Doping is a myth

Friday December 16, 2011

The ban on doping in sport makes no sense and reflects modern suspicions about human progress, says Matthias Heitmann

Whenever I discuss the issue of ‘doping’, a strange paradox evolves before my eyes. On the one hand, people universally agree that using performance-enhancing substances in sports is a bad thing, regardless of whether they think it should be banned. So far I haven’t encountered a single person actively defending the use of doping. On the other hand, when being asked how exactly doping should be defined, literally everyone somehow starts feeling uncomfortable.

Those better informed refer to the Word Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) that has produced a list containing all substances and methods prohibited. When I then ask them about the parameters within which the decision to ban this or that substance has been taken, people explain to me that doping is either “health damaging” or “artificially enhancing the athlete’s performance” or both at the same time. Either should be enough reason for banning it.

It is striking that this uneasiness and lack of clarity when defining doping can be encountered everywhere: in pub discussions as well as on expert panels and discussion forums. The lack of clarity exists in most cases alongside the emotional outrage at doping itself. Very often, within a couple of minutes the debate turns to other issues which seem to be related to the issue of doping. People see a connection to the social problem of drugs, of corruption in competitive sports and society and to modern meritocracy in general. They also refer to health and medical issues, environmental problems, the difficult relationship between man and technology or even the nature of education.

It seems as if the issue of doping encompasses a wide range of anxieties and fears, doubts and prejudices. This is despite the fact that the actual question of what doping is and means is most difficult to come to terms with. One gets the impression that doping isn’t just a sport problem, but reflects all kinds of topics to do with individual and societal deterioration and decay. Doping appears to be a politicized and moralized issue. Why is that?

First, it is nearly impossible to politicize or moralize clearly defined scientific facts. Questioning the laws of nature in physics is too weird to be seriously considered worth the effort. The definition of the term ‘doping’, however, is not based on scientific facts. Doping is a myth. Not in the sense that the use of performance-enhancing substances does not take place, but in that it is a constructed and moralistic term that is able neither to summarize all drugs and techniques related to this issue nor to formulate any sensible guidelines for how society should deal with it.

Lifting the doping ban as such won’t solve the definition problem. Demanding the legalization of doping would add credibility to a term that should be questioned fundamentally. This is why getting to the bottom of the doping debate has to go beyond the simple question of how to deal with it practically. Law and legislation presuppose clearly defined rights, duties and offences in order to be useful and transparent and in order to make sense to people. Clarity, transparency and sense, however, are the exactly the features that are missing when considering the doping offence.

When talking about doping, people very often argue that the use of additives might be unhealthy and dangerous. This may be so. On the other hand, professional sport is not about health and safety. Professional athletes use and spend their physical strength to make their personal dreams and visions come true. Quite often the bodies of athletes are exhausted, but the athletes are still championed as heroes. Being a potential health risk cannot be sufficient to put a substance on WADA’s prohibited list. The list would explode with all potential poisons – and it would have to list competitive sport itself too.

Nor should the fact that a substance is artificial be seen as generally problematic. After all, who has never used additives or any form of product, chemical or natural, to perform? I confess: I need two espressos every morning to get going and I sometimes enjoy a beer in the evening to relax after a long working day. Whenever I have a headache, I use chemical painkillers to get rid of it. And I brush my teeth to make them last longer. In fact, my lifestyle is quite unnatural. I am fighting against diseases and against natural physical decay. And, by the way, so far I’m winning.

I have more or less adapted my physical condition to my needs – often by questionable means. This might not be healthy, but it is legal. My body is heavily influenced by hormones and I continuously manipulate myself with carbohydrates and other stuff commonly known as food. A lot of people, such as professional athletes, get more out of their bodies than I do. They have different aims and visions of what they want to achieve and in order to do so they use their bodies and influence them directly. They exercise every day to be able to perform better than the average couch potato. They work hard, use proteins, vitamins and the most extraordinary physical techniques. In a way, they do what everyone does, or would like to do: They use their bodies as tools of their free will.

In the end, we all live very unnatural and artificial lives and we all shape our bodies accordingly. In order to improve and advance, mankind has always used additives. Everyone. Always. To be able to survive under harsh weather conditions, man started wearing furs and building houses. Axes were developed to enable them to catch their prey, which they cooked to ensure better digestion, allowing them to maximize the efficiency of energy input. To cure diseases and to extend their lifetime, men started consuming certain plants. They developed agricultural techniques and domesticated wild plants and animals. More or less all leguminous plants we consume today, as well as cattle and sheep, are products of our own making.

Men have always used the brain to overcome the limitations of our existence. Our greatest strength is our reason, and to develop our brains we do the most unnatural things. We spend years in school sitting down and listening. When we read, we force our eyes to concentrate on minor characters, and if they can’t cope, we wear glasses to make them work properly. Without mental training we would not be able to survive. What would we be like without additives and body enhancing products? The answer is straightforward: We would be less human and definitely worse equipped to adapt to our environment. The use of additives is a fundamental human trait that enables us to do and achieve things we are physically not made for. It is absurd to introduce “natural” as a decisive category in sport, which is a purely cultural and therefore strictly unnatural phenomenon.

So where and how should we draw the line between legal and illegal additives? Should it be legal to take ginseng to increase mental performance, but illegal to take ‘proteins’ to become stronger and faster? What is the reason for the celebration of some additives and the condemnation of others? We could just say that the difference is that some are forbidden and others are not. But rules are man-made, not god-given. They have to make sense and if they don’t, we should question them. Referring to a prohibited list is like defining theft on the basis of a list of things you should not steal. No one would accept that, and everyone would understand this list as to what it is: arbitrariness on paper.

Some argue that performance-enhancing drugs should be banned because sports competitions have to be fair. But is it really fair that some athletes have the opportunity to use high-tech training schemes and methods to improve and others don’t? Is it fair when a tall person competes against a shorter one? Should we set a height limit for basketball players? And why is it ethically correct to attend mountain training sessions in order to increase one’s haemoglobin level to acquire a better oxygen intake, while injecting your own blood in the process of an autohemotherapy is frowned upon? And where is the moral gap between taking vitamins supplements and erythropoietin, the glycoprotein hormone that stimulates the production of red blood cells in bone marrow? Whether I deliberately inject additives into my body or simply wear them on my skin in the form of makeup or lotions – what’s the difference?

Of course, sport federations are free to create their own rules. The freedom to form and be a part of an association is an important right, and politics should not interfere and undermine this. However, the moral rejection of doping cannot be explained by that fact that someone simply broke a rule or that it may be unhealthy. The moralization of the debate is based on a strange understanding of ‘natural’ performance. Considering that human performance and human life in general is all about going beyond natural barriers and physical limits, defining doping as unnatural or as a form of cheating is absurd.

If we defined doping as an unnatural way of accelerating our performance we wouldn’t find anyone innocent. But the official definition of this so-called crime is even more banal: Additives are claimed as illegal when their names have been listed by a sport federation. That’s about it. We should be thankful that 10,000 years ago mankind didn’t have these kind of bureaucratic federations – either in social life, or in sport. Otherwise they would have banned everything from the use of axes to the domestication of cows in the name of fair play.

It is unlikely that the use of performance-enhancing additives won’t take place in the future. As it is a human trait, men will always aim at getting better at shaping the world around them in their interest. However, today’ society suffers from doubts about its potential and its purpose. Political and social alienation shape society to such an extent that nearly any scientific progress is considered as too risky. It is this culture of fear that fuels anxieties about people that are prepared to do ‘everything’ to achieve their goals. The term ‘doping’ encapsulates these anxieties and turns this preparedness into a crime. ‘Doping’ is a moralistic term that mystifies more than it clarifies. And clarification is what we need to make sense of the world and of the role we want to play in it.

A society able to dismiss the mystifications around the issue of doping will be a better place. Not by getting rid of this myth which, after all, is nothing but a sports-related issue, but by developing a much more rational attitude towards topics that are discussed in an emotional and alarmist way today. In achieving that, society might also be able to concentrate on the really important questions of life. Demystifying doping won’t make society much better in itself, but a world that is able to do so will surely be a better place.

Matthias Heitmann is a writer based in Germany. His German booklet “Mythos Doping” was published in 2010 by Parodos, Berlin