Legalized doping would advance medicine, athletes
O f all the sports events I could have picked to obsess over, the Tour de France hasn’t done much for my manliness. Until now. That’s because the day before this year’s race, several top riders were thrown out for being under investigation for taking performance-enhancing drugs. My athletes not only suffer for hundreds of miles up in the Alps in the July heat, they also inject drugs like guys who date Kate Moss.
Although cycling is now definitively the most doped-up sport in the world, narrowly edging out the International Doping Championships, this scandal hasn’t ruined my love of the sport. That’s because I don’t mind when my athletes take drugs to boost their performance.
Although ESPN commentators love to wax morally superior, I know that if everyone else were taking EPO and I knew it would help me compete in the tour, I would too. If it weren’t for the fact that I’m afraid of needles. And working out in the heat.
Sure, cheating is wrong, sort of by definition. But if everyone is cheating – and a Los Angeles Times front-page investigative story strongly implied that Lance Armstrong was doping – then it really isn’t cheating. It’s like everyone agreeing that the fault of the ball going out of bounds isn’t the guy who purposely throws it at the other team, but the guy whose face it bounces off.
I understand steroids and EPO are probably dangerous. But being a 300-pound lineman and having other 300-pound linemen smash into you every Sunday is surprisingly bad for your joints. Driving a Chevy at 150 mph around a track hasn’t always worked out well.
I don’t want to go back to days of 30 home runs a season, when finding out if Tris Speaker would round second was as exciting as it got. I want to see feats of human impossibility, brought to us by the best equipment, nutrition, training and medicine available.
I also would like to see a sport where Zinedine Zidane just head-butts people. That made soccer, just for a moment, as good as hockey.
I don’t think it’s the cheating, or the medical danger, that makes people hate doping so much. They only hate it because it seems deeply unfair.
That’s why, to level the playing field, we need to legalize doping.
As the pace of medical technology has sped up, we’ve panicked about its fairness: cloning, genetic enhancement, plastic surgery. Why, we wonder, should rich people get another advantage? The answer, of course, is because they’re rich.
But it’s not the ability to medically alter ourselves that gets us upset – not when we take Klonopin for public speaking, Xanax for flights and marijuana for getting through that Al Gore movie. We only mind when science makes people better than us.
“Dateline NBC” does a gooey congratulatory segment when Al Roker gets his stomach stapled, but US magazine abuses any starlets who look like they might have gotten Botox. If cloning were limited only to J. Dennis Hastert, no one would be bothered.
Like all new technologies, the lines of acceptability are moving rapidly. Not long ago, you went away for your cosmetic surgery, came home and denied it vehemently. Now I can’t go anywhere without hearing women bragging about their work. Especially when I keep pestering them to tell me about their breasts.
The assumption that there’s an inherent fairness to our natural state is ridiculous. Is it fair that some people are born better looking, that Lance Armstrong has huge lung capacity, that I have this weird tuft of hair on my lower back? Where’s the injection for that?
Technology is scary because it’s change. On Saturday, the best of the B-level competitors remaining in the Tour, American Floyd Landis, was told by officials that he couldn’t use his cool new aerodynamic handlebars. By next year, I’m guessing, everyone will be allowed to have them. I’m also guessing that by next year, even if he wins, I’ll still be the only one who knows who Floyd Landis is.
Eventually, if they can make a safe form of steroids and EPO, the sports leagues will permit them too. There will be nothing more wrong with that than letting pitchers extend their careers with Tommy John surgery or letting players be designated hitters.
If, in fact, Armstrong used drugs, will it make his comeback less incredible against a field of other doped-up athletes that he clearly out-prepared, out-trained and out-strategized? The sad part is that – by demanding ultimate competitiveness in everything except medicine – doping will have made him a liar. And we don’t like that in people from Texas.