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ОглавлениеA Little Edge Can Make a Big Difference
Pop quiz. What do Nellie Kim, Yohan Blake, and László Cseh have in common?
If you said that they each won a silver medal at the Olympics, then you get an A+. But I’d bet you are more likely to recognize the names of Nadia Comăneci, Usain Bolt, and Michael Phelps. These are the three athletes who beat Kim, Blake, and Cseh, winning gold medals, not silver.
We live in a winner-take-all world where, as popularized by legendary football coach Vince Lombardi, “winning isn’t everything; it’s the only thing!”1 As the late National Association for Stock Auto Car Racing (NASCAR) driver Dale Earnhardt, Sr., used to say, “Second place is the first place loser.”2 The difference between winning and coming in second can be exceedingly small. In three different swimming events in the 2008 Olympics, László Cseh won three silver medals when his finishing times were a mere 0.6 percent, 1.7 percent, and 1.0 percent behind those of Michael Phelps, but faster than everyone else on the planet.a Yet outside his native Hungary, Cseh is little known.
More than sporting pride is at stake between winning and coming very close to winning. Consider Heath Slocum, a golfer who turned professional in 1996, the same year that Tiger Woods did.3 From 1996 to the end of 2013, Slocum’s scoring average for each round on the Professional Golfer’s Association (PGA) Tour was 70.9, which he was able to translate into four victories and a cool $17 million in winnings (inflation adjusted), making him one of the top 100 money winners ever on the PGA Tour. Over the same eighteen-year period, Tiger Woods averaged about 1.6 strokes per round better than Slocum, turning that small score differential into a difference of $110 million in tournament prize money and becoming one of the most recognizable faces on the planet.
Here is another way to think about those numbers: Over eighteen years, Woods turned his 2.2 percent better scoring average into a 650 percent advantage in prize winnings over Slocum. (Slocum shouldn’t feel too bad; Woods did the same to everyone on the Tour over the same period.)b In sport, the smallest performance difference can be a very big deal indeed. No wonder athletes are always looking for that little bit of an extra edge.
Seemingly small differences in sporting outcomes can translate into outsized differentials in rewards. And that’s true not just for athletes. Coaches have long reaped the rewards of big-time sporting successes. In 1905, the twenty-six-year-old coach of Harvard’s football team earned a salary of $7,000, which was $2,000 more than Harvard’s highest-paid professor, and only $1,000 less than Harvard’s president.4 Eighty-six years later, in 1991, an academic observed that “today, a salary above $100,000 is not uncommon for the successful collegiate coach.”5 In 1987, Jerry Tarkanian, head coach of the highly successful University of Nevada, Las Vegas, basketball team, received a salary of $174,000 plus the use of a Cadillac. Swanky. But even those more recent numbers seem quaint today, when coaches are paid far, far more than professors and college presidents, and even more than many CEOs.
In 2013, Deadspin.com produced a map (see figure 1.1) showing the highest-paid public employees in each of the fifty United States. In forty states, that person was a head coach of a college football (twenty-seven) or basketball (thirteen) team.6 The head football coaches of the Army, Navy, and Air Force academies are paid far more than any general or admiral, or anyone else, in the US military, including its commander in chief, the US president.7
Figure 1.1. Highest-Paid Public Employees by State, 2013
Source: Reuben Fischer-Baum. Infographic: Is Your State’s Highest-Paid Employee A Coach? (Probably). http://deadspin.com/Infographic-is-your-states-highest-paid-employee-a-co-489635228, May 9, 2013.
Within most professional sports, differences in compensation are dramatic. Figure 1.2 shows the distribution of all player salaries for five major US professional sports leagues in 2014. The top earners in each of these leagues far exceed those in the middle, who (with the exception of Major League Soccer) are all extremely well rewarded compared to most people. Moving just a little bit from left to right on this scale means a dramatic increase in earnings potential. Even within the boundaries of elite sport, a little edge goes a long way. And in sport, by its very nature, there is always a little more edge to achieve.
On-the-field success often translates into off-the-field earnings power. Table 1.1 presents estimates of what the world’s top earning athletes made from endorsements in 2015, as well as the estimated commercial value of a single tweet.8 Roger Federer is at the top, with an estimated $58 million in endorsements, followed by plenty of familiar names, all of whom are characterized by extraordinary athletic success. Cristiano Ronaldo, the superstar striker for Real Madrid, can earn more than $250,000 just by sending out a product endorsement via Twitter to his 38 million followers.c Not a bad return on typing 140 characters or less.
Figure 1.2. Players’ Salaries in the Top Five US Leagues, 2014
Source: National Basketball Association, National Football League, National Hockey League, Major League Baseball, and Major League Soccer.
Old Rules, New Values
Here is another pop quiz. What do Ben Johnson, Marion Jones, and Alex Rodriguez have in common?
That one is easy. Each was penalized for taking prohibited performance-enhancing drugs—otherwise known as “doping.”
Their efforts to become champions went over the edge. They violated the “spirit of sport” as codified in the rules that they agreed to follow within their respective sports. As you will discover in chapter 2, the spirit of sport is an important but fuzzy concept, the imprecision of which sometimes leads to inconsistencies and even irrationality in the rules of sport. What is OK in the National Football League is not necessarily OK in the Olympics. The severity of sanctions differs across sports. For instance, get caught taking human growth hormone in the Olympics and you can be suspended for four years, but in the NFL, the penalty is four weeks.d
Table 1.1. Endorsements by Top-Earning Athletes
Sport is characterized by frequent appeals to admirable aspirations, such as purity of motive and self-regulation. However, such aspirations have proven problematic when they morph from fuzzy, overarching values into concrete rules and regulations. The sports values that we have inherited have a long history. The founder of the modern Olympic Games, Pierre de Coubertin, explained in 1927 that “our object in reviving an institution twenty-five centuries old was that you should become new adepts of the religion of sports, as our great ancestors conceived it.” Athletes became members of that religion by “the swearing of an oath of fidelity to the rules and unselfishness, and above all in compelling themselves to strict adherence thereto.”9
Pierre de Coubertin, founder of the modern Olympic Games.
Without rules, our society would be impossible. Think about driving. In the United States, we drive on the right side of the road and agree to follow numerous rules that govern how we drive. Red means stop, green means go. If people chose to make up whatever rules they wanted, not only would our safety be imperiled, but our ability to move about would be compromised. Rules—and following them—help make the world go round. They also make sport possible.
Not everyone follows the rules, however, so there are traffic cops and traffic courts, speed cameras, and parking tickets. A vast array of institutions is in place to govern the rules of driving. Sport is no different. The sports world has many institutions, ranging from referees and umpires to players organizations, leagues, associations, federations, and even scholarly groups and fan clubs. Sport is surrounded by an ecosystem of business and commercial interests that, as we will see, is not particularly large in comparative economic terms but that has outsized influence in culture and the media. Also involved in overseeing sport are governments and at least one international treaty. Sometimes these institutions break down or fail to do their job. Indeed, as we are often reminded, sports officials are occasionally complicit in helping athletes avoid the rules, and at other times they break the rules when athletes want them followed.
This chapter introduces the struggle that lies at the heart of this book: the battle between a performance edge and an ethical edge. The battle takes place in the language and practice of rules. And the rules, in turn, reflect a battle to preserve certain values. The trouble is, today the values that underpin sport are outdated, which places rules on a shaky foundation.
The aspirational values that underlie modern sport can be distilled down to four: amateurism, purity, uncertainty, and autonomy. Unfortunately, all four are either out of step with modern society or have always been mythological. As I argue in chapter 2 (and throughout the book), sport needs to be governed based on a new quartet of values: professionalism, pragmatism, accountability, and transparency.
Rapid developments in the twenty-first century and outdated sports governance have revealed the tension between sports’ outdated values and the demands of the new era. This tension has left sport in a state of crisis. Increasingly, athletes, teams, and administrators seek a competitive edge in the cutthroat world of elite sport—and sometimes they go over the edge in their pursuit of one. Sustaining what we love most about sport requires that how we think about sport keep pace with the changes in sport in the twenty-first century.
Squidgy Balls, Fuzzy Edges, and Hazy Rules
The travails of Tom Brady and his (allegedly) deflated footballs illustrate what happens when old principles and new attitudes collide: the rules get broken or blurred, the institutions supposed to enforce the rules do a bad job and get a bad rap, and no one can agree what it means to “cheat.”
Tom Brady is among the most successful athletes in American history. As of this writing, he has led the NFL’s New England Patriots to four Super Bowl victories, earning the award for most valuable player in three of them. By the end of the 2015–16 NFL season, only four other NFL quarterbacks had ever passed for more yards and no one had ever passed for more in the playoffs.10 His magnetic smile and movie star good looks befit the leader of his generation’s winningest team in America’s favorite sport.
Yet, when Brady came out of college at the University of Michigan, he seemed highly unlikely to make it in the NFL, much less assemble one of the most remarkable careers in league history. Skinny for a professional football player and lacking much in the way of obvious muscle tone, young Tom Brady did not look the part of a future sports hero.
The numbers bear out that perception. Each year, before NFL teams draft eligible players from the college ranks, they evaluate the players’ athleticism at what is called the NFL Combine. Consider these remarkable statistics: Of the 327 quarterbacks who participated in the NFL Combine from 1999 to 2014, Brady recorded the 325th fastest time in the forty-yard dash, at 5.28 seconds.11 Only two prospective quarterbacks ran slower. He also had the 6th worst vertical leap, at 24.5 inches.
With this performance, it is not surprising that Brady was the 199th player, and the 7th quarterback, chosen in the 2000 NFL draft. But in the years that followed, Brady surprised everyone, especially those teams that passed on taking him in the draft that year. The six quarterbacks selected ahead of Brady collectively started 191 games in their NFL careers, a total that Brady surpassed in 2014. The skinny, slow kid from Michigan outperformed them all. In fact, he has outperformed almost every quarterback who has ever played the game.
There could not be a better example than Brady to illustrate that achieving a competitive edge in sport is about much more than physical appearance or even the analytical quantification of athleticism in raw numbers. Attaining that edge, whether you are Tom Brady or the New England Patriots, requires a sometimes-mysterious combination of skill and luck. Cracking that code, or just being the right person in the right place at the right time, can lead to on-the-field glory and off-the-field rewards.
Tom Brady cracked that code. Today, Brady has a reported net worth of more than $130 million. He is married to a Brazilian supermodel. A postfootball career in politics—which Brady has hinted at every so often—seems possible. Brady’s opulent lifestyle and fame provide an easy answer to the question of why athletes seek to achieve a competitive edge. Sure, winning and basking in its glory are great. But the winnings are found not only on the field.
In the 2015 Super Bowl, the Patriots pulled off an improbable, last-minute victory over the Seattle Seahawks (whose coach decided—in what many people thought a moment of madness or hubris—to throw the ball rather than run it, even though the ball sat a mere thirty-six inches from the Patriot’s goal line). Another chapter was added to Brady’s storybook career. But then the entire fairy tale appeared to be threatened by a most bizarre turn of events.
Tom Brady playing for the New England Patriots in 2009.
It turned out that less than two weeks before the Super Bowl, an equipment manager for the Indianapolis Colts—whom the Patriots had beaten in the American Football Conference (AFC) championship game to get to the Super Bowl—had contacted the NFL with concerns that the balls used by the Patriots had been intentionally underinflated. In the NFL, each team provides the game balls that it uses when on offense, and the equipment manager suspected that the Patriots were using nonconforming balls to gain a competitive advantage. The Patriots were accused of preparing the footballs that they were using in a way that would make the balls easier to throw, catch, and grip. Specifically, the Patriots were charged with letting some air out of each ball, thereby making them a bit softer and easier to handle on a cold, rainy New England winter day.
The combustible mix of America’s most popular sport, one of its most high-profile teams, and its wildly successful and photogenic quarterback at the center of the controversy ignited into what came to be called “Deflategate.” The controversy led the NFL to investigate, which resulted in a 243-page report that suggested some sort of cheating by Brady and the Patriots. The NFL responded to the findings of its report by suspending Brady for four games.
Deflategate blows up. New York Daily News, May 7, 2015.
But that was far from the end of the story. It was actually just the beginning. Brady challenged the suspension, which the NFL subsequently upheld. Then the National Football League Players Association (NFLPA) took the NFL to court. The dispute thus moved from an internal NFL disciplinary proceeding to a legal action under US law. All this over allegedly deflated footballs used in a game.
In court, the NFLPA accused the NFL of failing to play by the rules of its own disciplinary proceedings through a lack of independence in its investigation, misrepresentation of evidence, and errors in its analysis that called into question the NFL’s findings. The science of ball pressurization underlying the NFL’s report on the alleged deflated footballs was challenged, and competing hired experts aired their different views. A cottage industry of analysts found a home on the Internet, and included everyone from skilled technical experts to far-out conspiracy theorists. The issue became characterized as NFL commissioner Roger Goodell’s rush to judgment versus Brady’s alleged cheating. Just before the next season began in September 2015, the court vacated the NFL suspension, freeing Brady to play, but the cloud over Brady lingered. The issued dragged on, and in the spring of 2016 a court reinstated Brady’s suspension, withholding judgments on the merits of the dispute but supporting Goodell’s disciplinary authority.
Tom Brady and the Patriots may indeed have been guilty of violating the rules in search of an advantage—consider that one of their equipment men was nicknamed “the Deflator.”e However, what is unambiguous is that the NFL, in its procedural missteps in conducting its investigation and meting out punishment, failed in its basic duty to fairly enforce the rules of the game that it oversees. Writing for Yahoo Sports, Dan Wetzel summed up the controversy, explaining that the NFL’s missteps helped the controversy evolve to become about much more than simply underinflated footballs: “How does anyone in the NFL—owner, coach, player, or fan—possibly trust the league office to investigate and rule on anything ever again?”12
All is fair in love and war, but not in sport. Sport is based on rules. Without rules, there can be no sport. Without trust in the enforcement of rules, the rules risk becoming meaningless, or worse, the rules actually contribute to a diminishment of the integrity of sport.
Whatever may have happened with those footballs, the violation itself doesn’t threaten the integrity of sport. But if the NFL fails to uphold the rules of the game or the rules that it has in place for investigations and punishments, then the integrity of the game itself may be threatened.
When the organization in charge of establishing and enforcing the rules fails to do its job, the spirit of sport is threatened. We may never know the truth behind Deflategate. But the NFL rules that governed equipment for football games set the stage for the Deflategate, and the NFL did professional football no favors in how it responded to the claims of the Patriots’ subterfuge. As the entities responsible for coming up with the rules governing the preparation of footballs, the NFL and NFLPA share the ultimate responsibility for the lingering controversy. The NFL rules allowed each team to prepare its own footballs, for use when on offense, with very little in the way of oversight or accountability. That created an opportunity for mischief while denying the NFL the ability to enforce these rules when a situation like Deflategate arose.
It need not have been so. Had the NFL had in place better procedures for overseeing how footballs are prepared by each team—basic accountability—Deflategate might never have occurred. And if allegations were raised about rule breaking, greater transparency about the handling of the footballs would have rendered moot future scientific debates in courtrooms about the application of the Ideal Gas Law to the behavior of wet footballs.
Reactions to the Deflategate controversy help characterize two commonplace positions when it comes to enforcing rules in sport.
One is that rules are meant to be broken, and if you get caught, too bad for you. NFL Hall of Fame quarterback Joe Montana expressed this view when he said that even if the Patriots altered balls for advantage, Deflategate was not a big deal:
It is one of those things that is a rule, right? It might be a dumb rule, but it doesn’t matter. [Brady] didn’t deflate them himself, but you can pick up the ball and can tell if it is underinflated, overinflated, or what you like. Everybody is afraid to say it, but if the guy did it, so what. Just pay up and move on. It’s no big deal. . . . Our offensive linemen used to spray silicone on their shirts until they got caught. Once you get caught, you get caught. Period. It doesn’t take anything away from Tom’s game.13
Players, Montana tells us, go right up to and sometimes over the edge, and if they do, they sometimes get caught. Big whoop. If you are caught you are penalized. That is what rules are for, right? Accept the penalty and move on.
The other position on Deflategate has been voiced by, among others, Charles Haley, another NFL Hall of Famer and the only player to earn five Super Bowl rings (two with San Francisco and three with Dallas). Haley, who played linebacker and defensive end, positions that often require chasing after quarterbacks (perhaps protected by linemen with silicon on their shirts!), called Brady a cheater: “I’ve lost all respect [for Brady]. When your integrity is challenged in the game of football, to me, all his Super Bowls are tainted.”14 Similar comments were made by Jerry Rice, the Hall of Fame receiver who caught a lot of Joe Montana’s passes, in siding with Haley: “I’m going to be point blank, I feel like it’s cheating.”15
Edge Battles
We all think we know what it means to cheat, right? It means to take something unfairly or act dishonestly or unfairly to get an advantage—to cheat is to gain an edge improperly. Right?
Defining what it means in practice to cheat in sports can be fiendishly difficult. Consider these cases:
Before a race, a sprinter takes three caffeine pills, prepared specifically by sport scientists to give her a notable performance boost.
A soccer player bets on the timing of a game’s first throw-in and kicks the ball out of bounds at exactly that time (and then he scores one of his team’s two goals and his team goes on to win).
A popular college athlete accepts money for his signature.
A woman with elevated but natural testosterone level competes against women whose testosterone level is more common.
A soccer player (who is not the goalie) intentionally uses his hands to stop the ball from entering his goal in a tied game near the end of the match (and he gets a red card from the referee, meaning he is kicked out of the match). The opposing team misses the subsequent penalty kick and then ultimately loses the game in a penalty shootout.
A tennis player is losing a match—and her composure. She takes an allowed ten-minute medical timeout even though she is uninjured. She regains her composure, returns to the court, and promptly wins the match.
A bicyclist takes a prohibited performance-enhancing substance, knowing that virtually everyone else in the peloton is taking the same stuff. He receives a lifetime ban from the sport, while other riders who took the same drug are given much shorter bans.
A man born without lower legs uses prosthetic blades to compete in the Olympics against athletes who have no such technological aids.
A young boy is given human growth hormone by a famous soccer club to aid his physical development. He goes on to stardom.
A badminton doubles team purposely loses a match early in the tournament in order to get a better seeding in the later knock-out phase of the competition.
A basketball player “flops”; a soccer player “dives”; a baseball catcher “frames” a pitch.
Each of these examples is taken from a real-world situation. And each is discussed in the following chapters. Whether or not each case reflects cheating, going over the edge, or not, is hotly contested. For example, a top official of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), the international body that oversees doping regulations in Olympic sport, has suggested that caffeine ingested as a triple espresso is allowable, but the exact equal amount of the drug in pill form should not be allowed. The tennis player who abused injury rules was accused of gamesmanship and cheating by some, while others applauded her cleverness. A soccer team that plays for tournament positioning in group play is usually characterized as being sensibly “strategic”; but the badminton players engaging in exactly the same behavior were sent home from the Olympics.
Where is the ethical edge that separates effective tactics from cheating? Sometimes it’s literally impossible to tell, because there is no written or unwritten rule stating where that edge lies. That is why institutions of sports governance are so important—it is their job to define where that edge lies and to hold athletes, officials, and administrators to account.
The sporting world today is overwhelmed by what might be called “edge battles.” Edge battles are to be expected in sport, because sport is all about securing an edge—over history, over an opponent, over what has been done before. Pushing limits and exceeding them is a defining characteristic of sport and even a fulfillment of what it means to be human. Such battles might not be so problematic except for the fact that ample evidence suggests that more than a few institutions of sports governance are either not doing their jobs or doing their jobs extremely poorly. Consequently, it is no overstatement to say that today’s edge battles are part of a larger war for the soul of modern sport.
Part II of this book zeroes in on five edge battles—probably the top five in terms of their current impact on sport and on what we think sport is or should be. The chapters in part II look in turn at battles over amateurism, match fixing, doping, technology, and sex testing. The chapters also offer some constructive and pragmatic ideas about how these battles might be won in a way that makes sports no less exciting and competitive (no less edgy) but more ethical and pragmatic (more in keeping with the spirit of sport).
Amateurs: Who Is Being Cheated?
College sports in the United States are governed by an organization called the National Collegiate Athletic Association, or the NCAA. The NCAA asserts that “amateurism” is the “bedrock principle” of college athletics.16 Under the NCAA, amateurism means that “young men and women competing on the field or court are students first, athletes second.”
But what amateurism means in practice is increasingly complicated. In the 1950s, the NCAA introduced the athletic scholarship, which in recent years has been augmented by many other perks and benefits that are provided to athletes in exchange for playing. Athletes are not paid salaries, but they are certainly compensated. In 2013, the American Institutes for Research, a Washington, DC–based nonprofit organization, estimated that major universities spent an average of about $14,000 per enrolled student per year in support of their education. For scholarship athletes, however, they spent an additional $95,000 per student per year.17 University spending on college athletes is increasing faster than spending on students generally, mainly because athletics departments are able to secure external funding support well beyond that provided by tuition alone.
As more and more money has poured into college athletics, due largely to men’s basketball and football, athletes and their representatives have demanded a greater share. Some have even called for salaries to be paid to scholarship athletes. The NCAA has responded by increasing athletes’ food allowances and implementing a stipend system (called “cost of attendance”), which USA Today estimated to resulted in $160 million in additional benefits in 2015–16.18
As we shall see, the efforts by the NCAA to maintain a façade of amateurism while college sports becomes increasingly professionalized has created tensions that threaten the very existence of college athletics. It may be time for the NCAA, like the Olympics before it, to move beyond the ideal of amateurism and embrace professionalism in a way that makes practical sense but preserves the unique identity of college sports. If the NCAA does not change, then change will be forced upon it. I make some pragmatic, common-sense suggestions that might help preserve what is so beloved about college sports while recognizing the professional characteristics of elite programs.
Match Fixing: Cheating to Lose
Match fixing, the manipulation of game results often associated with organized crime and gambling, poses threats to the integrity of what we see in sport, threatening in some cases to turn it from unscripted competition to staged performance. The start of 2016 saw the tennis world thrown into upheaval with remarkable claims of widespread match fixing at the highest levels.19 The specter of match fixing has on occasion blighted the National Basketball Association (NBA) and the NCAA. Soccer and cricket have for years been embroiled in controversies over contrived results. As Simon Kuper relates in the preface, even the World Cup has not been immune to such claims.
In 2015, prior to the Cricket World Cup jointly hosted by Australia and New Zealand, the New Zealand cricket team participated in a training session that, rather than involving bats, balls, and stumps, centered on a ninety-minute video on how to avoid the threat of match fixing. Among the threats players were warned about in the session was the so-called honey trap. A honey trap refers to the use of a beautiful woman (or man, as the case may be) who uses her (or his) sex appeal to get a player in a compromising situation, which is secretly filmed and then used by match fixers to blackmail the player. A player might be told, for instance, to score less than ten runs or to let in a goal. The scenario is not so far-fetched. In Singapore, for example, several years ago a soccer referee was sentenced and jailed for trading sex for match fixing.20
Although documented cases of the successful use of the honey trap remain rare, the threat of match fixing is very real, and the number of players and officials found guilty of it is on the rise. For instance, a German soccer referee was jailed in 2006 for fixing games, including one in the prestigious German Cup.21 Soon after, Italian soccer was rocked by a match-fixing scandal that included one of its most prestigious clubs, Juventus.22 Wikipedia has a list of top-level cricket stars who have been sanctioned for match fixing that totals more than thirty names.23 In 2016, the South African government investigated widespread allegations of match fixing.24 Worldwide, such cases are almost always tied to organized gambling, and, in recent years, they often have occurred in Asia, where gambling is popular and unregulated.25
It turns out, however, that defining what is meant by match fixing, and thus developing rules and regulations in response, is more difficult than it might seem upon first impression. Furthermore, studies have shown over and over again that many people, including sports fans, just don’t see match fixing as a major problem. I argue that because of the stakes involved, match fixing is typically found in lower-tier competitions, where simple economics means that athletes and officials are more easily bought off. But that’s not to say that match fixing couldn’t happen in the biggest sports settings, just that it is unlikely. Ultimately, however, match fixing is more a problem for the gambling industry than it is for the sports fan.
Doping: Lance Armstrong Gets the Last Laugh
Doping refers to the use of methods or substances that enhance athletic performance and are prohibited because they are unsafe or deemed unfair. One example of a method is the drawing of an athlete’s blood for subsequent transfusion back into that same athlete just prior to competition to boost oxygen capacity, via greater blood volume, and thus endurance. An example of a substance that boosts performance is the anabolic steroid, which contributes to added muscle mass and strength. We can divide performance enhancement into three different categories, which I call “stronger,” “longer,” and “better.” Some drugs can act on all three categories at the same time. In 2015, WADA included almost 300 specific chemicals and three families of methods on its prohibited list.
Sport has faced crisis after crisis related to doping. Athletes have been caught violating rules, and more recently sport organizations have been caught covering up doping and even extorting athletes. A few years ago, Lance Armstrong and cycling were at the center of this storm. More recently, international track and field, especially in Russia, China, and Kenya, has been at the center. Then Maria Sharapova and meldonium pushed athletics off center stage. Swimming, football, baseball, and even soccer and tennis have al leged doping problems. Rather than getting better, doping in sport seems to be getting worse.
There is ample evidence to suggest that doping in sport is endemic, and little evidence to indicate that antidoping efforts actually do much at all. It is time to take a good hard look at the notion of “cleanliness” in sport in favor of a more evidence-based, transparent approach to the regulation of banned performance-enhancing substances. I argue that the current approach to antidoping has been a complete and dismal failure, and that athletes most of all suffer the consequences of this failure.
Technology: Hacking the Athlete and the Games
Another edge battle surrounds what has been called the “technological augmentation” of the biological human. Beyond doping, athletes routinely take advantage of modern technologies to improve their performance. Golfers and baseball players have laser surgery on their eyes, not just to get to 20/20 vision, but to take their eyes to the limits of human visual capabilities. Ligaments and tendons are not just repaired, but improved. Athletes today run on and jump off of prosthetics that enable them to go faster and farther than human legs allow; they have surgeries after injuries that make their bodies stronger than they were previously. Some athletes go to extremes, such as fighters who have their facial skin replaced and bones shaved in order to reduce the odds that they will bleed in a fight. Cutting-edge genetic technologies offer the promise of techniques to create potential superathletes—perhaps not so far in the future.
Technologies also change the games themselves. Tennis, cricket, soccer, football, and basketball are among the sports that use technologies to aid in enforcing rules. High-definition television and ultra-slow-motion replays give spectators a way to watch games that allows for a better view than that possible for referees on the field. With such vision, referees’ mistakes and on-the-field action can pose challenges to the legitimacy of sport. Consequently, new rules are invented. Some are simple to implement, like goal-line technology in soccer to help the referee determine if the ball crosses the line. Others, like video review of football catches in the NFL, force us to confront the uncomfortable fact that a “catch” is a subjective event in sport. Technology can go only so far in helping officials, and at times it can make their jobs harder and enforcing the rules impossible.
Technologies threaten the integrity of sport itself. Hydrodynamic suits in swimming, grooved wedges in golf, and sophisticated brooms in curling have all been judged to aid the athlete too much for use in those sports. Technologies also allow for new ways to cheat: in early 2016, a professional cyclist was caught with a hidden electric motor in her bike.f When put to good use, technological augmentation of sport holds the promise of making sport better; when it is used improperly or unthinkingly, the opposite is possible.
Technology provides another challenge to the idea of the “purity” of sport. Technological changes will force changes to rules governing athletes as well as to the games themselves. I argue that we are overdue to open a discussion of technology in sport. That means that sport might change. Fasten your seat belt.
Sex Testing: When Mother Nature Cheats
The final battleground centers on what might seem to be a simple question: How should sports organizations determine who is eligible to participate in women’s sports and events? After all, pretty much everywhere you go has a public restroom for men and one for women. We all pick one. Easy, right?g
Biological sex is anything but simple, as scientists and sporting officials have learned. Western societies (in particular) over the past century have gone to great lengths to distinguish two genders—male and female—and to hide, erase, or gloss over any ambiguities that exist in the space between male and female. Sport has been a central part of this trend. For more than a half century, sport has looked to science to offer a definitive way to classify what it means to be female. Over that period, controversy after controversy has arisen showing that efforts to delineate once and for all what it means to be a woman for sporting purposes have failed again and again. The consequences have been significant for some athletes, who have been denied the right to compete or suffered public shaming. I argue that today we are in a position to end the half-century of debates over “sex testing” once and for all. Sport can serve its highest ideals by leading the way to a more just and equal world.
How to Win the War for Sport
The keys to winning the war for sport are the focus of part III. There I discuss science, governance, and how we might apply twenty-first-century values to sport.
Experts, including scientists, can be handy to have around. When an athlete is badly injured, he or she goes to a surgeon to get fixed. It is logical, therefore, that when sport is broken, we turn to relevant experts to fix things up. However, winning the war for sport will require more than simply calling on experts—it will require the ability to distinguish when experts can help and when they can’t. As we will see, science has an important role to play in antidoping, but too much science can make matters worse. In sex testing, science cannot provide a unique or simple test to tell who is and who is not a woman. Asking science to answer questions like this encourages us to hide questions about gender and politics in the guise of technical issues. And that serves no one.
Science and other forms of expertise have an important role to play in winning the war for sport, but only if we put experts in their proper place. A crucial challenge for the sports world is to be able to secure independent advice from experts, especially when that advice may be uncomfortable or challenge conventional wisdom. Too often, sports organizations rely on experts who may have conflicts of interest, which in turn may compromise their advice or how it is perceived. Better advice doesn’t mean that better decisions will be made, although it is likely to help.
Securing better advice is one part of the need to improve sports governance overall. For many decades, sports organizations, particularly international ones, like the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) or the International Olympic Committee (IOC), have evolved under the principle that they should be able to govern themselves. In the language of the sports world, these organizations should have “autonomy.” And for a long time, governments, sponsors, and athletes have supported this view. However, in recent years, autonomy has been used as a cover for corruption and the exploitation of athletes. Autonomy has failed sport.
We can look at recent governance failures in sport for guidance on how things might be done better. Greater accountability and transparency does not mean that sports should be taken over by the United Nations or that international sports organizations should become international corporations, although both options are well worth discussing. Rather, in whatever form sports organizations take in the twenty-first century, they should be expected to adopt the best practices of modern governance as they are applied to other national and international organizations outside of sport. It doesn’t seem a lot to ask, but sports organizations have often resisted such calls.
Finally, winning the war for sport depends on articulating a new set of values to guide sport to replace those that are outdated. And athletes should be at the center of the process of identifying those values. The voices of the athletes who play sport should no longer be silenced or ignored by the people who administer sport. Only then can the rules that make sport possible be truly legitimate and broadly accepted. Winning the war for sport will require much more open debate and discussion than has been the case to date. Such a conversation may be difficult at times, it may involve strongly held opposing points of view, and it may enter uncomfortable territory. Let’s get started!
a Cseh was 0.67 seconds behind Phelps in the 200-meter butterfly and 2.29 and 2.32 seconds behind Phelps in the 200-meter and 400-meter individual medleys, respectively; http://www.olympic.org/olympic-results/beijing-2008/swimming.
b Slocum likely has Woods to thank for more than $8 million of his career earnings, due to what I call the “Tiger effect” of Woods’s popularity on Tour purses. See Roger Pielke, Jr., “Measuring the ‘Tiger Effect’: Doubling of Tour Prizes, Billions into Players’ Pockets,” Sporting Intelligence, August 6, 2014, http://www.sportingintelligence.com/2014/08/06/measuring-the-tiger-effect-doubling-of-tour-prize-money-billions-extra-into-players-pockets-060801/.
c Ronaldo’s followers make up about 12 percent of all Twitter’s active followers every month (about 320 million in early 2016; see https://about.twitter.com/company). As of this writing, only twelve Twitter personas had more followers than Ronaldo: seven of those were singers, one was a talk show host, one was Barack Obama, and three were companies.
d In the NFL, the penalty is technically four games, which could occur in consecutive weeks.
e The Patriots insist that there is a perfectly innocent explanation for this remarkable coincidence; see Sean Wagner-McGough, “Patriots: Ball Boy Called Self ‘Deflator’ Because Wanted to Lose Weight,” CBSSports.com (May 14, 2015), http://www.cbssports.com/nfl/eye-on-football/25185129/patriots-attendant-called-himself-deflator-because-he-was-trying-to-lose-weight.
f A new term was coined in the process: “technological fraud.” See Benoit Noel, “Cookson Confirms ‘Technological Fraud’ at Cyclocross Worlds,” VELONEWS (January 31, 2016), http://velonews.competitor.com/2016/01/news/first-technological-fraud-case-rocks-cycling-world_394276.
g No so fast, you might say, based on headlines in 2016: http://money.cnn.com/2016/04/20/news/companies/target-transgender-bathroom-lgbt/.
