancid saveloy.
The report stated Armstrong had engaged in “the most sophisticated, professionalised and successful doping program that sport has ever seen”, a fairly accurate description of the elaborate scheme, which has called all of the cyclist’s achievements in the Tour de France into doubt (by the way, that report isn’t the ultimate in steroids-are-bad literature. That distinction belongs to The Power And The Glory, an article written by Paul Solatoroff about bodybuilder Steve Michalik, an engaging tale of bleeding green pus through the eyeball, intimate moments snatched with a soft-drink dispenser and cracking open monkey skulls to suck out the spinal fluid. I never tire of recommending this article to people because for one it tells you what steroids will do to your body and secondly how often do you get to use the phrase ‘cracking open monkey skulls to suck out the spinal fluid’ in conversation?)
Anyway, back to Lance Armstrong. Leaving aside the man’s apparently never-ending unpleasantness, there are all sorts of interesting philosophical questions raised by last week’s report.
For instance, how do you feel now about Livestrong, the cyclist’s cancer charity? Clearly raising funds for cancer research is good, but should you still support the charity if it contributes to Armstrong’s self-aggrandisement? As for the steroids themselves, you can find plenty people describing the report as a watershed moment. I’m inclined to agree, but not because there will now be a new lack of tolerance for chemical enhancement, a zero tolerance for all those daft concoctions: your stanozolols, your clenbuterols.
For one thing, the fact that the American never failed a drug test raises another question: should we abandon testing entirely? There are scientists on the record as saying that athletes who use blood doping, for instance, to gain an unfair advantage will always have a chance of beating drug tests; why test when you know there are processes that you can’t detect? Go a step further. We have doping already: legal doping. Take the altitude chambers used by athletes to recreate the experience of thin air at altitude which helps stamina. Those are approved by WADA on the basis that they recreate a natural phenomenon.
As arguments go, that’s pretty weak. Nothing is more natural than blood, and that’s used in blood doping to gain an unnatural advantage.
That’s not why the Armstrong furore is a before-and-after event, though. It’s because from now on illegal assistance will be on a different level.
By coincidence, The Times newspaper carried a feature last Saturday about ‘grinders’ or ‘biohackers’. People who enhance themselves by putting machines in their bodies (at home, a lot of the time, and often without anaesthetic, but that’s another matter).
Obviously sewing a magnet into your finger some Saturday you’re fooling around in your garage isn’t going to win you an Olympic medal. But clearly having certain types of machinery in your body could help: just ask Oscar Pistorius.
The fact that there was even a debate about whether Pistorius, the South African sprinter famed for the running blades which replaced his feet, should compete in the Olympics or the Paralympics poses another philosophical poser: what constitutes an unfair advantage? That argument has already been moved on to another level, of course. Brazilian Alan Oliveira beat Pistorius in the 200m at the Paralympics, and the South African claimed later it had been an “an unfair race” because his opponent was wearing longer running blades; Pistorius claimed they added about four inches to Oliveira’s height and, obviously, extended his stride length significantly.
What’s the solution to that? Have everybody use blades of the same length? Wouldn’t that be like restricting Usain Bolt’s opponents to men of exactly the same height? It’s significant that within a year or two we’ve moved from the admissibility of machines in human bodies when it comes to sport to notions of a level playing field when it comes to how those machines should be used. Not a matter of if or when; more a case of how to use them.
If that’s all a bit too Michael Fassbender-in-Prometheus for you, then sorry: those are the questions we face, right up to the ultimate, obvious concluding query.
Should we be asking what actually makes athletes human? Too deep? If it makes you feel better, try this: what should Trapattoni do against the Faroes? Too shallow?
* michael.moynihan@examiner.ie
