August 27, 2006
Doping in Sports
Doping in Sports-BECKER
I watched on television Floyd Landis' stirring victory in the hard mountain-ascending stage 17 of the Tour de France after he stumbled badly in the difficult previous stage. Landis went on to win what seemed like a remarkable victory, but tests taken after stage 17 showed abnormally elevated levels of testosterone. The French then stripped him of his title as winner of the 2006 Tour. Professional cycling is now in bad repute partly because of this latest scandal, and partly also because just prior to the Tour several major riders were disqualified for testing positive for banned substances.
These cycling scandals came not long after scandals in American baseball, where Bobby Bonds, Jason Giambi, Mark McGuire, Sammy Sosa, and other stars appear to have been guilty of using performance-enhancing steroids to push them to record breaking performances, especially in home run hitting. World class track stars, such as Olympic 100 meter champion Justin Gatlin, professional football players, weightlifters, swimmers, and outstanding athletes in other sports also have either failed drug tests or are suspected of using banned substances.
Why should various chemicals, like steroids, blood transfusions and other forms of drug doping, and looming possible gene doping, be banned in competitive athletic contests if the athletes know the risks to their health from using banned substances to enhance their performance? The principle justification for banning doping when it harms persons using "dope" comes from the fundamental nature of athletic competition. The reward system is based not so much on absolute performance levels, although that does count, as on performance relative to competitors. For example, Lance Armstrong, who has successfully fought off continuing claims that he used dope, is remembered primarily for his six consecutive triumphs in the Tour de France, not for his winning times in any of the races, or on any of the stages. Victories are primarily what count also in World Cup soccer and American football, in weightlifting and boxing, in running, in tennis, and all other competitive sports.
Rewards are related to victories because live and television audiences and the media are mainly interested in outcomes from competition, not absolute performance levels. That is, they pay primary attention to who wins tennis match, a baseball, basketball, or football game, a marathon, or other contests. In essence, competitive sports are an example of the "super star" phenomena analyzed by my late colleague Sherwin Rosen. Super stars, including superior teams, get large rewards even when they are only slightly better than competitors, while those who are only modestly inferior receive much lower incomes and prestige. As a result, professional baseball, basketball, soccer, golf, tennis, and many other sports have a few performers and teams that do very well, like Tiger Woods, Roger Federer, and the New York Yankees, while the vast majority of their competitors get much more modest benefits.
In this environment, certain types of doping are attractive to athletes because it gives them a competitive edge. The problem arises because overall outcomes when many of the performers use dope is essentially zero sum in the sense that if all leading athletes take steroids, other chemicals, or different forms of dope, they all tend to increase their performances without often having much effect on who wins or scores high in a race, game, or contest. In other words, participants may engage in doping to improve their performance and hence chances of doing relatively well, but obviously not everyone can improve their relative position. In a contest where relative performance is what matters, what may be rational for the individual athlete makes little sense for the collection of athletes.
This becomes a matter of concern when the performance enhancers, like steroids and other forms of doping, have a negative effect on long-term health. For then users of these enhancers are hurting themselves in the long run without on the average improving their short-term rewards from athletic competition, as long as competitors also use harmful enhancers. This is the main rationale for trying to ban steroids and other forms of doping from athletic competitions. It sometimes also leads to bans of other costly enhancers that do not affect overall outcomes. For this reason, golf limits the number and size of clubs that can be used in competition, baseball bats cannot be "corked", professional tennis limits the types of rackets permitted, and professional baseball, soccer, and other team sports limit the number of players that teams can have on their rosters.
The same argument applies but in much weaker form to performance enhancers that benefit athletes using them, such as training hard and keeping in very good shape, eating a balanced diet and keeping weight at healthy levels, or spending time studying opponents and videos of one's own past performance. Athletes would tend to use more of these enhancers than if they were not competing, which helps explains why many of them "go to pot" after they retire from active competition. But since the effect of these enhancers is on the whole beneficial to athletes using them, or at least not very harmful, there is little concern about such activities, and no effort to regulate them.
To be sure, absolute performance also counts to some extent, such as the number of home runs in baseball, scoring averages in basketball, pass completion rates in American football, the number of goals scored by a soccer player, and speed in running the mile and other races. But even here there is a crucial relative aspect. Roger Bannister's breaking of the 4 minute mile barrier was noteworthy not mainly because 4 minutes has some special significance, but because no one had done that before. Baseball fans are upset that Bonds, McGuire, and Sosa apparently took steroids because that enabled them to break the single season record for home runs established by Roger Maris, who did not take drugs, allowed Bonds to pass Babe Ruth in total home runs-Ruth did not use enhancers unless one counts constantly getting drunk- and helped Bonds close in on the all time home run leader Hank Aaron-who has a squeaky clean reputation.
While the case for banning various types of drugs and other enhancers is strong, the ability to control doping is limited. For there is a continuing battle between bans and the discovery of new enhancers that have not been banned. So steroid use in baseball was not banned until after several major players greatly improved their slugging performance through using them. Perhaps some sports would like to restrict excessive use of weights and other forms of training, but detection and control of these activities would be impossible.
The result is a fragile equilibrium between the banning of various substances, enforcement of bans, and the search for new substances and ways to evade bans on old substances. This is not a perfect outcome, but I believe it is on the whole better for competitive sports and for participants than a policy that allows all kinds of performance enhancers and stimulants.
Doping Athletes--Posner's Comment
Becker rightly stresses relative as distinct from absolute performance norms. I would add that this is a well-nigh universal phenomenon rather than one confined to athletics. The reason is that there are very few absolute standards in nonempirical fields of human endeavor. We form a judgment about the quality of a musical or literary work, an artist, a musical performer, and so forth by comparison with other works, other artists, performers, etc. So it is natural for the writer, the artist, etc. to do whatever he can to increase his performance relative to his peers. The reason empirical fields are different is that in them success can be measured in absolute terms; a contribution to knowledge can be deemed important on the basis of the value of the knowledge alone.
Why then the objection to permitting athletes to use steroids and other drugs to enhance their performance? (The objection to permitting some athletes to cheat by using these drugs sub rosa is too obvious for discussion: that really is unfair competition. The objection would disappear if the ban were lifted.) One valid objection, which seems however minor, is that it complicates comparison with earlier athletes, who didn't have access to performance-enhancing drugs. But in many sports, such as baseball, they had an advantage denied to current athletes: black and Hispanic athletes were excluded from the competition. Other changes that complicate comparison between baseball players of this generation with those of earlier generations include the advent of night baseball, natural gains in height and weight because of better nutrition, improved vision correction, longer seasons, better equipment, better orthopedic surgery, more sophisticated techniques for managing a team, and better health care generally.
As Becker points out, no objections are raised to athletes' improving their performance by better training, more exercise, more practice, or abstention from alcohol and cigarettes. So maybe the root of the objection to the performance-enhancing drugs is that they have long-term deleterious effects on the health of the user. This in turn gives rise to an externality, since use by some athletes depresses the relative performance of non-users. Yet I do not think that serious objections would be raised to self-destructive behavior in pursuit of athletic distinction as long as the behavior did not involve drug use. A football lineman will not be criticized for blowing himself up into a 400-pound freak if he does it without the aid of drugs, even though the long-term effects on his health of the added weight are very bad and even though his weight gain may place pressure on other linemen to match it.
Nor do we criticize poets and other artists who deliberately lead unhealthy lives, either in search of experiences that they can incorporate into their work or out of sheer irresponsibility or mental derangement, even though they might be thought to be competing unfairly with the normals. Some associates at large law firms work much too hard for the good of their health in order to steal a march on their competitors, but they are not criticized either.
So is the ban on doping athletes just a mindless reaction against novelty and science, a Luddite reaction? Or does it just reflect a confusion between cheating when drugs are banned and lifting the ban? I think not. There are two valid reasons for the ban. One is the pure "arms race" character of the doping; there is no improvement in the entertainment quality of football if 400–pound linemen confront each other rather than 200-pound linemen. In contrast, the overworking law firm associates increase their firm's utput.
The other justification for the ban is that it is a rational means of protecting children. Because successful athletes earn high salaries, because success as an athlete does not require a high order of intelligence, and because an athletic career to be successful must begin in high school (in the case of tennis, perhaps even earlier), there is enormous competition by minors to achieve athletic success. If performance-enhancing drugs were legal, their use by teenagers would be pervasive, and teenagers lack sufficient maturity to trade off the benefits of an athletic career (discounted by the very low probability that any given teenage athlete will have a really successful athletic career) against the long-term damage to their health. Of course adult athletes could be permitted to use such drugs but minors forbidden to do so, but such a legal regime would be difficult to enforce, especially given the "role model" status of adult athletes in the eyes of minors. The lifting of the ban would remove all stigma from the use of such drugs. Their legal and widespread use by star athletes would validate the drugs in the eyes of impressionable youth.