Latest Sports Doping Blip

[bjarvis]

I can't bring myself to call the latest doping incident involving Floyd Landis a scandal. A scandal invokes images of betrayal, public angst & anger, a general sense of outrage against the participants, etc.. Somehow, I just can't work up a good head of steam on this one. Or any other sports event.

My sports-related cynicism goes back a few Olympics. For at least a couple of decades now, it's never been about the sport events: it's been my-pharmaceutical-industry-can-beat-up-your-pharmaceutical-industry.

I've always been half-way to this point anyway as I don't see public sports as contributing much to the world in general. People who actively participate in sports are at least getting exercise, but for those who simply read about it or watch it on TV, it strikes me as a waste of time & focus. Yes, there's an entire sports entertainment economy built up around vast mobs getting excited about their favourite teams, but this strikes me as being a demented feedback cycle, sort of like Paris Hilton being famous for being Paris Hilton while not actually doing anything useful or creative.

So here we are with Floyd. It appears that yet another celebrity athlete may have cheated --the second test is still in progress and it may contradict the first-- through doping. And I'm not surprised. I suspect at least half of the baseball industrial complex has been self-doping. As well as basketball, hockey and a dozen other sports I don't care much about.

Maybe I'm just getting old and no longer have enough outrage left to dish out to every cause on the planet as I did in my teens. Perhaps I'm just reserving my indignation for truly infuriating events where people die or suffer extreme injustice. A sports doping incident doesn't make the cut in my current emotional triage. It just seems so twisted that Floyd's doping seems to be getting equal coverage with, say, Darfur, the Iraq war, the latest Israel-Lebanon conflict and corruption in Homeland Security noncompete contracts. What strange judgment makes an artificially elevated testosterone count as important as a war where 30,000 have already lost their lives and --worse still--thousands more may yet die?

Go dope yourself up, Floyd. I just don't care anymore, if I ever did.

Comments

[ciddyguy.livejournal.com]

I'm with ya on sports in general.

Although with some very, very few exceptions, like when one of our teams is doing really, really well, I might be interested, a little. :-)

[apparentparadox]

Your link isn't set up right -- it uses "http" rather than "href" for the <a> tag.

[bjarvis.livejournal.com]

Fixed... not enough caffeine --my personal doping preference-- yet this morning.

[rsc.livejournal.com]

caffeine --my personal doping preference

Does it enhance your performance?

[billeyler.livejournal.com]

There was another blip this morning I caught on CNN about a runner who "may" have been taking steroids.

I'm with you...I don't care. I don't have the gene that lets me get excited about sporting events.

[dr-scott.livejournal.com]

My first comment is that I'm glad sports fans are wasting their time on it rather than participating in tribal warfare or the other more destructive projections of what appears to be an evolved tendency to form teams and battle. Gay men are less likely to be interested in this. It tends to mesmerize and subordinate non-alpha males in the pack, which is just as well.

Secondly is the peculiar extension of the term "doping" to testosterone, which is a hormone already native to the body. Doping used to have something to do with dope, in the era when Tour riders used alcohol and benzedrine as drugs of choice. It's very hard to determine if additional testosterone has been added, and the test they used is subject to all sorts of false positives. And it brings up the question of where the line is drawn -- a few generations ago, clubby British sportsman would have felt "too much" training with excessive dedication was unsportsmanlike behavior. Then we have the recent example of use of the drug EPO vs. sleeping in tents where the oxygen level is kept low to achieve the same goal of increasing red cell transport of oxygen. The tent technique is equivalent to traveling to a high altitude location to train, yet attempts have been made to outlaw the tents while athletes who can afford to continue to do the high-altitude version.

Sports at this level is a business. Even supposedly amateur events like the Olympics have not truly been so for decades, and the widespread support of athletes by governments to achieve a political purpose means all those Communist athletes were professionals at least as mercenary as Westerners supported by endorsement contracts. We don't usually try to control what adults do in pursuit of their livelihoods -- there's always a competitive arms race of technique and artifice to achieve at maximum levels. We assume they will balance risks and advantages, and if they do it badly, it's their problem.

So I agree with you -- I don't care much, I don't think governments should establish any policy on these things because, like religion, sports is an atavism that should be beneath state attention. Those Senate hearings about steroids in baseball? Fooey.

Underlying this is a meme suggesting that natural is best and that government should be used to prevent "unnatural" methods of living better and dying later. Leon Kass of the President's Council on Bioethics, who is the intellectual source of the President's foul policy on embryonic stem cell research, believes science and technology must be limited to remove the freedom of human beings to use it to better or extend their lives, and that liberla democracy must be controlled by a guiding cabal of the wiser to ensure that liberties in the biological sphere are limited. So be aware that these battles are in part an attempt to harness the population's interest in sports to haul a Trojan Horse of authoritarian bullshit into law.