Steroids, Sports, and Capitalism/Ben Johnson Is My Hero

ESPN.com features an article about Marion Jones' ex-husband C.J. Hunter accusing her of using banned substances including designer steroids, growth hormone, and EPO during her preparations for the 2000 Olympics in Sydney. Jones' handlers are claiming that Hunter, who has tested positive for steroids many times, is just trying to get revenge on Jones for ending their marriage.

Who knows who's telling the truth? It's not quite believable that anybody got involved with BALCO to get things you can buy at GNC, but it's also eminently believable that Hunter is purely motivated by vindictiveness. There could be truth to what both sides are saying.

This sordid little story summarizes neatly a couple of related narratives in contemporary sports. The first is that the Olympic games are a mockery of their original principles, dependent on shamateurism, steroids, and importing events like soccer and tennis where the Olympic competition functions as a glorified exhibition. Even rugby union, the most Phillippian and blue-blooded sport this side of polo, finally recognized in 1995 that amateurism is bad for the sport that tries (always unsuccessfully) to enforce it. Athletes will always accept whatever compensation they can, and to blame them is to miss the point entirely. If it's wrong for runners, swimmers, wrestlers, and weightlifters to get paid for their athletic talent and achievements, then it's just as wrong for basketball, baseball, or football players to get paid. Which is not to say that it's wrong for the market to determine how much any particular athlete should make; on the contrary, that situation would be ideal. All that a ban on professionalism achieves, like any attempt to throttle an open market into submission, is to drive talent away from amateur sports and thereby diminish their quality of play. [The only really successful example of socialism in sports, the NFL, depends on an enormous revenue base, a pro-football ideology in many areas of the country, and salaries so exorbitant that a few years in the league will allow players to get by financially for life. The NFL might even be a vision of what post-capitalism will look like: such huge surpluses in resources that traditional market forces no longer obtain.--ed.] Another point about the Olympics: they suck. Do you give a shit who wins the gold in synchronized swimming or ice dancing? If you're planning on watching the Olympics at any length, keep repeating this mantra, and you'll be cured: just because the Gumbel brothers say so, doesn't mean it's any good.

If the Olympics are a joke at the expense of the games, then coverage of the steroid scandals has been a joke at the expense of fans and (especially) sportswriters. I happen to have some breaking news: Barry Bonds used steroids. Sammy Sosa used steroids. Mark McGwire used steroids. Jason Giambi used steroids. And so did and so do many other elite professional athletes. It's not terribly difficult to explain wild fluctuations in weight, body composition, strength, and speed. Confronted with these facts, sportswriters have two choices. Either they can remain willfully and painfully credulous---these are the ones who always hide behind weasel phrases and refuse to say anything directly; or they can join the righteous minority that acts as if steroid use is a corruption of the otherwise noble ethos of professional sports (Mike Lupica, hello).

The reason that steroids are so prevalent in sports---this is something you'll never read in SI---is that they are fantastically effective. They deliver exactly what they promise to, enable athletes to achieve feats that were once thought unimaginable, and provide terrific entertainment to fans. It's silly to protest that the athletes who use steroids aren't haven't earned their records. Of course they have. No one else swung the bat or ran the race for them. They did it all by themselves.

"But steroids create an unfair advantage, don't they? What does it mean that Barry Bonds hit 73 homeruns on steroids when Roger Maris hit 61 without them?"

Glad you asked. I'll tell you exactly what it means. Sports training and nutrition are improving constantly. A modern athlete who exercises and eats properly enjoys a massive edge over someone like Babe Ruth who trained on beer and hot dogs. It's simply impossible to compare records amongst generations of athletes, firstly because they competed against different opponents, but more importantly, because the more recent the athlete, the better the knowledge of training available to him. Take two athletes, A and B. A follows the Babe Ruth approach to preparation, while B works out 6 days a week and supplements his diet with extra protein. Assuming A and B are equally well-coached, and have the same amount of talent and composure under pressure, not only will B outperform A, but it won't even be close. Was B cheating? Obviously not. Now let's introduce athlete C. He does everything B does, but also takes something the boys at BALCO cooked up. Keep the other variables constant, as before. Now C wins by wide margins. Tell me why C was cheating when B wasn't.

"Because B worked for his advantage over A, and C didn't work for his advantage over B." Nice try. B's advantage over A was nutritional as well as physical. Something as simple as protein supplementation makes a huge difference in overall muscle anabolism; in fact, without surplus protein, no amount of exercise will make you the slightest bit bigger or stronger. Do protein supplements create an unearned and therefore unacceptable edge? All they are is a mixture of condensed milk proteins and carbohydrates. Shall we next disallow athletes from eating large portions of meat and potatoes? Should we regulate their diets so that no one gains a nutritional advantage over any one else? Or should we instead allow them to improve their physical abilities as much as they possibly can, and reward them for utilizing advancements in biology and nutrition to augment their training?

Now look at these questions from the other direction: if protein supplementation is okay, then why not creatine? It is, after all, a naturally occuring substance that is responsible for the production of ATP, the nucleotide complex that serves as the body's energy currency, a fundamental component of metabolism. And on and on with all the other available supplements. The effects they produce are "natural" in the sense that they are organic, i.e. changes in the size, strength, and endurance of muscles and other tissues. And they are all either naturally occuring body chemicals or else derived from them.

It should be clear that any firm line-drawing on these questions is absurd. Yet the prevailing opinion is not only that a line should be drawn, but that it should be drawn at steroids. What pious, puritan nonsense! How much of the current anti-steroid-ism, I wonder, is the result of decades of miseducation and propaganda about steroids and other illegal drugs? [The war on drugs is a huge, grotesque lie supported by smaller grotesque lies, but that's the subject of another post.--ed.] Whatever the dangers of steroids, and they are real if consistently exaggerated, the emergence of the so-called designer steroids augurs a time in the not-too-distant-future when synthetic drugs can combine the advantages of steroids with none of the side effects. At present, a professional athlete's choice to use steroids over a long period of time is a conscious decision to sacrifice quality of life in the future for achievement in the present. It's an ancient ethical dillemma, but as long as we remain a free society, then the choice belongs to the athlete. The athletes who choose not to use performance enhancing drugs are nicely compensated by the enormous mandatory minimum salaries their players' unions have secured.