Disability Rights & Ideas & Sports Posted by Oaktown Girl, 10 Jun 2007 02:50 pm

To Juice or Not to Juice

By Bill Benzon

All’s not well in the world of cycling. The century-old Championship of Zurich was canceled in April for lack of sponsors. The Tour of Flanders saw a 77 percent drop in live attendance. The reason is obvious; doping scandals have all but ruined the credibility of the sport. Will baseball suffer the same fate? It’s anyone’s guess. It’s clear that there’s been a whole lot of juicin’ going on. Congress has held hearings, and drug testing was started two years ago, but no current big names have been caught. So it is still easy for fans to hide their heads in the same sand that’s been covering all those WMD’s in Iraq.

And then we have track and field and pro football, where testing programs have battered “plausible deniability” pretty badly.

But that’s not my game, bewailing the parlous moral state of athletic play. Not quite.

Why do so many of us find it so easy to think of juicing as cheating? It’s not as though chemical performance enhancement is confined to a small club that forbids it to others, thereby creating an unfair advantage for themselves. Any athlete can do it, and the pros have reasonable expectations that they’ll get good drugs and competent advice on how to use them. As far as I can tell, such judgments tend to be based on an intuitive sense of what is right and proper, what is natural. And juicing isn’t natural.

Consider a rather different example of unnatural sports preparation, vision enhancement through LASIK, laser surgery on the corneas. Back in 1999 Tiger Woods underwent LASIK surgery so that he had 20/15 vision, which is better than the 20/20 that is considered normal. Once Woods’ success validated the procedure many other golfers had it done as well. Athletes in other sports, such as baseball, have also had LASIK-enhanced vision. But no one has complained about this.

Why not? Surgical alteration of the cornea is no more “natural” than steroid ingestion – and perhaps less so, as Nature did create steroids, but not lasers. It’s as though when we infused sports with moral gravitas we didn’t include vision within the scope of the moral compass.

Juicing helps increase strength and endurance. Normal athletic training routinely works on both. If you do the correct exercises, in the correct way, you’ll become stronger and be able to last longer. It takes hard work and discipline, with moral credit accruing to your account in direct proportion to hard work and discipline. Juicing increases your performance without, however, adding moral credit to your account. Therefore, it is cheating, as there should be just proportionality between moral credits earned and performance achieved.

I suspect that something like the above reasoning is what’s behind our ordinary intuitions about juicing and athletic performance – at least those of us who disapprove. And vision simply doesn’t fit into that conceptual framework. One’s visual acuity seems to be beyond the scope of one’s will; you can’t improve your vision through practice (but see this). This being the case, vision simply isn’t moralized. Hence no one much cares about Tiger Woods or any other athlete getting their eyes LASIKed to an unnatural acuity. That practice has no moral valence.

Is this right? I don’t know. My point, rather, is that our moral intuitions do not seem very reliable in these matters, especially to the extent that they depend on some notion of what’s natural.

Let’s consider a last example, a South African sprinter named Oscar Pistorius (NYTimes subscription req’d):

He would like to compete in the 2008 Olympics. He’s not yet turned in times fast enough to qualify, but he’s on a performance trajectory where he may well get the times he needs. He’s got a problem, however; his legs were amputated below the knee when he was 11 months old and, consequently, he runs on prosthetics. Some officials believe that his prosthetics give him an unnatural advantage:

“With all due respect, we cannot accept something that provides advantages,” said Elio Locatelli of Italy, the director of development for the I.A.A.F., urging Pistorius to concentrate on the Paralympics that will follow the Olympics in Beijing. “It affects the purity of sport. Next will be another device where people can fly with something on their back.”

However:

“I pose a question” for the I.A.A.F., said Robert Gailey, an associate professor of physical therapy at the University of Miami Medical School, who has studied amputee runners. “Are they looking at not having an unfair advantage? Or are they discriminating because of the purity of the Olympics, because they don’t want to see a disabled man line up against an able-bodied man for fear that if the person who doesn’t have the perfect body wins, what does that say about the image of man?”

My intuitions are with Gailey on this, but, as I have already indicated, I fear that those intuitions aren’t a reliable guide to conduct. Consider these questions raised by George Dvorsky of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies:

And given the ‘arms race’ nature of competition, will these positional advantages cause athletes to do something as seemingly radical as having their healthy natural limbs replaced by artificial ones? Is it self-mutilation when you’re getting a better limb?

Dvorsky sides with Locatelli and the I.A.A.F.:

As for Pistorius and his particular dilemma, I agree with the IAAF. He should not compete with normal humans. Instead, he should continue to race against other para-athletes and keep pushing the envelope of what is physically possible.

Eventually, performances by cyborgs will surpass those of unaugmented humans. It’s the disabled, after all, who will inherit the earth.

Now where are we? Cyborgs, for real? I don’t know. But winging it on moral intuition is not going to work. Pleas on behalf of purity and the natural are of little value.

It’s back to the drawing board.

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Responses to “To Juice or Not to Juice”

  1. on 11 Jun 2007 at 6:32 am 1. The Constructivist said …

    Just a quick plug for my colleague’s pro-steroids arguments at Objectivist v. Constructivist v. Theist, a blog I’m “on leave” from while I’m in Japan. I don’t know if the length of the leave should make the Party more or less worried, but I would like to point out that over at Mostly Harmless Peter Ramus has taken up the Barry Bonds/steroids issue, as well. And I’ll just mention that the LPGA just instituted a very stringent anti-doping policy.

    I think sports governing bodies have the right to ban what they want to ban. Those who don’t like their rules are free to start their own leagues. Personally, if we’re going to be separating competitions by gender and age and disability, I don’t see why we shouldn’t include doping/cyberization categories, as well.

  2. on 11 Jun 2007 at 6:59 am 2. Kiera PSI said …

    I think the whole horror comes down to the fact that “juicing” has produced some particulary nasty health issues. It also, depending on what is used, can cause behavioral/temperment changes. While I don’t agree that Tiger or the other golfers should have “abused” Lasik surgery to gain an advantage, we don’t know that this will have an otherwise adverse affect on their health, or on the lives of those around them. It’s also not something kids can easily emulate (unless you can find a parent willing to pay for it AND a surgeon morally bankrupt enough to perform non-essential surgery on a child), so they’re not as likely to learn “cheating” from their golf heroes (do people even hold golfers up as heroes?) as they are from football, baseball, or other sport stars.

    What happened to the days when kids were asked to write about their heroes and they wrote about a parent, or about the local cop or fireman? What does it say about us that our heroes come out of a pharmaceutical syringe, or off of a laser scalpel? I think it’s pretty damn pathetic.

  3. on 11 Jun 2007 at 7:22 am 3. The Constructivist said …

    Well, Tiger was pretty damn good (i.e., the best in the world by far) before the surgery and others who have had it haven’t seen too much of a jump in their games. Hell, glasses and contacts improve your vision almost as well, and if he wasn’t as sensitive to eye irritation from his contacts as he is, he probably never would have had the surgery.

    Once I found out I was red/green color blind and near-sighted/mildly astigmatic, I had to give up on that fighter pilot/astronaut dream (and soon after, the Yankees shortsop one), so I’d hate to see the augmentations I rely on banned from competitive golf, which I still have dreams of returning to….

    That said, it does seem like altering your body chemistry is on a different level than wearing glasses in a golf tournament. And philosophers have been exploring this issue in ways that go far beyond our gut feelings about what’s natural or proper. Take my dad’s book, Fair Play, for instance.

  4. on 11 Jun 2007 at 10:04 am 4. Bill Benzon said …

    Google Books has big chunks of Fair Play online, for free. Basically, the opening pages of chapters are there. The opening pages of the drugs chapter makes short shrift of naturalness as a guide.

  5. on 11 Jun 2007 at 11:12 am 5. Oaktown Girl said …

    Sorry folks. We had a glitch in the system this morning [it’s so hard to get good help these days!:)] and the YouTube that Bill had in his original post did not show up. So if you’re reading comments from email updates or the RSS feed, please go back to the post and see the cool YouTube Bill has up there.

    Thanks for this post, Bill. Very interesting (and complex) stuff. The idea of anyone actually cutting off a limb to have it replaced by an artificial one is positively chilling. I wonder if a few generations down the line, people won’t even give it a second thought?

    But for now, while one may be able to gain in athletic ability, you’d certainly loose all the sense of touch where that real limb used to be, yes? I mean, if you willfully cut off your feet/ankle/lower leg, don’t you also give up ever enjoying a foot massage, or feeling the sand beneath your feet on the beach?

  6. on 11 Jun 2007 at 11:41 am 6. Kiera PSI said …

    I’ll pass on the sand and such beneath my feet, but there’s no way I’d willingly give up the foot massage, reflexology, playing footsie with the D-Man…uh, TMI, sorry. But, I can see some warped (IMNSHO) individuals doing it in pursuit of the Almighty Dollar.

  7. on 11 Jun 2007 at 2:51 pm 7. Dr. Free-Ride said …

    To my mind, there’s less of a question about what’s permissible and what’s not in sports than in “real life” (broadly construed) for the simple reason that sports generally have explicit rules and those rules are generally pretty arbitrary. The game is to achieve the goal or best your opponent within the rules. To be sure, you can flout the rules, but then you’re playing a different game.

    (One of my favorite sentences, when presented on its own devoid of context, was uttered during an explanation of the arbitrary rules of the Indianapolis 500 and the sorts of scientific verifications that are made that the rules are not being violated: “This is not a race of experimental lubricants!”)

    This is not to say there’s never an argument to be made for changing the rules of the game. Mostly it’s the sneaks who pretend to be playing within the rules and in actuality are not with whom I have a problem.

  8. on 11 Jun 2007 at 5:48 pm 8. The Constructivist said …

    Hmm, thinking about it a bit further, as long as the “more competitive” leagues are open to any individuals and teams that can compete at that level, the kind of segregation (sometimes of competition, like, say, in pro soccer leagues and sometimes of result, as in marathons) we already practice is ok. If not, as in the bad decades of MLB, it’s bad news. Michelle Wie, once she gets her health and game back, will someday make a cut in a PGA event (I can imagine Lorena Ochoa doing the same if she decided to go for it, actually)–and I think that’s good for golf.

    Mackinzie Kline got a sponsor’s exemption at Annika’s inaugural LPGA tournament a few weeks ago and the LPGA allowed her to use a cart because of her heart condition–right decision, I think, in contrast to the PGA’s ultra hard line on Casey Martin.

    Bill, thanks for the link to Google Books for Fair Play–I have to admit I haven’t gotten around to read the new edition….

  9. on 11 Jun 2007 at 9:05 pm 9. JP Stormcrow said …

    In general I think that this is yet another area where the “sports as a microcosm” of broader society works. And to that end I believe that what you are seeing is one of several emerging tips of the iceberg for some biotechnology challenges that face society as a whole. It may be true of the Indy that This is not a race of experimental lubricants!, but sooner or later contests like the Indy get in line with general societal trends or they end up as just another vintage car race. But therein does probably lie the answer for sports as TC suggests, you spin off something new (like car racing was) in the cyborg division, the big question then is where does the ad revenue go? [Class assignment, go watch the original Rollerball.]

    In fact, I basically see this as an integral part of the spectrum that includes disability** studies, abortion and Terri Schiavo-type end-of-life scenarios. We have and will continue to develop capabilities to extend our capabilities that will blow even the most “open” mind. This is one of the reasons that it is so infuriating for society to be stuck at the simple-minded framing that we have for abortion etc., we need to be developing societal mechanisms to think through all of these hard questions and we are stuck back at square one.

    **Like the “disability” of being unable to handle the refurbished Church Pews at Oakmont.

  10. on 11 Jun 2007 at 9:38 pm 10. JP Stormcrow said …

    For me, the one sporting event that specifically brought that drug aspects to the fore was track and field at the 1988 Seoul Olympics. Headliners were Ben Johnson (caught and stripped) and Florence Griffith-Joyner (suspected, but not “caught”, died at an early age) and, for me at least, Butch Reynolds (NE Ohio native 400 meter runner - “caught’ a few years later.)

    Quick recaps.
    Ben Johnson - clearly the strongest and fastest in the mens 100m - as some jerk who sounded just like me said at a subsequent safety meeting at work; “Are we going to reconsider our position on performance-enhancing drugs given Ben Johnson’s results in the Olympics.” Basically speaks to my point above.

    Flo Jo - In the “Barry Bonds just look at his changed physique” way, most are convinced that her stunning performances (she is still ~.5 seconds fater than any woman in the 200m.) were drug-enhanced. Especially given that she had “disappeared” for long periods of time before her greatly improved times in 1988. I recall an interview with Evelyn Ashford where the interviewer said something along the lines of “That Florence Griffith-Joyner sure is something else, isn’t she?” and Ashford responding “She sure is.” with a restrained, but telling look on her face. The early death raised further suspicions, but I have no information to doubt the official results of a congenital problem.

    Butch Reynolds - Less well-known than the other two. Reynolds was officially “clean” in Seoul, but was caught later, but fought and won to get reinstated (he briefly won financial damages, but it got overturned and I believe went all the way to the Supreme Court.) Reynolds is from Akron and had a suitably “great, but not quite the greatest” Northeast Ohio career. He smashed Lee Evans longstanding 400m world record (dating from Mexico City ‘68) leading up to Seoul, but drew the inside lane in the Finals and lost to Steve Lewis. Reynolds has the two fastest losing 400m races in history - ‘88 Olympics and to Michael Johnson in the ‘96 trials (he got hurt in the prelims at the ‘96 Olympics themselves and did not make the finals). Reynolds is now speed coach for football at Ohio State.

    No big point here, except to point out the differing life trajectories and amount of respect accorded to three great runners at the same event who were in one way or another touched by “doping scandals”.

  11. on 12 Jun 2007 at 8:37 am 11. Sven DiMilo said …

    “Woods’ success validated the procedure” but of course it was an uncontrolled experiment. It’s not clear to me how improved distance vision helps in golf anyway.
    I think there is a reasonable prohibition to be made against machines that actually do the work being tested in the sport–for example, prosthetic legs in running (I believe it really is an “unfair advantage” issue; the prosthetics in question store and release much more elastic energay than mere mammalian tendons). You can’t have DHs stepping up to the plate with bat-swinging backpacks on, or servo-aided shoulder joints. Pole-vaulters with rocket-packs, etc.
    As for “juicing,” as with “drugs,” there are drugs and then there are drugs (and then there are “drugs”). Long-term anabolic steroid use does in fact increase muscle mass, but so does working out harder and longer without them. Creatine supplements also seem to work (for some), by permitting slightly more intensive workouts. There are three ways to increase the blood’s oxygen carrying capacity (and therefore endurance): working out at high altitudes, removing, freezing, and replacing the athlete’s own red blood cells, or doping with the hormone erythropoietin. Is one OK but not the other 2? Two out of three OK? or what?

  12. on 12 Jun 2007 at 8:39 am 12. Sven DiMilo said …

    yeah, “energy” not “energay.”
    Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

  13. on 12 Jun 2007 at 9:07 am 13. JP Stormcrow said …

    Pole-vaulters with rocket-packs, etc.

    No, but there are the moves to fiberglass poles etc.

    Somewhere in the distant past I read a novel where a character persists in using an old wooden pole long past when everyone else had switched and pursues it with a monomaniacal intensity - I think he gets to the point that he is as good as anyone ever was with the old equipment, but he is just a semi-embarrassing spectacle at track meets in the “present” day of the novel. As I recall, ultimately his pole snaps on a jump and he gets impaled and dies - real upbeat stuff.

  14. on 12 Jun 2007 at 9:34 am 14. Oaktown Girl said …

    I read a novel where a character persists in using an old wooden pole long past when everyone else had switched and pursues it with a monomaniacal intensity … As I recall, ultimately his pole snaps on a jump and he gets impaled and dies - real upbeat stuff.

    And such subtle symbolism, too!

  15. on 12 Jun 2007 at 10:26 am 15. James Killus said …

    I’ve asked the question of why Sandy Koufax has never been accused of “juicing”
    despite being on more drugs than a Deadhead towards the end of his career    . My short answer is that he was using drugs to “play hurt,” which is considered part of the “fair play” sports narrative, and fits in well with Jon Stewart’s line about Lance Armstrong, “He won after having had cancer of the balls; I don’t care if he was riding with a rocket up his ass.”

    Still, central to the question is what constitutes “fair” for sports in general; “fair” is “our guy winning.” The Tour de France is a nationalistic fever swamp, so cries of “unfair” will fly at the drop of a pill (not to mention the questions about controls on the lab test results). There was plenty of talk (and evidence) for MarK McGuire’s steriod usage when he was gunning it, but no one with subpoena power went after him. Could the color of his skin have been a factor? It’s okay when “our guy” wins, after all, and McGuire was “our guy” for more folks than is Bonds.

    Maybe there are plenty of our guys who are upset at Bonds closing in on Hank Aaron’s home run record, too. I do wonder how Bonds’ record for death threats compares to Aaron’s, though. Too bad there are no public stats for that particular record.

  16. on 12 Jun 2007 at 11:33 am 16. Zeus said …

    At one point bogus explanations were extended to keep women out of pole-vaulting. One particularly outlandish one had to do with pole-vaulting “stretching the uterus”. When I was competing in pole-vaulting in high school, my state qualifying height 12′6” was higher than the women’s record at that point. Now I couldn’t get within shouting distance of the women’s record which is a tad over 16′.

    Though it is true that equipment can give an advantage externally, it is the “internal” messing that gets me queasy. Lightweight bikes and racing shells (rowing) do confer huge advantages. Some rules have even had to be laid down in golf and tennis with regard to the equipment to prevent a completely departure from the integrity of the game. Fiberglass poles in pole-vaulting made them a heck of a lot more fun, less damaging to the body, and more likely to throw you higher. But athletes largely all have access to these.

    With drugs, an artificial “internal” advantage has been conferred (with health effects often being negative). There is something we rebel at there. Even though Lance Armstrong and some other athlests have genetic anomalies that confer upon them a “natural” internal advantage, something in us cringes about conferring artificial ones, even if they allow us to “even” the playing field with those “unfairly” endowed at birth with speed, height, greater cardiovascular mechanisms, etc. and I don’t really think there is an answer to this tension. It is more about an instinct, an art, a notion of integrity, and fairness measuring the effort to train and the barriers to perform being overcome and positive performance being exerted.

    If we truly wanted to go sci-fi, and we recognized it was the will or some undefinable quality that we truly admired to triumph over adversity and perform that we like about sports, then we would “measure” or formulate a person’s starting point, including in the calculation genetic advantages (Lance’s VO2 max, drops him down) and drugs and age, etc., and measure who much they improve. Maybe one prize should be given in each category. Drugs allowed (like in bodybuilding), drug-free, etc. listig top performances, and then another set for people (like the disabled sprinter) who have certain disabilities perhaps somewhat cancelled by certain enhancements (artificial “springy” legs) who “go farthest” beyond their basic starting point in performing.

    This is already being done to some extent on the West Coast. The Dipsea Race is a trail race that handicaps runners according to age and sex and gives them a headstart. Bay to Breakers gives the women a four and half minute headstart on the guys. Actual finish place depends on when you cross the line. Fastest times are also recorded but place is not determined by the fastest time necessarily, I kind of like this method. It emphasizes what is best about sport, that it should be competitive for all ages, that it should honor those that rise above their limitations, that it should stress effort over mere talent or genetic advantage. I’d like to see more of it done creatively in other sports (if possible, much harder in something like football, unless one had different leagues for different sizes).

    My two bits,

    Citizen Zeus

  17. on 12 Jun 2007 at 9:27 pm 17. The Constructivist said …

    Now I should start talking about handicapping in golf and what a great game sport it is but I’m leaving for Hiroshima in less than 12 hours and those talks I have to give are stubbornly refusing to write themselves. See y’all on the weekend!