In the wake of the seemingly endless drug scandals at the Tour de France, the on-going investigations into drug use in baseball and track, and the not-so-distant drug case at the Ironman World Championships a few years ago, everyone is talking about drugs in sport today. Honestly, I wish we didn’t have to spend any time on this subject at all. But since it’s on everyone’s mind, I thought I’d share a piece that I wrote on the subject a year ago in the wake of last year’s Tour de France scandals.

The use of performance enhancing drugs in sport is a complicated issue with elements of black, white and the gray areas in between. As I write about this issue, I want there to be no mistake about something: nothing that I say should be construed as condoning the use of banned substances or techniques to enhance athletic performance. For those of us that love sport, there is no place for cheating or breaking the rules, no matter what the reason.

When athletes gamble with drugs, they put the credibility of their sport on the line. And if we don’t want cycling, running, and triathlon to become a theatrical show like professional wrestling, then we all need to take this issue seriously.

An issue of black, white and gray
Drug use in sport is not a simple matter. It may appear so at first blush, but there are deep ethical issues at stake. What complicates the matter is the gray area in which performance enhancement bumps against violation of rules. Performance enhancing drugs that have been ruled illegal in sports should never be used. Period. But that’s the black and white. Performance enhancement in general resides in the gray area in between.

Performance enhancement can span many different topics, from training methods and nutrition, to geography, to drugs. In one respect everything that athletes do in their training is intended to enhance their performance. If we look at our methods today and those of athletes in the past, they are in stark contrast. Today’s athletes benefit from decades of research on athletic performance. And everything from what they wear, to how hard they train, to what they eat is carefully tweaked and monitored to gain the greatest output from their bodies.

We know that nutrition and hydration are keys to athletic performance, for instance, and we embrace these tools whole-heartedly. Should it be against the rules not to eat certain foods or drink specially formulated hydration drinks?

Consider the impacts of high-altitude on an athlete for a moment. We know that people that live in high-altitude environments benefit from increased oxygen carrying capacity in their blood, which makes them more competitive when racing at lower altitudes. Should it be against the rules for a person to move to high altitude to live in order to gain these advantages? What about creating a high-altitude sleeping chamber in your home at sea-level? And if you see that these raise issues, what do you do about people that have lived their whole lives at high-altitude? Should they somehow be handicapped for the sake of their ancestral geography?

Those are a lot questions that ride right on the edges of the gray areas involved. But we have methods for dealing with them: the black and white rules that are set out by international governing bodies. These rules tell us what drugs we can and can’t take. They tell us that athletes must make themselves available for testing. They tell us that lying about one’s whereabouts to avoid a test is as bad as failing a drug test.

The job of athletes and coaches then is to maximize performance within the accepted rules.

Yet this raises another ethical issue. Coaches, doctors and scientists have the responsibility to work within the spirit of these rules. Developing new techniques and drugs simply to evade detection, ones that are not yet on banned substance lists, is not within their ethical responsibilities. It is not ethical to “work the limits” of tests to avoid detection. It is not ethical to develop new methods simply to evade drug testing. These are serious violations of the spirit of the rules.

Many people will say that athletes are simply pawns in a much larger chess game, one that involves billions of dollars in advertising, TV ratings, and sponsorship endorsements. Some would say that the system encourages athletes to work the edges of drug testing regimes, for the sake of getting to the front of the pack or breaking an elusive record. But that is an excuse of the highest order. Athletes need to stand up and tell those that would encourage them to cheat that their bodies are not tools in a war to win advertising dollars.

Athletes need to reclaim their bodies and remember their reasons for getting into sports in the first place: to see how far, how fast and how high they can go on the merits of their natural talents.

The use of drugs by the champions of sport today is a huge ethical digression that takes away from the amazing things they do. It’s disheartening to me and saddens me. Sports, especially endurance sports, are about pushing the limits of the body and proving to others where those limits lie. Cheating entirely undermines the spirit and motivation of the competition.

I have witnessed people cheating in races. I recently saw four guys blatantly drafting off one another in Ironman triathlon. They blew by me at 35 miles per hour. I just had to ask myself “why are you guys out here?” The point of the Ironman is to test your individual limits. Just like some of the stars of the big sports today, those four guys forgot what it’s all about it.

Let’s hope, for the sake of sport, that athletes find a way to remember what it’s all about. I can tell you one thing: it’s not about EPO, blood transfusions, testosterone or steroids. It’s about something much greater than that. It’s about competing fairly with other human beings to see who is best.

Today the entire history of sport is on the line. It’s time that athletes, and everyone else involved, understand that never before in the history of sport have we seen so many blatant violations of established rules. We need to get back to basics and find the soul of sport that appears to somewhere have been lost. We can get there. It feels like we’ve started in that direction. But we still have a long way to go.

Coach Joe

Running Wild with Coach Joe – a blog focused on marathon, triathlon and ultra-endurance racing, training and motivation. Bookmark us at http://coachjoeenglish.wordpress.com or use your favorite RSS feed reader to get the latest news and articles. Running Wild is also now available on Facebook and My Space.