By Michael Burke
In 1990, an Australian documentary television series on scientific innovation called Beyond 2000 produced Zenith, an episode on scientific research and innovation in sport. The segment on the use of performance enhancing drugs, during this era of moral panic on the topic, was unexpectedly balanced. The two positions addressed were a strengthening of the current enforcement model and, contrastingly, a harm-minimisation model regulated by sports doctors.
Supporting his preference for a harm-minimisation model regulated by sports doctors, former Australian Olympic Federation doctor, Tony Millar, said: "We’ve got them, we’ve got to learn to live with them and make the best use of them we can."
Yet the segment bookends both made powerful references to the death of athletes who have used performance-enhancing drugs. The narrated introduction, accompanied by still pictures and a slow-motion video stated:
Dutch cyclist, Johannes Draaijer. So badly did he want to win on the highly competitive pro-cycling tour, he took erythropoietin. Dryer took his course of EPO knowing the drug had killed twelve Dutch long-distance cyclists in just six months… Forty years after steroids entered the arena, Johannes Draaijer became EPO’s victim thirteen.
This image of EPO/PED death and ‘destruction’ has been at the forefront of discussions about anti-doping policy, practices and justification for at least the last thirty years. It is a powerfully persuasive image that has produced, if not universal, then substantial support for the current enforcement model. Aside from a small number of maverick ethicists, sociologists, doctors and lawyers, very few in the sporting world have agreed with Millar’s position, at least in public.
The Recent Shift
A relative explosion of academic work that questions the justifications of the current model began in the late 1990s. Key topics included:
the reliability of empirical evidence used in both the discourse about doping cases and the banned substance list (Dimeo and Moller, 2018; Lopez, 2011),
the intrusiveness of anti-doping practices (Dimeo and Moller, 2018; Henne, 2015; Macedo, 2018),
the fairness and proportion of penalties (Burke and Hallinan, 2008; Dimeo and Moller, 2018),
the justice of the strict liability principle (Burke and Hallinan, 2008; Henne, 2015, McDermott, Henne and Hayes, 2018; Moston and Engelberg, 2018)
and the relationship between WADA and athletes (Macedo, 2018; Dimeo and Moller, 2018; Henne, 2015).
Lopez’ reveals that the reporting of the relationship between EPO use and death is itself a myth. He exposes the lack of ‘empirical evidence, historical rigour and honest research’ that has been ‘sacrificed for the sake of the cause.’ He concludes that the ‘EPO destruction’ in cycling, supposedly resulting in the deaths of 18 Belgian and Dutch cyclists, is the ‘flagship myth’ of the anti-doping campaign with ‘no empirical basis’.
Girginov and Parry have gone further in their evidence-based critique of the findings of the McLaren Report concerning the systemic doping allegations against Russia at the Sochi Olympics. The authors, both strong opponents of the use of drugs in sport, suggest that the McLaren report undermined the integrity of the anti-doping movement in world sport by taking a political stance with insufficient supporting evidence and using a ‘highly questionable’ information gathering methodology that admitted to failing to interview Russian officials. As with many doping cases, the credibility of the whistleblowers in the Russian case was not questioned (also see Burke and Hallinan), also raising doubts about the conclusions of the report. WADA press releases were able to sustain the belief that there was irrefutable evidence and strong whistleblower testimony to support the conclusion that Russia had engaged in a state-supported system of doping, and this conclusion became part of a new cultural myth. But there are dangers associated with engaging these tactics.
A New Relationship?
The most significant danger associated with this political manipulation of the anti-doping discourse is that it can undermine the consensus that WADA hopes to produce against doping. Emmanuel Macedo takes his criticism of anti-doping policy and practice, and WADA, to a philosophical level utilising post-colonial critique. Macedo argues that WADA and the other organisations that have supported anti-doping including the IOC and its medical commission and the Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sport, have ‘imprinted anti-doping with specific ideological positions’ that perpetuate imperial control over athletes. Athletes and various support people are the colonised, forced to enter into, and comply with, the demands of WADA. The basis of this colonisation is ‘the infantilisation of athletes’ who are deemed incapable of independently participating in sport ethically- they are delinquents who require control. Macedo argues for a different form of relationship, a postcolonial relationship of ‘playful world travelling’ involving supporters and critics, athletes, doctors and legislators, that ‘puts anti-doping enforcers and the policed on the same team.’ With this new relationship, athletes may be more likely to embrace restricted limitations on their performances. Dimeo and Moller also call for far greater input by athletes on doping control mechanisms and practices.
This leads me to question: Has the popular discourse also demonstrated this ambivalence? My own paper, co-authored with Chris Hallinan, suggested that resistance to the apparent injustice and disproportion in anti-doping penalties would, following Foucault, reveal ‘where official discourses [of WADA] over-assert their authority’ such that ‘defenders of the sports-drug morality are ultimately betrayed by the effects of the discourse they mobilised’. When a ninety year old male masters cyclist, the lone competitor in a race, has his national title and world-record stripped for testing positive for an anabolic agent that was likely apparent due to an inadvertent cause, the overreach of anti-doping is revealed, and the response from many in public was scathing. It is cases like this that are now undermining the cultural hegemony against doping control mechanisms in sport.
Twenty-five years after the constructed EPO crisis in cycling that produced significant cultural capital for WADA, authors are now asking some very critical questions of WADA and its anti-doping governance, policy, practices and justifications. Whilst several athletes have been put in prison, been banned from sport and been humiliated in public, many of us are now hoping for necessary changes. A starting point would be to follow the suggestions of Dimeo and Moller about the potential to ‘humanise’ anti-doping policy so it cares for, and can be supported by, all athletes.