EVENTS

Date:	Thursday, December 18, 2008
Time:	10:00 AM -- 4:30 PM
Location:	Wohlstetter Conference Center, Twelfth Floor, AEI 1150 Seventeenth Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036

 

Ushering In the Era of Über-Athletes? Hold On

 

 

WASHINGTON, JANUARY 13, 2009--Athletes are searching for a competitive edge in a variety of new ways--whether through out-of-bounds practices like doping and other therapies or simply through medical advancements and new training methods. But while some proponents of new technologies and doping in sports are enthusiastic about a new era of "über-athletes," opponents of such practices have struggled to draw a line that their critics have labeled ambiguous and costly to enforce. What separates illicit performance-enhancing drugs and gene manipulation techniques from acceptable practices?

At an AEI event on December 18, 2008, Edwin Moses, a two-time gold-medal-winning hurdler and pioneer in antidoping enforcement, discussed his experience as an Olympian and the challenges he has faced creating and enforcing antidoping measures. Moses competed in his first Olympic Games in 1976, and he was astounded by the role of performance-enhancing drugs, especially in women's events. American women were falling behind female athletes from Soviet bloc countries. "If you really looked at the women," Moses noted, they "looked a lot like men!" An athletic war was taking place, with athletes serving as geopolitical proxies for their governments, and governments were doing all they could--legal or otherwise--to give their athletes the greatest competitive advantages.

Consequently, Moses convened a group of athletes and formed an antidoping program. His group wrote rules for a U.S. antidoping program that conformed to Olympic standards. It was difficult, he said, because it "required us to think like athletes who were cheating . . . [and] the list of drugs was changing all the time." Not only were drugs changing, but training techniques were shifting as well. Moses said that athletes' training includes far more supplements and injections to boost cardiovascular ability than in the past. Moses' efforts eventually culminated in the creation of official antidoping agencies: the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) and the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) Through the use of independent drug laboratories, Moses said, USADA and WADA are able to detect many of the most advanced and widely used drugs that some athletes use. But while many people have found this increased scrutiny on doping comforting, there is still broad disagreement over whether athletes should face any restrictions on their training at all.

Panelists at the conference, which was moderated by Jon Entine under the auspices of the National Research Initiative, included elite athletes, Olympic and athletic officials, and scholars studying the ethics and science of performance enhancement. Andy Miah of the University of the West of Scotland argued that restrictions on drugs and gene manipulation limit personal liberty, preventing athletes from achieving "morphological freedom." There are problems inherent with both pro- and antidoping viewpoints, he argued, because all actions take place in a moral and political framework built upon different people's disparate values. Under the umbrella of "doping" are separate activities that evoke varying levels of moral repugnance. For example, Miah explained, athletes use a range of technologies to affect performance--such as knowledge about training and nutrition--that contains "latent scientific principles that go into the foundation of what makes an athlete successful or not." This kind of technological development muddies the very definition of doping.

Thomas Murray of the Hastings Center disagreed, arguing that Miah missed the point about the purpose of sports. It is "not the means that decide the ethics of biomedical enhancement," he said. "It's the relationship of those means to the practice itself, to the values that underlie it, and to our flourishing as human beings." Murray illustrated the difference between genetic enhancement for a neurosurgeon and for an athlete. "The point of the practice of neurosurgery is not to show off the skills of the neurosurgeon. The point is to heal," he explained. "The point of practice of sport is to show my talents perfected to the ultimate I am able to bring them to." Genetic enhancement in sports is thus something that observers reject, since it creates an uneven playing field and poses health risks for athletes.

Furthermore, according to Theodore Friedmann of the University of California, San Diego, the claim that antidoping standards are arbitrary and incoherent is weak because any line can be perceived as arbitrary. As Friedmann noted, critics accuse "antidoping of being incoherent, and yet they embrace immature science in support of their own position." Friedmann agreed with Murray that sports requires a basic framework to create a level playing field for athletes and permit meaningful competition.

"We are left with two options," Murray concluded. "Either choose a system where anything goes, where you'll allow any kind of manipulation people are willing or persuaded to try . . . or you have to prohibit certain forms of biomedical enhancements."

--JON FLUGSTAD

For video, audio, and event information, visit www.aei.org/event1841/.

For media inquiries, contact Veronique Rodman at vrodman@aei.org or 202.862.4870.

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