The Curse of PED Shaming

More On The Maria Sharapova PED Positive Test Thing

I've been following the headlines for a couple of days since Maria Sharapova hit us with her bombshell about testing positive. I have to say other people are far more condemning of Sharapova than I was, so maybe I'm the one with the out-of-step view. Although, I find it hard to understand how all these people who follow sport can't get their heads around certain notions. Sometimes I think the visceral hatred directed at offending athletes is bolstered by fairly unreconstructed nationalist fervour more than anything reasoned. That is to say, the condemnation is in proportion to the resentment felt about athletes who lost, who might have lost to PEDs.but I guess she's fair game right now.

Way back in the 1970s when the Olympics were a lot less money-covered, the sport was still firmly amateur and hostile to professional sports. Baseball, Tennis, Soccer and Basketball were nowhere near the five rings every four years. Arguably, the only thing the athletes were competing for was national pride. The Olympic Games as they stand are terribly nationalistic affairs, and taking pride in one's countrymen and women winning gold out there is a kind of proxy war but without violence. During the Cold War, the Eastern Bloc saw fit to juice athletes wholesale and try and grab as many medals as they could. It also coincided with an era when Australia's medal tally dried up, and this was a painful outcome for our national psyche - so much so it gave birth to the Australian Institute of Sport.

Australia has been one of the most vocal countries in combating PEDs, and one suspects it comes from this deep psychological trauma of the 1970s when the East Germans romped home with medals having smashed records which then took three decades to match. Sharapova being Russian by nationality probably scratches at this scar more than Lance Armstrong's efforts. After all, it's been a long time since Australia has produced a female Grand Slam winner. We also produced Shane Warne who tested positive to a PED and he got off with a 1 year ban. So we're certainly a lot more flexible about this topic than our headlines indicate.

The Olympics certainly went weird in the late 1980s, specifically around the time of the Seoul Olympics. This requires a bit of a background too. The Olympic Games were a high prestige but money-losing proposition for some time. A brief back of the envelope digest of the Summer Olympics from the 70s goes - '72 Munich which had a terror attack; '76 Montreal which left Montreal broke; '80 in Moscow which got boycotted by the West because of the USSR's invasion of Afghanistan; '84 in LA which got counter-boycotted by the Eastern Bloc as retaliation for the Moscow boycott. That takes us to '88 Seoul where some of the Professional sports were brought into the tent. These were specifically Tennis, followed by Basketball, Baseball and Soccer.

The absence of professional sport until that moment was the hallmark of the Olympic Games as a brand. You couldn't really make a tonne of money out of winning the Olympics. Consider the big names of the '76 Montreal Olympics: Bruce Jenner (way before becoming Caitlyn) did okay for his Decathlon Gold medal doing the talk circuit, but he was very active in marketing himself. Dorothy Hamill sort of made some money being in ads, but in most part Gold medalists didn't make a tonne of money out of their success. Nadia Comaneci, who scored a perfect 10.00 went home to Romania where she was courted and abused by the son of the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu - not much money in that. In most part these amateur athletes did it for the love of the sport.

The inclusion of professional sport opened the door for more corporate sponsorship, and that meant more money for the athletes as well as the IOC. So it is no coincidence then that Ben Johnson famously tested positive for steroids after beating Carl Lewis in the 100m dash. He wast trying to win so he could get sponsorship money. It was also the moment that blew the door open for PEDs to be a major problem, roughly 16years after the East Germans cleaned up at '72 Munich. It's almost bad luck, really that the moment the Olympics redefined its business model so it could make more money, this horrible little complication burst open on to the scene. There's something deeply ironic that at the Olympics where the IOC figured out how to make money, an athlete cheated and got busted trying to earn sponsorship dollars.


Nice bit of Bruce McAvaney commentary there.
The Ben Johnson bust was a terrible thing. I've spent years since then pondering his race, his win, and then the positive test which disqualified him. He ran the 100m in 9.79 seconds. It was more memorable than just about anything else that happened at '88 Seoul, and then he was stripped of his medal. The IOC established WADA and they test hundred of thousands of athletes a year... and Dick Pound thinks they're not really serious about catching them because catching cheats and exposing them is a scandal with only downside for the relevant sport.

Six out of the eight men who raced in that race were later found to have had ties to doping. Ben Johnson maintains till today that doping is widespread, the drugs are now better, and also harder to detect. For all the people getting busted - which is about 2% of the sample, plenty more are flying under the radar. None of these sports are cleaner than they were in 1988. None. And so we're really left with the results to argue over and people will argue just how much the records are tainted.

Here's the thing: all records are tainted, and nobody will ever know to what degree. If you're a sport fan with any amount of brains, you just have to accept that fact and deal with it. Even if Ben Johnson was disqualified because of PEDs, he did run 100m in 9.79. Carl Lewis got the Gold Medal that day, but he didn't exactly come in first. And this is the same of all these records. They ended up stripping Lance Armstrong of his 7 Tour de France titles, but the man did win them. They haven't handed over his titles to the people who came second because they can't be certain they weren't on PEDs. Rewriting the record books is an undignified response of the anal pedant. Reality is what doesn't go away when you close your eyes.

Perhaps the most significant records to fall in numbers were in Major League Baseball. MLB ran right into the storm with their eyes closed. As a professional sport with 30 teams and 162 games to be played in a schedule per team, putting product on the field for paying audiences meant turning a blind eye to PEDs. Pretty soon hitters bulked up, the batting side of the sport exploded in numbers, and some long-standing records began to tumble. It took until 2004 for MLB to start putting in regulations about PEDs. Until then, it was a seeming free-for-all, as an astounding number of players reached milestones with great ease. 500 homers used to mean something. Players like Rafael Palmeiro and Gary Sheffield who were linked to PEDs made it mean much, much less than it did ten years before. Condemn them as much as you like, the reality is still that these homers were hit and baked into the record books.

As I pointed out previously in the previous post about PEDs, the bigger threat for professional sport isn't a single player trying to get ahead by doing unnaturally better, it's the threat of players tanking and manipulating results for gambling money. To this end, the lessons of the 1919 Back Sox remain with us today with Pete Rose, the sad addendum. Next to Pete Rose, Barry Bonds is ... just not so bad - and there are apologists even for Pete Rose, wanting to reinstate him into baseball and putting him into the Hall of Fame.

So naturally I've come to view all this bicker/banter/brouhaha/balderdash/ballyhoo about PEDs with a more disdainful eye. It seems the moral scales we have for judging players has the sophistication of a comic book's sensibility for moral justice (and perhaps less) while the whole enterprise of sport as business, and sport as entertainment, and sport as this object of fetishistic attachments demands we have an adult, nuanced understanding of the context in which these things happen. Maria Sharapova taking for ten years, a substance that ended up on the banned list is not the worst thing to happen in the world, in sports in general, or even Tennis in particular. It's not. Even the likelihood of Sharapova being a "bad role model" in inspiring younger athletes to take PEDs is actually no higher than if this positive test and press conference had never take place. Besides which, ten years on Maria Sharapova seems to be perfectly in good health in spite of taking this substance - which weakens the argument that the side effects of PEDs can ruin your health; and it's not like the agent would turn another, regular-run-of-the-mill top 50 player into a Maria Sharapova. The indignant condemnations are media hyperbole in a world that has lost perspective.

I don't know how long they will suspend Sharapova. They will likely pick a length which would be arbitrary as any sentence-without-trial. The bottom line is, it's just another aspect to sport that is a media circus. Mistaking it for morality or ethics would be pretty sad.

Maria Sharapova Tests Positive

Maria Sharapova's PED Infringement

Maria Sharapova got pinged for taking PEDs. The only catch with this one is that she was taking a medication that was legal until 1st of January this year, and then tested positive during the Australian Open.

The ITF said in a statement that "Sharapova will be provisionally suspended with effect from [March 12], pending determination of the case".

The five-times grand slam champion said: "For the past 10 years I have been given a medicine called Mildronate by my doctor, my family doctor and a few days ago after I received the letter I found out that it also has another name of Meldonium which I did not know". 

Sharapova said she received an email from the World Anti-Doping Agency in December that noted changes to tennis' program for 2016. She said that the email including a link to a list of banned substances, but that she did not look at it.

Meldonium is used to treat diabetes and low magnesium and improve blood flow, among other things. 

"It's very important for you to understand that for 10 years this medicine was not on WADA's banned list and I had been legally taking the medicine for the past 10 years," Sharapova said. 

"But on January 1st the rules had changed and Meldonium became a prohibited substance which I had not known."

So now, there's speculation that she can't continue playing if she has to be on this drug, thus spelling the end of her career.  Nike, Porsche, and TAG Heuer promptly dumped her.  Very classy... not. It's not as if she's suddenly turned out to be a big white Russian female Tiger Woods type sex fiend; and last I checked owning a Porsche and a TAG Heuer were great performance enhancers for pulling chicks so I don't see how they have the moral high ground here. After all, Porsche and TAG Heuer stuck photos of Maria Sharapova on their ads with the intent of subliminally telling their target market that if they buy their product, they might have a chance with Maria Sharapova. Yeah, real classy, right there.

Jokes aside, there are some really grey areas developing in the world of sport and drug testing, and this case would be one of those. Tennis is a fully professional sport. The big break with amateurism that happened in the 1960s left great scars on the sport, but in a nutshell, it is one of the sports where the players make money in direct proportion to their performance. While it is customary to argue taking PEDs is cheating, there's an aspect to tennis that indicates the effect of PEDs might not be so dramatic.

For instance if a male player took PEDs for better endurance, there would be an advantage in the fifth set at a grand slam tournament, which happens about 1 in 6 matches across 4 tournaments a year with 127 matches each. Even if the PEDs added a 10% boost performance, its arguable it is not going to be reflected in a 10% winning rate. It is totally unlike Olympic running or sprinting where by a 1%boost in endurance could reflect itself as 10% more chance of winning. In women's tennis, they don't play these 5 set matches at all - ALL of these female tennis athletes have enough endurance to play the 2hours on court through a 3 set match that goes deep into the third set.

This is from the same sport that allowed their racquets to develop, grow, and become totally unlike the wooden racquets that were standard in the 1960s. They've been perfectly happy to let these modern racquets completely change the sport (and in the process make it rather boring) and suddenly they're worried about Maria Sharapova's meds.

As for Meldonium, it is highly suspect as to whether taking it would enhance performance enough to make an ordinary Top 50 player into a player with Maria Sharapova's record. This also goes without saying but the results of tennis matches are more likely to be manipulated by match fixing than PEDs At least the player on PEDs is trying to win. The player tanking sets and matches because of match fixing are far more detrimental than the incremental advantage of PEDs.

I get it that PEDs are open to abuse and might have terrible side effects. Especially steroids of all kinds. And if Maria Sharapova were forced into retirement because of this drug, I probably won't be one to miss her al that much. But it does seem to me that people are overestimating the impact of PEDs on a professional sport where other influences are far more likely to impact on the fairness or legitimacy of match outcomes. You'd have to be blind Freddy not to see that PEDs like this one, pertaining to tennis is firmly in the middle of the 18% grey card.

Of course, Jennifer Capriati doesn't see it that way.

"I had to lose my career and never opted to cheat no matter what. I had to throw in the towel and suffer," she wrote. 

"I didn't have the high priced team of [doctors] that found a way for me to cheat and get around the system and wait for science to catch up".

"What's the point of someone taking a heart medicine that helps your heart recover faster unless you have a heart condition? Is that accurate," she asked. 

"In my opinion [if] its all true every title should be stripped. This is other people's lives as well."

Well yeah, but as Navratilova pointed out somewhere, what Sharapova took was legal until 1st of January this year. Besides, this stripping offenders of medals and trophies is starting to look crazy after Lance Armstrong had his 7 Tour de France titles taken from him. Sports organisations can do that to humiliate the offender but it hardly changes what happened - somebody on PEDs beat the field. It's not like Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa and Barry Bonds didn't hit all those homers during the years when MLB didn't look too deeply into PEDs. It's not like Sharapova didn't win those 5 Grand Slam tournaments. In the context of professional sport, it's actually hard to argue against an athlete who tries to get better by taking PEDs, especially when his pay is dependent on the outcome. 

So here we are again, in this moral purgatory of Performance Enhancing Drugs. We're none the wiser, none the better and probably more huffed up with self-righteous indignation over something oh so grey.