Drugs and sports

Like T, I feel a reflexive disgust at the wave of drug scandals in the sporting world. But I’ve always had a hard time articulating just why I feel this way.

I used to think it was about fairness. Players who don’t take drugs (such as Ken Griffey, Jr.) should not have to compete with, or have their accomplishments compared against, players who do take drugs (such as Barry Bonds). But the fairness argument doesn’t support a drug ban. If anything, it supports the democratization of drugs: drugs for the (athletic) masses! In other words, the fairness argument merely suggests that drug use should be available (or not) to all players, rather than only to some. For instance, pitchers often guzzle coffee before a big game to help their concentration, but nobody says that this practice is “unfair,” because anybody who wants to can pick up a cup of joe.

So what is it about the use of drugs, rather than the selective use of drugs, that is so distasteful? It can’t be that drugs create superhumans to whom we no longer relate. That’s already happened. As the New Yorker wrote a little while back,

Professional athletes once looked like somebody we knew, that friendly young fellow down the block who could run fast and dunk the ball or throw it a mile—not us exactly but close enough, and there in the games to represent if not always our town or our college then our species. This illusion waned when everyday N.B.A. players grew to six feet eight or better and N.F.L. linemen suddenly averaged two hundred and ninety pounds and could run forty yards in under six seconds….

The dream of intimacy—it was always fantasy—is gone, and today’s players, so close to us on our plasma screens, are galaxies away from our own doings and capabilities.

Nor is the problem that drug use will create uniformly skilled players. You can pump me full of steroids, amphetamines, and whatever the hell else they use nowadays, and I will never run like a clean Ben Johnson or bike anywhere near as hard as Floyd Landis, even if he were undrugged, ill, and out of practice.

Finally, the problem also isn’t that drug use saps the fun out of sports. If anything, it would just add another element. Right now athletes and their teams have to apply all sorts of arcane knowledge to push their already superhuman bodies to the limit: sports medicine, training regimens, special diets, etc. What’s so bad about adding drug cocktails to the mix?

None of these doubts has dampened my anger at each new revelation. So, please, comment away, and help fuel my intuitive outrage.