OK’ing performance enhancing drugs will level the playing field
On April 22, Toronto Blue Jays first baseman Chris Colabello gathered his teammates in the clubhouse and told them he had been suspended for 80 games after testing positive for de hydro ch lo rm ethyl testosterone— a performance enhancing steroid.
Colabello released a statement, expressing his frustration and disappointment. “I hope that before anyone passes judgment,” it read, “they can take a look at the man that I am, and everything that I have done to get to where I am in my career.”
Judgment, unsurprisingly, was passed. In baseball, getting ahead by taking performance enhancing drugs (PEDs) is still perceived as a cardinal sin, tantamount to winning an election by stuffing the ballot boxes. Now Colabello’s heroic narrative of a hardscrabble athlete dutifully working his way from the minors to the major leagues, a story of determination and stick-to-itiveness, becomes a tragic tale of a career cast under the pall of cheating and suspicions of doping.
Of course, there is one fairly obvious way to dispel this cloud of professional shame and personal disgrace: sanction the use of performance enhancing drugs in pro sports.
Let’s use Chris Colabello’s Cinderella story as an example. If the urine and blood test results conducted by the league are true (and they’re not, according to Colabello, who claims he would “never compromise the integrity of the game”) it’s not so much PEDs corrupted a feel-good story. Rather, they helped create it. If Colabello was using steroids, then it was his doping (in combination with his training and his staunch resolve) that allowed him to rise above his status as just another minor league hopeful.
And anyway, Colabello’s only true slip-up may have been getting caught. In his 2005 book Juiced, former Jay Jose Canseco estimated 80 per cent of pro players use steroids. More recently, The Chicago Tribune described MLB’s crusade against PEDs as “unwinnable.” “It’s part of the game,” Chicago Cubs outfielder Jason Heyward told the paper. “In life, nobody’s perfect . . . There are people doing stuff maybe to try to get an edge.”
Of course it is precisely this imperfection that creates a market for PEDs. Middling minor league prospects such as Chris Colabello are driven to catch up with pro stars who may be — at the risk of sounding like some Soviet biochemist juicing up that Übermensch boxer from Rocky IV — their genetic superiors. PEDs can be thus viewed not as an attempt to cheat the system, but as an attempt to correct for the essential unevenness of the genetic lottery. When used safely and responsibly, PEDs level playing the field.
It’s an argument endorsed by prominent bioethicists, such as Princeton’s Peter Singer and Oxford’s Julian Savulescu. Both support dropping the ban on PEDs in pro sports, as long as athletes aren’t severely risking their health in order to improve. As Singer writes, “The issue is the red blood cell count, not the means used to elevate it.” Regulatory bodies should exist to monitor the wellness of players — because, like all drugs, steroids and other PEDs pose significant harms when abused — and not merely sifting through urine for traces of human growth hormone and dolling out suspensions.
Such arguments may seem galling to fans who delude themselves into believing that sports are beholden to some rubric of purity or grace. In the words of the conservative commentator George Will, “Sport should be the triumph of character, openly tested, not of technology, surreptitiously employed.”
Yet there exists no arena of unadulterated virtuousness to permit for such tests of character. As soon as an athlete lifts a dumbbell, or puts on a ball cap to shield himself from the sun’s blinding rays, he becomes in some respect augmented by technology. It’s the wishful thinking of should be that sees athletes like Colabello (or, more recently, Florida Marlins second baseman Dee Gordon) railroaded for keeping pace with their competitors. The ritual of public shaming and excommunication is now part of the spectacle of pro sports — with scandalized, scapegoated cheaters conspicuously cast to the side, re-purifying the sport by virtue of their exclusion.
Contra someone like George Will, Oxford’s Savulescu has written that doping is not antithetical to the fundamental character of sport, but the purest declaration of it. “Humans are not like racehorses,” he writes, “flogged by the whip of the jockey: they are their own masters. The choice to be better is an expression of that, and so performance enhancement embodies the spirit of humanity.”
It’s not that Chris Colabello (or Dee Gordon, or Barry Bonds, or Lance Armstrong) represent the shameful underbelly of the “spirit” of professional sport and its drive for excellence. It’s that they capture the very essence of that spirit, and that drive. That the public admonishes performance enhancement as shameful and ignoble says more about our naive, unreasonable expectations of our heroes than it says about the heroes themselves.
John Semley is a Toronto-based writer and author who contributes regularly to the Toronto Star.