Poor Lance Armstrong. The seven-time Tour de France winner has been stripped of his famous victories by the United States Anti-Doping Agency, which claims he used illicit performance-enhancing drugs. Armstrong never tested positive for anything, but his decision to quit fighting the charges has been seen by some as tantamount to a confession. So why shouldn't he be punished? Doping is, after all, widely considered the ultimate sin of professional athletes.
Dwain Chambers, the UK's fastest sprinter in the 100 meters, was banned from competing in the Olympic Games after testing positive for the anabolic steroid tetrahydrogestrinone. He claimed in his autobiography that at least half of the U.S. racing team at the 2008 Summer Games used illegal substances. The battle to control drug use never, ever seems to end. Why don't we accept doping will always happen and legalize it?
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That may seem crazy, but a pro-doping culture might be the inevitable future of sport. It gets to the heart of what it is we want when we compete in and watch sports, and what we consider to be "normal" humanity. An athlete who takes a performance-enhancing drug is relying on something he doesn't actually have to improve performance — whether that drug is naturally occurring or designed by scientists, whether that extra help skews their genetics to alter their humanity.
As training, coaching, nutrition and equipment has been perfected, the best times of the best athletes have been increasing at a slower and slower rate. There are numerous estimates of what the fastest possible 100m time will be, based on extrapolating current trends. The most recent study found that 9.48 seconds was the predicted "fastest" time.
Eventually, athletes will reach a wall, and then we face the question of how to keep sport interesting. We could start measuring to the thousandth of a second, say, but how interesting would it be if every race were decided by margins undetectable to the naked eye? There's no narrative of success there, nothing as iconic as Usain Bolt strolling across the line with the swagger of a man who knows he has utterly destroyed his competition. Such accuracy is also difficult to pull off in places like swimming pools, for instance, where distances of a couple of millimeters may be needed to decide a race.
That's where doping comes in. After all, it's not like it's going to go away, argues ethics professor Julian Savulescu of the Oxford Centre of Neuroethics.
"The war on doping has failed," he says. "Lance Armstrong never failed a doping test, despite being subjected to thousands. Nearly every recent winner of the Tour de France has been implicated in doping. About 80 percent of 100-meter finalists are or will be implicated in doping. The fact is that blood doping and use of growth hormone have not been possible to detect, and because doping mimics normal physiological process it will always be possible to beat the test." Thus, we should embrace the inevitable, and control doping as best we can."
This is a view echoed by bioethicist professor Andy Miah of the University of the West of Scotland. He argues that we should have a "World Pro-Doping Agency" to complement the World Anti-Doping Agency. "At the moment athletes look to find dangerous substances with significant health risks, but with the correct framework in place athletes can know the risks involved," he says.
It makes sense to make sure that athletes know what they are ingesting, as opposed to the current free-for-all which can lead to awful side effects for athletes. Anabolic steroids, for instance, have adverse side effects which range from acne, infertility and impotence, to hypertension, psychosis and cardiovascular disease. A regulatory body that lets athletes know what they're ingesting would improve athletic health.
However, this doesn't address the issue of authenticity and integrity that professional sport is built upon. After all, cyclist Bradley Wiggins could easily get up a mountain faster if he was using a motorbike. Our societal conception of sport as competition between opponents rests on a certain sense of human nature — what will decide the battle is determination, effort, grit and sweat. We can help the honest athlete compete with the doper by allowing both to use drugs, but that seems to start picking apart why we value sport.
Savulescu doesn't see this as a problem.
"Steroids augment the effects of training," he says. "They are like more effective training, which has been achieved in other ways. That does not corrupt the nature of sport. Caffeine is a performance enhancer which was banned but is now allowed. The relaxation has done nothing to affect the spectacle, nature or definition of sport. It has just meant we don't have to waste time working out how much Coca-Cola an athlete has drunk."
People still need to train to make the most of their drugs, then. It doesn't help to look at sport as being a battle of wills if, as we've already seen, the natural limits of the human body are increasingly the reason for success. I could try all I want, but I will never make it as a professional gymnast because I'm just too tall and awkward. The same applies to many athletes now who are never going to be able to beat Jessica Ennis, no matter how much they try.
We as spectators push athletes to be the absolute best, and in the process create the culture where doping is needed to reach those heights. It increasingly feels difficult to reconcile the purity of asking athletes to do whatever it takes to win as long as that isn't going beyond an arbitrary definition of "natural". Performance-enhancing drugs are that great leveler, that tool for athletes to bridge the unfair natural gap.
"Doping is not against the spirit of sport," Savulescu says. "It has always part of the human spirit to use knowledge to make oneself better and doping has been a part of sport since its beginning. Doping should only be banned when it is significantly harmful relative to the inherent risks of sport, or against the spirit of a particular sport. For example, drugs to reduce tremor like beta blockers in archery or shooting are against the spirit of that sport as it is inherently a test of ability to control nerves. Drugs which removed fear in boxing would be against the spirit of boxing. But blood doping up to a haematocrit [percentage of red blood cells in blood] of 50 percent is safe and not against the spirit of cycling."
Miah also points out that there is a lot of legal doping going on already, such as altitude chambers, which recreate the experience of training in thinner air to give athletes a bigger oxygen capacity. WADA approved such chambers in 2006 because they were felt to recreate a natural phenomenon. But then what's the difference between that and injecting someone with natural growth hormones, for instance?
This points towards the fundamental problem many have with doping &mash; its implications for what it is to be human. Athletics is at the forefront of that debate. Just look at Oscar Pistorius.
"He symbolizes the coming together of the two Olympic movements," says Miah. "If Pierre de Cobourtin founded the Olympic movement today, seeing how the gap between [the Olympic and Paralympic Games] is closing, there would be only one Games."
Pistorius represents a future where our ability to transcend what a "normal" human being is will also herald the end of a distinction between the able-bodied and paralympians — and drugs are a big part of that.
That's because, as Miah points out, human enhancement will become more and more common in everyday life. "The current problems will become less apparent because the athletes of the future will be enhanced before they even begin training for an event," he says. "Look at the human genome, for instance. Twenty years ago it took thousands of dollars to sequence just one man, now it costs $5,000. That process will only get cheaper. The continual pursuit of enhanced life will lead to these things becoming normalized."
We can see, from the use of drugs by students to improve studying to the medication of children to keep them calm, that personal enhancement through drugs is more and more common. As genetic profiling becomes more common, too, that will also herald huge changes as people are screened for diseases at birth that they may only have come to discover in later life. You can already see this as an issue when it comes to so-called "gene doping," where techniques used in gene therapy may be used to switch on or off certain genes associated with, for instance, improved muscle mass, or faster acceleration.
Doping, then, becomes part of the grand question that humanity is beginning to ask itself as nature is increasingly improved upon with technology. Just as innovations in Formula 1 cars eventually filter down to your humble hatchback, those pills and serums that athletes take to shave another 0.01 second off a personal best may well herald a common life enhancing drug later down the line.
"What is a normal human?" asks Miah. "Athletes in the NFL have 20/15 vision, which is better than normal. People are concerned about genetic identification, that the use of genetic tests will be normal. People may recoil from that, thinking that it may compromise what it means to be human, but I don't think it changes any kind of internal human essence."
That may be the crux. If there were to be an Olympiad in, let's say... thirty years' time, then will there be a Paralympiad alongside? Or will there in fact be three, with a new Olympiad for those who choose to enhance their bodies beyond what they were born with? Whatever happens, it will be a reflection of wider society's attitudes towards human enhancement beyond what is natural, or normal.
