Phillip Barron
The Herald Sun
Jan Ulrich and Ivan Basso lost their bids for the yellow jersey to Operation Puerta before this year’s Tour de France even began.
Operation Puerta isn’t a new contender for victory; it’s a six-month doping investigation and arguably the most significant doping scandal of bicycle racing. Thanks to OP, thirteen professional riders were kicked out of the race and more than forty others are involved in a continuing investigation.
Around the same time Operation Puerta’s news was breaking, Lance Armstrong was wrapping up his latest victory. He settled a libel suit with a British newspaper that had accused him of using banned drugs to speed his recovery from cancer and boost him to a Tour de France victory in 1999.
What’s at issue when cyclists are accused of doping is whether or not professional athletes have cheated. The Tour de France is a stage race, spanning nearly a month with riders covering up to 130 miles per day with brutal climbing stages in the Alps and Pyrenees. Since stage races in cycling are tests of endurance and aerobic strength, cheating methods revolve around ways to increase the rider’s aerobic efficiency.
Did Lance use EPO? Did Jan Ulrich freeze his own blood for a transfusion at a later time? What would it matter if they did? More plainly, what’s wrong with doping anyway?
The superficial answer is that doping is against the rules. Every professional sport has a governing body that establishes the rules of the sport and the conditions under which athletes may compete. Doping is breaking the rules of the game. In a sense, it’s like goaltending in basketball or slide-tackling in soccer.
But goaltending or slide-tackling can happen by accident, whereas doping is intentional. That’s why the penalty for doping is more serious than giving the other team a foul shot or a free kick.
Doping is rule-breaking that you try desperately and secretly to get away with. An athlete caught doping will usually have gone to elaborate lengths to hide it.
In other words, doping is cheating.
For a more meaningful answer to the question what’s wrong with doping, we have to see sport in a more meaningful context. And to do this, we turn to the arbiters of meaning – philosophers.
In The Philosophical Athlete, Heather Reid says that all sports have moments of challenge — “times when an athlete finds him- or herself alone, faced with a particular task and the very real possibilities of success or failure.”
It is these moments of challenge that make sport meaningful. Whether or not you can rise to the challenge – whether the challenge is to make the free throw, outrun a defender, or beat the current best time in a bicycle race — is a matter of discipline and skill. Whether you can do so while respecting your opponents is a matter of personal integrity.
An athlete who dopes disrespects him or herself as well as his/her competitors, officials, and fans.
Without opponents there wouldn’t be any competitive sports. Using drugs or blood transfusions to gain an advantage over your competitors is to disrespect your competitors by ignoring the rules of game. Without a competitor, there is no opportunity to win. Opponents are necessary to play the game or race the race. So, respect for your competitors is what fairness in sport is based on.
Cheating (or doping) enters the picture when the desire to win the game supplants the desire to be an athlete who is worthy of winning.
Pop culture’s values may be different. On reality TV or in a culture of on-demand instant gratification, cheating is more a strategy to get ahead of your competitor than the forbidden alternative. Indeed, in these nihilistic venues getting caught, rather than cheating, is the sign of weakness.
But the concepts of respect and fairness, archaic as they may sound to some, are still what sport is based on. Training is a performance enhancing activity done in earnest. Preparing for a race, there is no substitute (physically or morally) for practice. If sport is a measure of physical discipline, mental toughness, and moral determination, then cheating leaves us unworthy of playing the game (much less winning).
Without Jan Ulrich, David Zabriske, Ivan Basso, Floyd Landis, or George Hincapie racing against him, Lance Armstrong’s seven Tour de France victories would be meaningless. They also would have been meaningless if he hadn’t developed the muscle-tone or dexterous precision needed to rocket his body and bike across the French countryside.