Inspired by reading the books of Andrew Jennings I decided to have a personal boycott of the Olympics and the ‘sports’ of Cycling, Swimming, Weight-lifting and track and field.
What that means is that I refuse to watch any of the sports on TV or otherwise.
I cycle to work and I jog in the park. I consider those activities rather than playing a sport.
Every thing I read about the IOC usually confirms that I have made the right decision. Would anyone care to make this a great debate…
Well I guess a better question might be what sports you aren’t boycotting.
I think that a level headed assessment of doping situation in any professional sport of notable size will clearly indicate a large amount of doping including football, American football, baseball, hockey, etc. The list goes on.
Curling, to the extent of my knowledge, remains a relatively clean sport.
Why is doping bad?
To be honest, I gave up on the Olympics, but doping’s only a part of that.
My sports are baseball, basketball, and hockey. The extent to which doping makes those sports unfairly contested is frankly unclear; it’s not certain what impact they have on performance, and the extent to which doping has changed the end results of the contests is, frankly, probably limited or nonexistent, since the extent of doping appears to be (a) pretty consistent across the teams and leagues, and (b) as near as anyone can tell, generally of limited impact except in a few unusual cases.
Realistically? It’s not an issue for me. Sports is entertainment. As long as it amuses me, I’ll watch. Drugs are certainly being used behind the scenes but they’re also being used behind the scenes in movies and television and music and books. And I don’t really care all that much as long as the product doesn’t suffer.
This may sound cold. But if people like Darryl Strawberry or Robert Downey Jr. or Amy Winehouse want to use drugs, why should I get all upset about it? Sure, they’re killing themselves but they’re adults and they can make their own decisions. I’ll reserve my concern for people who are suffering because of things that are beyond their control.
In sports, it matters because, if you don’t crack down on use of performance enhancing drugs, athletes are going to have to choose between sacrificing their long-term (and possibly short-term) health, or being unable to compete with those who do so sacrifice. I don’t want athletes fucking themselves up for my entertainment, even if they don’t end up going all Chris Benoit.
Really? My understanding was that a number of experts in these sports considered steroid use a prime-mover in acts such as Sammy Sosa’s home run record etc. I’ll conceed to not being a expert in any of these sports, but I recall plenty of media coverage about the role they play in boosting performance in these sports.
As far as I can tell there are drugs that will help with strength, speed and endurance but no drug will help you be a more skillful cricket player or soccer player. If you look at people who are drug cheats it is almost always sports like cycling, weight lifting and track and field.
I see very few drug cheats in golf,snooker, cricket and soccer.
I can’t see myself boycotting a sport over steroids or whatnot. A sport’s lax attitude towards performance-enhancing drugs might well lead me to care less about the sport, which would result in my watching it less. But it’s not the same thing, although it has some of the same effects.
I do not watch much sports except golf, but I do not understand the proscription against doping.
With the exception of the argument that underage children will be more inclined to use performance-enhancing substances before their safety is proven, I find no cogent argument that applies to consenting adults.
The first argument–that it is unfair–is removed if we stop outlawing it. Everyone has access to the same enhancements.
The second argument–that is is unsafe–is removed if we encourage and study use so we can make it as safe as possible. Certainly most professional-level sports that are benefitted by doping are very bad for you over the long run in general, doping aside. It is entirely arbitrary to decide which of the bad things you decide to outlaw. Regular old football will tear the snot out of your musculoskeletal system, and the long-term survival of NFL players is abysmal whether they doped or not.
The third argument–that it is unnatural–is ridiculous. No one should be a victim of their genes. If one guy’s testosterone level is naturally poor and another’s is naturally high, it is surely no fault of the athlete, any more than his birthplace. We’d encourage him to get better training somewhere other than Timbuktu and we should encourage him to get better hormones somewhere besides his own genetic factory.
Sports is entertainment for the masses and glory for the athletes. It is a consenting relationship on both sides. If we can “get to the next level” by “giving 110%” (and wouldn’t it be glorious if that statement actually, finally, had a grain of reality in it!) for athletes who “have come to play” I say: let’s get our finest institutions on the problem and get doping (along with genetic manipulation) out in the open where it belongs.
And I hope it will be in time for the studies to benefit me, too. I am not getting any younger…so far.
ETA: Don’t bother me about whether or not Timbuktu is a lovely place to train. It’s not the point.
I guess I’ll keep watching until the players start exploding.
I mean I wouldn’t want to miss that.
Cafe Society? (sports) or IMHO? (poll)
We’ll try Cafe Society, first.
[ /Moding ]
I think your boycott has merit - it depends on how you view sports in society I think. Whether they’re just entertainment like any other video game, or whether they embody wider values of how we interact with one another. If you’re of the latter viewpoint (the correct one IMHO), then sports doping is to be reviled as deeply unfair and boycott-worthy.
Your boycott will have more meaning, both personally and in terms of withdrawing revenue from these sports, if you’re actually a fan. Do you like weightlifting, for example? Have you had it up to here with drug abuse in the olympic lifts? If you have no connection with the sport then boycotting it doesn’t have a lot of meaning. If you’re a big fan, like I am of cycling, then it becomes a more perplexing issue.
Its very hard to get past the fact that these sports are such fantastic spectacles - all four of the ones you list in your OP. If there is any chance that the athletes are not on drugs, and there has to be a substantial number of clean competitors IMO, then I’m still going to be watching. You cannot justify a boycott on the basis of a minority of cheats. OTOH, if you’ve come to the conclusion that the olympics are a complete cess-pit of cheating across the board, at all levels, then on with the boycott. I struggle to see how you could arrive at this last point with such certainty, though.
In Australian Rules Football there have been recent allegations of EPO use. Now that they’ve started putting GPS tags on the players there are relatively accurate figures for how far and fast they run per game. The figures are astonishing and it is no wonder that something that lifts your aerobic capacity is beneficial to them. I doubt soccer is much different.
Beta blockers to promote smoothness have been used in snooker haven’t they?
I expect bowlers in cricket could benefit from steroids.
But nobody’s really demonstrated just how much of a difference it makes. (To nitpick, Sosa doesn’t hold any major home run records.)
It’s difficult to say for sure how many home runs Sosa would have hit without steroids. A hundred fewer? Ten fewer? Can’t say for sure. It’s worth noting that most players who have been caught using steroids are scrubs and minor leaguers, which to be honest is kind of what you would expect; it seems logical that players who’re on the bubble of not making it would be the ones most likely to cheat.
Separating the effects of steroid use from other factors in home run hitting is difficult because baseball has seen a general rise in home runs over the last 15 years attributable to a multitude of factors. Players lift weights now and engage in professionally monitored strength training, which was (believe ir or not) almost totally unheard of in baseball just 30 years ago. A ballplayer in 1977 who lifted weights and tried to build muscle would liukely have been ordered to stop by his manager, and in any case probably wouldn’t have though to try it in the first place. Even without steroids there is no doubt whatsoever that ballplayers are, intentionally, much stronger than they once were.
Furthermore, equipment and strategy have shifted to emphasize the home run. Getting on base and hitting home runs is the optimal baseball strategy at the highest levels of baseball (it is not necessarily so at lower levels, such as high school or Little League) and over time will always push out other strategies until some change is made to force another approach. OVer the last twenty years players have gone to using thinner-handled bats and standing closer to the plate to maximize their leverage and power. Hitting strategy and hitting coaches now emphasize the power swing, elevating the ball and hitting home runs.
There has also been a tremendous construction effort in building new stadiums - most teams now play in stadiums built within the last ten to twenty years - and those stadiums are, on average, easier to hit home runs in than the stadiums of before (this isn’t universally true - Petco Park in San Diego is notoriously hard to hit home runs in - but it’s true on average.)
So how do you separate all that out from steroids? It’s hard to do. One thing is for certain, though; two players in poarticular, Barry Bonds and Mark McGwire, may well have significantly padded their home run totals because steroids may have helped them overcome injury, and therefore stay healthy and effective longer than they otherwise would have. McGwire’s career appeared to be in serious trouble due to injuries, but he recovered and began swatting more homers at about the time he is alleged to have really gotten into the juice. Barry Bonds’s amazing longetivity is, well, otherwise inexplicable.
But we don’t really know for sure what overall impact it has had. A study by Baseball Prospectus suggested “a small effect, but not much” but I’m not 100% sold on their methodology; nonetheless, it’s a better study than anything I’ve done, so who am I to throw stones?
Originally Posted by threemae
Really? My understanding was that a number of experts in these sports considered steroid use a prime-mover in acts such as Sammy Sosa’s home run record etc. I’ll conceed to not being a expert in any of these sports, but I recall plenty of media coverage about the role they play in boosting performance in these sports.
RickyJay responds:
"But nobody’s really demonstrated just how much of a difference it makes. (To nitpick, Sosa doesn’t hold any major home run records.)
It’s difficult to say for sure how many home runs Sosa would have hit without steroids. A hundred fewer? Ten fewer? Can’t say for sure. It’s worth noting that most players who have been caught using steroids are scrubs and minor leaguers, which to be honest is kind of what you would expect; it seems logical that players who’re on the bubble of not making it would be the ones most likely to cheat.
Separating the effects of steroid use from other factors in home run hitting is difficult because baseball has seen a general rise in home runs over the last 15 years attributable to a multitude of factors. Players lift weights now and engage in professionally monitored strength training, which was (believe ir or not) almost totally unheard of in baseball just 30 years ago. A ballplayer in 1977 who lifted weights and tried to build muscle would liukely have been ordered to stop by his manager, and in any case probably wouldn’t have though to try it in the first place. Even without steroids there is no doubt whatsoever that ballplayers are, intentionally, much stronger than they once were.
Furthermore, equipment and strategy have shifted to emphasize the home run. Getting on base and hitting home runs is the optimal baseball strategy at the highest levels of baseball (it is not necessarily so at lower levels, such as high school or Little League) and over time will always push out other strategies until some change is made to force another approach. OVer the last twenty years players have gone to using thinner-handled bats and standing closer to the plate to maximize their leverage and power. Hitting strategy and hitting coaches now emphasize the power swing, elevating the ball and hitting home runs.
There has also been a tremendous construction effort in building new stadiums - most teams now play in stadiums built within the last ten to twenty years - and those stadiums are, on average, easier to hit home runs in than the stadiums of before (this isn’t universally true - Petco Park in San Diego is notoriously hard to hit home runs in - but it’s true on average.)
So how do you separate all that out from steroids? It’s hard to do. One thing is for certain, though; two players in poarticular, Barry Bonds and Mark McGwire, may well have significantly padded their home run totals because steroids may have helped them overcome injury, and therefore stay healthy and effective longer than they otherwise would have. McGwire’s career appeared to be in serious trouble due to injuries, but he recovered and began swatting more homers at about the time he is alleged to have really gotten into the juice. Barry Bonds’s amazing longetivity is, well, otherwise inexplicable.
But we don’t really know for sure what overall impact it has had. A study by Baseball Prospectus suggested “a small effect, but not much” but I’m not 100% sold on their methodology; nonetheless, it’s a better study than anything I’ve done, so who am I to throw stones?"
To nitpick: threemae says that his understanding is that steroid use was a prime-mover in Sosa’s homerun record. He did not say that Sosa has any major records, only that he has a record of hitting homeruns which is obviously suspect due to steroid use.
The fact that it is difficult to separate the multitudinous causes of increased homerun production from what might have existed without steroid use is exactly the problem and the reason why people such as myself have said “enough.” If you knew exactly what effect Bonds" steroid use had on his production, records might still have relevance. Sadly they don’t now. No matter what your view of the pluses and minuses of steroid use might be, there is no way you can fail to believe that fly balls that once were caught are now home runs, in big parks and small parks, with thin bats and thick ones, by fit players and fat players and that this fact has made all record comparisons pointless. Thus ruining one of the most enjoyable of all pastimes forever, the deciding of who was the greatest ever.
Don’t get me started on bicycling (that’s a joke - I can’t imagine why that is even a sport.)
But that happens in many sports with or without drugs. High level sports chew up bodies and spit them out. Should we outlaw two-a-day practices in football because of heatstrokes? Should we require jockeys to eat at least 2000 calories a day? Should we force catchers to retire at 30, while they still have enough cartilage in their knees to sit down without making grinding noises?
Steroids are problematic for the baseball fan for exactly this reason. Football fans, OTOH, generally don’t give a rat’s ass about stats. The common refrain is: “stats are for losers.”
As a football fan, the only interest I have regarding steroids is that I enjoy calling Shaun Merriman a cheater.
Curlers have been known to use beta blockers for better control. Their performance enhancing drug of choice, though, has always been scotch.
I generally find it hard to care in terms of professional sports, if people are using steroids or not. I care more in Olympic and other high level ‘amateur’ competition, because it’s supposed to be pure sport for sport’s sake.
A little quick googling found this.
50 to 100 percent is a big number. It also goes into pitching and how steroids help there. What it doesn’t talk about is how steroids would help recovery. That seems especially useful for a pitcher.
The reason why people take steroids is because they work. I’m a bit of a gym rat and a few of the guys I regularly workout with started to take steroids a year or so ago. Their gains are remarkable compared to mine. Their body fat percentage drops and their strength increases at a remarkable rate. Both of them had their entire regimen prescribed by a ‘doctor’ as well. So when I hear an athlete talk about how everything they used had a prescription, I can’t help but laugh. Paul Byrd, this means you.
Steroids are everywhere in professional sports and in the olympic sports. I have a friend who was an Olympic Kayaker for Hungary and she said that virtual everyone in the sport is on something and she knew this because her dad was a coach. We all know about Cross Country Skiing and Cycling. Speed Skaters have bodies that are OBVIOUSLY the results of certain types of steroids. Sprinters - gah.
Why the NFL gets a pass? I don’t know.
Regarding the NHL. I’ve heard that Steroids aren’t a huge issue in Hockey. If the number was higher than 10 to 15 percent, I’d be surprised. Cocaine and prescription pain killers are a bit of an issue.