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Prologue

This book is about a war—a war for the soul of sport. Sport depends for its very existence on rules; take the rules away, and what you have left might be a fistfight or a workout, but it won’t be sport. Today, however, the edge between what is acceptable in sport and what is not has become blurred, and this blurred edge threatens the soul of sport itself.

The search for a sporting edge brings many to the brink, both the men and women who play sports and the administrators, businesspeople, and politicians who regulate it. And once they are at the brink, the temptation to jump to the other side, to cross the line, can be hard to resist. Sport has never been immune from corruption, cheating, or greed, but these days it seems to be riddled with these vices. Just take a look at the headlines.

The media are abuzz with disturbing reports about the world’s elite athletes and the governing sports bodies, which have been investigated repeatedly about the rampant use of prohibited performance-enhancing drugs. The NFL has been embroiled in the so-called Deflategate scandal over cheating by Tom Brady and the New England Patriots. Tennis authorities have suspended players for fixing matches and using performance-enhancing drugs. Victor Conte, who founded a performance-drug company called BALCO (for Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative), went to jail for supplying Olympic sprinter Marion Jones, baseball superstar Barry Bonds, and others with illegal drugs.^a Conte alleges that the “majority of world track and field records were set” by athletes taking such prohibited substances.¹ The list goes on and on. I haven’t yet mentioned soccer’s governing body FIFA (Fédération Internationale de Football Association) and its longtime president Sepp Blatter, who stepped down amid a series of scandals and arrests connected to a culture of corruption at the very heart of international soccer.^b

The various allegations that sport is dealing with are explosive. For instance, a 2015 German TV series claims that pervasive doping took place in the Olympics over the past decade and that, remarkably, the organizations that are supposed to police such cheating turned a blind eye. The series alleges that one-third of all medals won at the Olympics (and the track and field World Championships) from 2001 to 2012 were awarded to athletes who subsequently had suspicious blood results. Russia and Kenya were identified as having an especially large number of athletes with suspicious test results, but the shadow of suspicion falls on athletes around the globe.^c

In the meantime, two athletes who experienced incredible performances during the summer of 2015 were Alex Rodriquez, a baseball player for the New York Yankees, and Justin Gatlin, an American sprinter. The good news is that both athletes were performing better than they ever had, and at ages well past the point when such performances might be expected. The bad news is that both had previously served suspensions for doping offenses. Their stellar accomplishments had people wondering about what, exactly, they were seeing. Were these rousing stories of athletic triumph or sordid tales of undeserved benefits collected by those who had gone over the edge?

Other debates are under way as well. Just one week before the broadcast of the German doping series, the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) in Switzerland issued a landmark ruling on “sex testing” by the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF), which oversees track and field. For more than half a century, athletics organizations have tried—and consistently failed—to figure out how to determine eligibility for participation in women’s events in athletics. It turns out that biological sex is not a simple binary set of categories, but is far more complex and better depicted in shades of gray than in black and white. Since 2011, the IAAF had used a policy based on female testosterone levels. The arbitration court struck that policy down in 2015, leaving the sport in limbo.

In short, the sports world of today is characterized by battles on multiple fronts, each characterized by a need for rules and regulations to govern what happens when the quest for a performance edge meets the boundary of what is allowed or acceptable.

This book is designed to help people make sense of these battlegrounds. There are a number of excellent books about athletic performance and doping.^d And there are plenty of narratives written about colorful but flawed characters in sport, such as Lance Armstrong and Marion Jones. But there is no book that looks at the edge, the place where the quest for athletic advantage runs into the rules governing what is allowed, what is fair, what isn’t, and what is really behind the “spirit of sport.”

The fact that there just isn’t a book like this is pretty exciting for an author. Over the past decade, I have moved the focus of my research on science, policy, and decision making away from space exploration and climate change and toward issues related to sport. Policy researchers are like sharks in the sense that if we are not moving forward, we can’t thrive. We are also like sharks in the sense that we are attracted to blood in the water, something (metaphorically speaking) that sport has plenty of these days.

But it’s not just the blood that appeals—it’s also the sweat and the tears that sport produces. When I was a child in the early 1980s, my father, then a professor at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, would often take me to campus with him when I was on holiday from school. I would wander the campus while he taught or did research. I would marvel at the rotunda, and regularly made a point of checking out the astronomy department (then my favorite). But most of all, I’d hope for a chance to catch a glimpse of Ralph Sampson or Jeff Lamp, stars of the Wahoo basketball team.

The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, and more than thirty years later I am a college professor. I am also one of those college professors who landed a job at his alma mater. I attended the University of Colorado in the late 1980s and early 1990s, earning three degrees along the way. The era of big hair and New Wave was also the time when the Colorado football program rose from obscurity to winning a national championship. It was an exciting time to be a student at CU.²

When I am older and most memories have long faded, I have no doubt that one that will remain will be a sunny September afternoon in 1989 when the Colorado Buffaloes had their way in a 38–7 victory over the University of Illinois. I remember defensive linemen Alfred Williams and Kanavis McGhee tormenting Illini quarterback Jeff George, and those of us in the student section tormenting him too. Seeing Williams and McGhee on the Boulder campus was a thrill then just like it had been for me in the early 1980s to catch a glimpse of 7’ 4” Ralph Sampson eating at the University Cafeteria near UVA.

An uncomplicated world is one of the benefits of being a teenager, I suppose. With age comes learning and experience, and the teenager’s simple view of the world inevitably grows more complicated. One week after that beautiful fall day and thrashing of the Illinois football team, the quarterback who had led the Buffaloes the previous two seasons, Sal Aunese, died from inoperable stomach cancer.

Occasionally during the previous few years, before he got sick, I had played basketball with Aunese and other football players at our neighborhood court on Canyon Boulevard, just off campus. From my perspective as a fellow student, one moment Aunese was young, strong, famous, and seemingly invincible. The next he was gone. Just like that. For me as a twenty-year-old, it was a brutal reminder that the fantasy world of sport and the real world of life are not so far apart. It wouldn’t be the last time that I learned this lesson.

I earned an undergraduate degree in mathematics and ultimately decided to pursue an academic career in science policy—that messy place where science and decision making meet. As a graduate student, I earned some money by working as a “mentor-tutor” at the university’s athletics department. The job involved working with specific students on specific subjects. Because I was pretty good at both math and writing, which every student had to take, and because I liked teaching, eventually I earned the privilege of working with some of the scholarship athletes who most needed tutoring help. In particular, I was assigned to the men’s and women’s basketball teams, and even sat on the bench with the CU men’s basketball staff at the 1993 Big 8 tournament in Kansas City.^e This experience marked my transition from starry-eyed sports fan to a budding academic with a deep interest in how we govern sport and its role in broader society.

Over the years that I have immersed myself in scholarship related to sports, I have come to appreciate that there are lots of smart, thoughtful, and creative scholars working on a remarkable array of issues related to the governance of sport. Sport probably receives more commentary and analysis outside of academia than any other human endeavor, except perhaps politics.

But at the same time, sport suffers a certain kind of prejudice in academia. In the United States, at least, more than a few university academics are offended by, if not openly hostile to, big-time college sports on their own campuses. This is perhaps understandable, given the amount of time and money that college administrators invest in athletics. (To take just one example: In 2016, Nick Saban, the superstar football coach at Alabama, received a salary equivalent to that of about seventy professors.)^f As well, many academics look down their noses at sport. As this book explains, this prejudice has deep roots in class and culture that date back to the nineteenth century and that persist today. Although there are plenty of university research centers focused on (to pick one I’m familiar with) the environment, there are only a few focused on the study of sport.

Yet sport is everywhere. Arguably, the enjoyment of sport offers as close as a universal value we can find among the more than 7 billion of us who inhabit planet Earth. Consider that nations as diverse as Iran, China, North Korea, and the United States are among the 183 countries that have signed on to the International Convention against Doping, which covers the use of banned performance-enhancing drugs in sport.³ The soccer World Cup represents 209 footballing nations, and the Olympics represents 206 sporting nations; the United Nations has only 193 member states. Look around and you’ll see sport almost everywhere. And where you find sport, you find all the messiness and complexity of any human endeavor.

Which brings us back to the edge.

Drawing on controversies straight out of the headlines as well as a broad base of academic literature, this book synthesizes a vast amount of information to explore the edge, to try to make some sense of it all, and to offer the reader a provocative but clear new understanding of twenty-first-century sport.^g

Make no mistake: although this book dives into the incredibly complex and interesting topic of sports governance, we don’t get close to the bottom of it. The book’s goal, however, is not to provide answers. The objective is to open a door to a fascinating topic so you can think about sport in new ways. Sport needs more thinking, more debate, and more out-in-the-open discussion. Many of the answers to the difficult questions facing sport won’t come from experts or authorities. Those answers—especially to the most important questions—will be shaped by all of us who care deeply about sport and its role in our society and our world. It is we who will ultimately decide what values we want sport to embrace and reflect.

This book covers some troubling territory. It is enough to make even the seasoned policy analyst more than a bit cynical. But please be aware at the outset that the book ends optimistically. If there is one thing that sport desperately needs in the second decade of the twenty-first century, it is a bit of optimism. But getting to that perspective requires an open-eyed look at the battles that confront sport. What we will see there won’t be pretty. But the first step in addressing any difficult challenge is to understand what we are up against. So let’s take a look.

a Specifically, for steroids. Conte also pled guilty to a money-laundering charge. He served four months in jail.

b Throughout this book. I use the term “soccer” to refer to what most people around the world consider to be “football.” To understand the origins of both terms and the evolution of their use, see Steve Hendricks, “A ‘Soccer’ Lesson,” Sporting Intelligence, December 6, 2015, http://www.sportingintelligence.com/2015/12/06/letter-from-america-happy-130th-birthday-to-english-soccer-071201/. The origin may not be what you think

c A World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) investigation of these claims concluded that more than 150 such medals had been awarded to athletes with suspicious blood values. See WADA, Independent Commission Report Part 2, 2016, https://www.wada-ama.org/en/resources/world-anti-doping-program/independent-commission-report-2.

d You can find recommendations for further reading at the end of this book.

e It was a short tournament for the Buffs, who were blown out 82–65 by Kansas in the first round.

f In 2016, Saban made about $7 million, enough for seven professors at $100,000 per year.

g This book does not consider issues associated with the rapidly growing world of “e-sports,” which refers to the playing and watching of video game competitions. This is a growing area, expected to reach $1.9 billion in revenue by 2018. It faces many of the governance challenges faced by more traditional sports, such as match fixing, doping, and accountability. For an overview, see Andrew Visnovsky, “Growth of Esports: Regulatory Concerns,” The Sports Integrity Initiative (December 16, 2015), http://www.sportsintegrityinitiative.com/growth-of-esports-regulatory-concerns/.