Doping and an Olympic Crisis of Idealism
Doping and an Olympic Crisis of Idealism - The New Yorker
When Thomas Hicks, an American runner, faltered near the end of the 1904 Olympic marathon, in St. Louis, his assistants gave him shots of strychnine (which is now commonly used as rat poison) and brandy to revive him. Hicks crossed the finish line after another American, Fred Lorz—but was declared the winner when it was discovered that Lorz had ridden eleven miles of the marathon in his coach’s car. The perception was that Lorz had cheated, and Hicks had not.
I thought of Hicks on Sunday, when the International Olympic Committee announced that all Russian athletes would have to appeal to the international federation of their sport in order to gain eligibility to compete at next month’s Rio Olympic Games. For anti-doping officials and for many athletes, the announcement was disappointing; they had been seeking a ban on all Russian athletes. Last week, the World Anti-Doping Agency released an independent report, which ran nearly a hundred pages, offering proof of a Russian state-sponsored doping system that gave athletes performance-enhancing drugs and then covered up their test results. The methods are the stuff of a spy thriller—a secret laboratory for replacing samples in the laboratory at the Sochi Olympics, actual cocktails of steroids dissolved in alcohol (“Chivas for the men and vermouth for the women”)—but the extent of the scheme is even more incredible. According to the report, Russian athletes cheated in more than thirty sports. The I.O.C. determined that “Russian athletes in any of the 28 Olympic summer sports have to assume the consequences of what amounts to a collective responsibility.” What is at stake, the I.O.C. said, is nothing less than the “credibility of the Olympic competitions.”
That performance-enhancing drugs represent a threat to the integrity of sport seems obvious. Gaining an unfair advantage is the definition of cheating. But that hasn’t always been the case. Otherwise, Hicks’s result would have been thrown out along with Lorz’s. So what happened? The answer has something to do with the sophistication of doping now, but it also has something to do with the changing way we understand sports. The current doping crisis is also a crisis about idealism. It’s related to the gradual erosion of faith in the original idea of the Olympic Games.
The modern Olympics were founded in 1896 by Pierre de Coubertin, a French baron who thought that his country was getting soft. He looked to Britain’s sporting culture—and the fad for all things ancient—to revive the Olympic Games, hoping that sporting competition would encourage the making of champions and the building of character. The point of a game is to win, and the Olympics would be no different. But that wasn’t enough for de Coubertin, whose idea of the Games was pseudo-religious. “The important thing in life is not the triumph, but the fight; the essential thing is not to have won, but to have fought well,” he famously said. The Olympics were an elaborate ritual constructed around the idea that a running race—or a wrestling match, or a ski jump—could tell you something about the virtue of its competitors.
For the 1920 Summer Games, in Antwerp, de Coubertin wrote an oath, which amounted to a mission statement for the Games. First delivered by the Belgian fencer Victor Boin, it read, “We swear that we are taking part in the Olympic Games as loyal competitors, observing the rules governing the Games, and anxious to show a spirit of chivalry, for the honor of our countries and for the glory of sport.” The word “chivalry” sounded archaic even then; the point was to revive a better, more noble world, where excellence was pursued for its own sake. Maybe there was something even noble about pushing yourself to the point of death to complete a race. In their view, a real sportsman pursued excellence for its own sake.
For most of the twentieth century, the existential threat to sport wasn’t doping. It was professionalism. If an athlete competed for material gain, the spirit of sport—sportsmanship—would be tainted. The classic example of this idea is Jim Thorpe, one of the greatest athletes in the history of the modern era. Thorpe bounced around Native American boarding schools. His twin brother died when he was nine, his mother died a few years later, and his father died when he was sixteen. Thorpe went on to win the pentathlon and the decathlon at the 1912 Olympic Games. But the following year it was reported that he had played semi-professional baseball before competing in the Olympics. It didn’t matter that he had earned as little as two dollars per game—about fifty dollars today—or that he had desperately needed the money. The I.O.C. made a unanimous decision to strip him of his medals. Thorpe’s ethnicity and his impoverished background surely made him an easier target. But, for decades, even in the face of blatant violations of the amateur ideal, the I.O.C. maintained that its decision to strip Thorpe of his medals—and to restrict the Olympics to amateurs—was intended to protect sport from corruption. “If we water down the rules now, the games will be destroyed in eight years,” a supporter of Avery Brundage, then the I.O.C. president, said, according to a 1960 Sports Illustrated article about the amateur debate. Brundage and his followers took the amateur ideal seriously—even metaphysically. One of his colleagues called it “a question of the soul.”
The use of performance-enhancing drugs was understood to be a problem, but only insofar as it was a symptom of the corruption of the amateur ideal. In the nineteen-fifties, speed skaters took amphetamine sulfate until they were sick. Cyclists took vasodilators; in 1960, one crashed and died. When an American weightlifting coach guessed that the Soviet lifters who were crushing records were chemically altering their bodies, he didn’t cry foul; instead, he started experimenting with testosterone injections and commercially available anabolic steroids himself, and then encouraged athletes to take them as well.
In the seventies, East Germany developed a program, called State Plan 14.25, in which athletes were given little blue pills and were told they were vitamins. They were, in fact, Oral Turinabol, a steroid. Women—for whom steroids were especially effective—started developing facial hair and low voices. Men grew breasts. Both sexes developed extreme acne. Records started to fall. “The training motto at the pool was, ‘You eat the pills, or you die,’ ” one swimmer later testified. “It was forbidden to refuse.” But even in countries where doping wasn’t forced, it was done. An American track-and-field athlete, Harold Connolly, told a congressional inquiry, in 1973, that “the overwhelming majority of the international track-and-field athletes I have known would take anything and do anything short of killing themselves to improve their athletic performance.”
The I.O.C. was slow to act. It formed a committee in 1962 and started developing a list of banned substances, protocols, and eventually tests. (The first athlete to fail was popped for alcohol.) But it wasn’t until the 1988 Summer Olympics, in Seoul, that a doping scandal rocked the Games, when the men’s hundred-metre champion, Ben Johnson, failed a test. This was, as it happens, the first Summer Olympics at which professionals were allowed to compete. In reality, of course, athletes had been compensated in various ways for decades. American athletes were subsidized by schools; athletes within the Soviet bloc were supported by the government, allowed to train full time and given salaries for bogus jobs. What really changed things, of course, was the introduction of television, and the fantastic amounts of money that flooded the Games, flowing around the athletes but not to them—and the public’s desire to see the best athletes, the dream teams, compete.
The belief that amateurism was necessary for real sportsmanship was over at the Olympics. (It continues, of course, in another organization, founded around the same time as the I.O.C.: the N.C.A.A.) But the anxiety behind it—how could sport maintain its idealism in the face of the intense pressures of commercialism? what ideals do the Olympics and the idea of sport itself represent?—had not disappeared. The problem was merely transformed. It was not a question of the soul anymore but, rather, a question of the unadulterated body. The crisis had become about drugs.
In the nineties, the I.O.C. began a rearguard fight against the widespread use of performance-enhancing drugs, culminating in the creation of the World Anti-Doping Agency, in 1999. In 2000, for the first time since 1960, the I.O.C. even changed the Olympic oath. On August 5th, when the Rio Games begin, a Brazilian will hold a corner of the Olympic flag and recite, “In the name of all the competitors, I promise that we shall take part in these Olympic Games, respecting and abiding by the rules which govern them, committing ourselves to a sport without doping and without drugs, in the true spirit of sportsmanship, for the glory of sport and the honor of our teams.” In place of “a spirit of chivalry,” we have a body that is uncontaminated by doping and drugs.
The vast majority of athletes, of course, are “clean.” (Even the word is telling.) But, ultimately, doping has become so sophisticated and hard to police, and the rewards so significant, that it is impossible to eradicate. A recent retesting of samples from the London and Beijing Games uncovered forty-five positive tests—twenty-three of which came from medalists. And testing may not be the most effective way to uncover the use of performance-enhancing drugs. Most of the major anti-doping success stories—the cases of Lance Armstrong; balco; and, now, the Russian Olympic team—relied on whistle-blowers and methods more commonly associated with criminal investigations. Doping is a problem in the N.F.L., N.B.A., M.L.B., N.C.A.A., in tennis, in horse racing, in Nascar—everywhere the rewards far exceed the punishment. But it is a particular challenge for the Olympics, because the Olympics are supposed to mean something more than an athletic competition.
The distance between the ideal and the reality has never seemed greater. The bribery scandal during the bidding for the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Games exposed an organization rotted by corruption. The price of hosting an Olympics has become so astronomical that few cities, especially in democratic countries, are willing to do it. In the cities that do, the residents who are least prepared to bear the costs often end up bearing the most. The runaway spending during the 2004 Athens Games—much of which was public debt—became a symbol of what was wrong with Greece’s economy when it went bust a few years later. In Beijing, the magnificent “Bird’s Nest” stadium sits underused and rusting. The risk of terrorism has led to draconian surveillance and security measures. Right after the Sochi Olympics, the host nation forcefully annexed Crimea.
And now Rio seems to be a catastrophe even before it begins. The water is polluted, the country is in a deep recession, the government is in the midst of political scandal, and the city is facing rising crime rates. Then came the Russian doping scandal.
In the end, the real question may not be whether the I.O.C. made the right decision on the Russian athletes. It is, instead, about what ideals the Olympics really represent.
