Reason Magazine - Topics > Athletics

Sports and Election 2008

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Sun, 11 May 2008 20:58:00 EDT

USA Today asked the three remaining major-party candidates how they feel about Title IX and about performance enhancing drugs.

Refreshingly, all three said neither steroids nor gender participation are any of the government's business, and that, being private entities, sports organizations should be free to set their own rules free of meddling from the federal government or grandstanding congressmen.

Just kidding. All three favor using the federal government to bend pro and amateur sports to their liking.

Joe Alston, Top Fibby, Badminton Champ: RIP

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Fri, 09 May 2008 09:15:00 EDT

One of the more interesting obituaries I've read in a while:

Joe Alston, an FBI agent who investigated Patty Hearst's kidnapping and a champion athlete who was the only badminton player ever to make the cover of Sports Illustrated, has died. He was 81.
[...]
He had just won his second U.S. Open singles title when he appeared on the March 7, 1955, cover of the sports magazine. At the time, he had been with the FBI for four years.
“That picture really changed my life,” Alston told Sports Illustrated in 1999.
“The bosses said, 'Maybe this isn't the time to have you doing undercover surveillance.' As a result, I continued working investigations – kidnappings, extortions, bank robberies, all the good stuff – the rest of my 30 years in the bureau.”
[...]
He was the FBI's major case coordinator in Los Angeles from 1967 through 1980. His family said he was involved with investigating the 1974 kidnapping of Hearst, the newspaper heiress who was seized by the radical Symbionese Liberation Army, and in the still-open investigation of airplane hijacker D.B. Cooper.
As a badminton player, Alston represented the U.S. eight times in the world men's team championships. He also was the only U.S. player to win the men's doubles title in the prestigious All England Open Badminton Championships. He and Johnny Heah of Malaysia won in 1957.
His son also was an FBI agent and a leading U.S. badminton player in the 1980s.

Out of the Cellar on WBAL

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Tue, 06 May 2008 15:33:00 EDT

Attn. Bal'moreans: I'll be on Ron Smith's terrific 1090-AM radio show at ~~12:45~~ 3:45* Inner Harbor time, to talk about Rat City.

* sorry about that.

Bissinger's Buzz-Kill

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 15:10:00 EDT

Wow. I didn't think there was any sports-twit more irritating than Bob Costas, but along comes non-astronaut auteur Buzz Bissinger, on Bob Costas' show last night, blowing a gatekeeper-gasket at the very existence of unwashed, non-jocksniffing bloggers like Deadspin's Will Leitch (who is actually a very good writer in addition to running one of the most successful sports blogs on the planet). First segment here; then watch the mid-life crisis unfold in real time:

Leitch reacts here; world piles on. As always, few things are more hilarious than watching the defenders of a deeply degraded form (newspaper sportswriting? Are you kidding me?) bust veins about modernity they understand not, while the kids laugh and laugh....

I'd never really heard of Bissinger (though he's the author of the famous Friday Night Lights), until I picked up a copy of the International Herald Tribune on vacation a couple weeks back and beheld the single most rancid column you will probably ever read about the Olympic Games. Sample:

There is only one way left to improve the Olympics: to permanently end them.
True, in the world of sports, any plan that puts morality over money is unlikely to happen. Commissions are formed only once the problem is over (see Major League Baseball) and the cheaters will always find another angle -- you can bet that some lab somewhere is working on the design of a new steroid undetectable to testing (see every professional sport and many "amateur" ones). The loftier the rose-colored rhetoric, which in the Olympics has become an Olympian growth industry, the worse the underlying stink. And this is an institution that is rotted in so many different ways.

Bissinger then goes on to list every (unrelated) bad thing that's happened at Olympiads over the past 40 years, and concludes:

Would some athletes become innocent victims with the loss of the Olympics? Yes. But it would be nothing close to the number of innocent victims killed in Darfur with Chinese-supplied weapons, or in Iraq during the American occupation.

Sounds like someone forgot to take his performance-enhancing sedatives!

Mark Cuban in GQ

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 21:19:00 EST

The quirky Dallas Mavs owner and HDTV pioneer (and fellow Hoosier) gives a freewheeling interview in this month's issue to Deadspin editor Will Leitch. Worthy excerpts:

When the scandal over referee gambling broke, everyone came to you, since you’ve always been so vocal in criticizing the referees. They were expecting you to say, “See, I knew this was happening.” And you didn’t. Why not?
Well, I did know it was happening, but what was the point? If you’ve been saying it all along, there’s no point in repeating it. I mean, look at the way the media handled Barry Bonds. They never pay attention to the fact that no one in government ever gets fired for trying to put a skin on the wall. They’ll only get promoted—other than Nifong from Duke.
Nifong was an extreme case.
It wasn’t an extreme case. He was just stupid enough to drive it in the media with his own name. You don’t know the guys behind the Barry Bonds investigation. You don’t know that someone’s not saying, “If I can only get Barry Bonds, I’ll be the stud in this government office.” Barry Bonds can’t sue the person who’s trying to make him a poster child. To spend however many years of government money to prove something that happened four years ago—what does it accomplish for the American people?
It sounds like you’re taking this personally.
Well, I’m a target, too. Like Barry Bonds. The most disgusting thing in the world is how much money I pay to lawyers. I get audited every year, and if you saw some of the things that the IRS said to me, you would think we’re living in a Communist country. I even had someone who worked for a government agency accuse me of throwing the playoff series with the Warriors last year. It’s ridiculous. I can afford it, so it’s okay, but it’s kind of sad.
Do you consider yourself libertarian?
Absolutely.
I take it you’re supporting Ron Paul, then.
No. I just don’t think he’s a legitimate candidate at this point in time. It’s interesting and fun to watch the Internet support he gets, and I like conceptually a lot of the things he says, but I wouldn’t vote for him.

I like this, too:

What do you think about college sports? You’re a Big Ten alum, yes? Any plans to do something for Indiana?
People always ask me if I’m going to be building a new assembly hall for them, and the answer is: No chance. Of all the places you can put your money, it’s not the most effective place. I’m a huge IU basketball fan, but I’m also a critic of the NCAA student-athlete hypocrisy. If I had my druthers, I’d find four colleges and create a conference that’s sort of a Juilliard for sports. I’d say, “Okay, Indiana, North Carolina, Duke, and SMU: I’m going to give all your programs $100 million, plus $25 million a year to withdraw from the NCAA, and we’re going to pay athletes to play for these schools. We’re going to call it NBA 101; we’re going to bring in the best coaches. We’re going to emulate the best music schools across the world and apply it to what athletes want to do.” It’d be just like now, how you can go to IU to be the best musician you can be, and if you want to work for the New York Philharmonic in the summer and get paid for it, you can.

I think it'd be an even better idea for football.

It's probably appropriate that Leitch asked Cuban about Ron Paul. There are some similarities. Both are generally forces for good, with some occasional eccentricities and bouts of nuttiness. But I'd be quite happy with more politicians like Paul, and more tycoons like Cuban.

Brits Gag Athletes From Badmouthing China

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 09:20:00 EST

That's the British Olympic soccer team giving the Nazi salute to the German government before a 1938 friendly with Germany in Berlin. They were ordered by British athletic officials to give the salute in the spirit of being gracious guests.

The country apparently hasn't learned much. The British government is now requiring its athletes to sign an oath to stay mum about Chinese human rights abuses this summer while competing at the Beijing Olympics. Refuse to sign, and the government won't let them compete.

Here's hoping a British athlete signs the oath, then breaks it after winning a medal. It'd be nice to see the British government put in the awkward position of actually trying to enforce the ridiculous gag order.

Why Are Russian Women So Hot?

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 13:29:00 EST

Anne Applebaum says thank the free market!

To put it bluntly, in the Soviet Union there was no market for female beauty. No fashion magazines featured beautiful women, since there weren't any fashion magazines. No TV series depended upon beautiful women for high ratings, since there weren't any ratings. There weren't many men rich enough to seek out beautiful women and marry them, and foreign men couldn't get the right sort of visa. There were a few film stars, of course, but some of the most famous—I'm thinking of Lyubov Orlova, alleged to be Stalin's favorite actress—were wholesome and cheerful rather than sultry and stunning. Unusual beauty, like unusual genius, was considered highly suspicious in the Soviet Union and its satellite people's republics.
This doesn't mean there weren't any beautiful women, of course, just that they didn't have the clothes or cosmetics to enhance their looks, and, far more important, they couldn't use their faces to launch international careers. Instead of gracing London drawing rooms, they stayed in Minsk, Omsk, or Alma Ata. Instead of couture, they wore cheap polyester. They could become assembly-line forewomen, Communist Party bosses, even local femmes fatales, but not Vogue cover girls. They didn't even dream of becoming Vogue cover girls, since very few had ever seen an edition of Vogue.

Applebaum concludes:

Beauty is a matter of luck, but the same could be said of many other talents. And what open markets do for beautiful women they also do for other sorts of genius. So, cheer up next time you see a Siberian blonde dominating male attention at the far end of the table: The same mechanisms that brought her to your dinner party might one day bring you the Ukrainian doctor who cures your cancer or the Polish stockbroker who makes your fortune.

The Case for HGH

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 13:45:00 EST

ESPN investigative reporter Tom Farrey surveys the medical literature, and finds that HGH may help NFL players with pituitary damage caused by concussions and other head injuries, which can be progressively debilitating, even after a player retires. Unfortunately, anti-PED hysteria will likely prevent the league from allowing HGH to be used as treatment in these cases—at least legitimately:

The league is in a precarious situation. Even if it were willing to test for deficiencies, the fact remains that the medically accepted therapy calls for hormones that have been banned. To complicate matters further, head trauma isn't the only way to wreck a pituitary. Taking high amounts of steroids can shut down the natural production of hormones as well, at least temporarily. Understandably, the NFL doesn't want to create a scenario in which drug-abusing players who show a hormone deficiency are rewarded.

Consider the implications of this passage. The league has banned HGH (on very little evidence), allegedly to protect its players from the harm it allegedly does to their health. But the game of football itself is causing debilitating, potentially life-threatening injuries to players, and we think little of it. These injuries are the entirely predictable result of the slobber-knocking hits that make the game so much fun to watch, both live, and from the six different angles in various highlight packages on SportsCenter.

So we're okay with trusting players to take the risks to their health that come with actually playing football. But we draw the line at letting them use artificial drugs to help them recover more quickly from those injuries. Because that might be dangerous. Or it might benefit players who are using PED's for non-medical purposes.

As Farrey explains, the good news is that the underground labs are miles ahead of testing technology. So most of the league is getting treatment anyway. It's just too bad that players have to protect their own health on the sly, and that the people who treat them risk their careers, and possibly their freedom.

Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch on the PED hsyteria here. Watch video of my debate against anti-PED shaman Dick Pound and others here.

Should We Allow Performance Enhancing Drugs in Sports?

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 15:09:00 EST

On January 15, Reason Senior Editor Radley Balko participated in a debate in New York City on the topic of performance-enhancing drugs in sports, sponsored by Intelligence Squared. Video text of his initial argument follow. Check this YouTube page for video of the other presentations, rebuttals, and Q&A.

On the train ride from D.C. this morning, we passed through Baltimore. It reminded me of one of my favorite authors, Baltimore native H.L. Mencken, who I think would’ve had a good laugh at the hypocrisy, the posturing, and the moral prudery associated with the steroid controversy. Eighty years ago, Mencken aptly summarized this debate when he wrote, quote:

“The urge to save humanity is almost always a false-face for the urge to rule it.”

Let me start by saying that I believe private sports organizations should be able to set their own rules, and that they should be free to discipline in any manner they see fit the players who break those rules. I don’t think Congress should forcibly allow performance enhancing substances in sports any more than I think Congress should prohibit them.

That said, we’re here today to debate what those rules ought to be.

So why exactly do people to ban some substances from professional sports?

If it’s about fairness and competition, I’m dubious. Take Rep. Tom Davis, one of the more camera-hungry politicians to demagogue this issue. After the 2000 census, Rep. Davis maneuvered to have his congressional district gerrymandered to include as many Republicans as possible, ensuring his continual reelection, and limiting the number of real options for his constituents. He ran the next year unopposed. Davis also snuck a provision into an unrelated piece of federal legislation preventing an apartment complex from going up in his district because, he said, he feared it would bring too many Democrats into his district.

This guy is cheating at democracy, and he’s lecturing baseball players about fairness.

It’s hard to believe the steroid panic is really about the safety of our athletes, either. My copanelist Dr. Fost I think has ably shown that the alleged side affects of anabolic steroids are overstated, and the negative side effects of HGH are negligible at best.

If we want to talk about health risks and professional sports, we might discuss the ballooning, unrelated-to-steroids weight of NFL linemen over the last 20 years, and the corresponding drop in life expectancy that’s come with it.

Or we might talk about the particularly hellish world of thoroughbred horseracing jockeys, who subject themselves to sweatboxes, diuretics and suppositories, and intentional eating disorders.

In fact, any world-class athlete subjects his body to stresses it wasn’t really designed to endure.

As we’ve seen with government bans on consensual activity—from alcohol to gambling to cocaine to prostitution—prohibitions not only don’t work, they make the activity in question more dangerous by pushing it underground.

So what about the children? As with just about every paternalistic policy dating back to alcohol prohibition, many a politician has iterated over the last few years that we need to ban performance enhancing drugs “for the children.”

But survey data actually shows that teen steroid use has mirrored the use of other illicit drugs over the years. It went up mildly in the 1990s, and has since either dropped slightly or leveled off since 2000. It’s likely that the same trends that govern cocaine or marijuana use govern teen steroid use far more than what’s happening in the sports pages.

In fact, a study released last year—and of the few studies to attempt to find out what motivates teens to take steroids—found that the most reliable indicator of steroid use was a teen’s own body image and self-esteem.

The suggestion—and I think we can all agree it’s pretty intuitive-- is that the teenage boys who do take steroids do so not because they want to look like Barry Bonds or Mark McGwire, but because they want to look good for teenage girls.

So what is this debate really all about?

I’d submit it’s about paternalism and control. A few luddites and prudes have successfully induced a full-blown moral panic over a set of substances that for whatever reason have attracted the ire of the people who have made it their job to tell us what is and isn’t good for us.

Our society has an oddly schizophrenic relationship with pharmaceuticals and medical technology. If something can be said to be “natural”, we tend to be okay with it. If it seems lab-made or synthetic we tend to be leery. But even synthetic drugs and manmade technology seem to be okay if the aim is to make sick or broken people whole again.

It’s when we talk about expanding or transcending what we’ve come to consider “normal,” be it through psychoactive drugs, performance-enhancing drugs, or genetic or biomedical technology, that a certain uneasiness sets in.

There was an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education last month about university professors taking stimulants like Adderall to increase their academic productivity. Oddly, the article quoted several professors who considered this "cheating" at academics. I have to confess, I don’t understand this way of thinking. Academics is the search for truth and knowledge. If a drug can make that search more productive with few side effects, why in the world wouldn’t you want to take it?

It’s also important to note that we consider perfectly natural and acceptable today was quite out of the ordinary not so long ago. 100 years ago, life expectancy in the U.S. was 50 years of age. Today it’s 78. Thanks to technology, medicine, and pharmaceuticals we are today taller, stronger, faster, healthier, and can expect to live longer than ever before. Genetically enhanced agriculture, anti-aging technology, and other advancements we’ve yet to see today—all of which seem as foreign to us now as penicillin likely seemed 50 years ago—will push our longevity even higher.

It’s an old cliché that sports is a metaphor for the human condition. But there’s a lot of truth to it. As technology helped humanity obliterate these milestones and move beyond what until 100 years ago had been a long, bleak history, similar advances in nutrition, training, and using technology to improve technique have enabled sports records to fall with astonishing regularity. Tennis players serve in excess of 120 mph. Record times in the 100, 200, mile, and marathon continue to crumble.

Sports is about exploring and stretching the limits of human potential. Going back even to the pre-modern Olympics, when athletes ate live bees and ate crushed sheep testicles to get a leg up on the competition, sports has never been some wholesome display of physical ability alone. Ingenuity, innovation, and knowledge about what makes us faster and stronger (and avoiding what might do more harm than good) has always been a part of the game.

It shouldn’t be surprising, then, that many of the biggest proponents of banning performance enhancing drugs in sports are also suspect of continued advances in human achievement. Take Leon Kass, formerly President Bush’s top advisor on bioethics. The same Mr. Kass who champions rigorous drug testing in sports has also spent much of his career actually lamenting rising average human life expectancy, which he considers contrary to some odd concept of the natural order.

Of course there have been luddites and naturalists like Mr. Kass standing athwart the tide of human progress for much of recorded history. The essence of the disagreement today I think is that people like Mr. Kass and Mr. Pound have a decidedly different definition of what’s pure, natural, and human that what I do.

For me, the essence of humanity is the pursuit of knowledge, and broadening and conquering the outer limits of our potential. For others, “human” by definition entails concrete limitations—it’s more about adhering to and abiding by well-defined historical, cultural, moral, and philosophical concepts of personhood. I’d like to live to be 150. Leon Kass believes we should all be content with 75.

I think each of us ought to be free to choose and pursue our respective notions of humanity as we may. Let there be sports leagues that thrive on “pure sport,” whatever that is, and let there be sports leagues where athletes are left to balance their own health and career longevity with technology, pharamacology, and the quest for a competitive advantage. If Mr. Kass wants to volunteer to be euthanized at 75, that’s his prerogative. Me, I’ll eagerly lap up what science can conjure—both to extend my life, and to better appreciate and enjoy it while I’m living it.

Unfortunately many who take our opponents position aren’t content with merely holding adhering to their own view of what’s human and what’s acceptably “natural.” They demand that the rest of us accept their concept of humanity, too. People like Mr. Pound and Mr. Kass want Congress and other government bodies to impose their will on society. Because they, better than we, know what’s best for us.

Of course even if they’re right and I’m wrong about the morality and propriety of some of these issues, a free society isn’t really free at all if it doesn’t include the freedom to make what some may believe are bad decisions.

Our opponents want to legislate away what they believe are the bad decisions. To borrow from H.L. Mencken, they believe they need to rule sports in order to save it.

Dodging Baseball's Speed Limits

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 11:40:00 EST

The number of baseball players who claimed to need stimulants for attention deficit disorder, and who therefore received "therapeutic use" exemptions from the disciplinary consequences of a positive drug test, rose from 28 in 2006, the year Major League Baseball banned amphetamines, to 103 last year. Rep. John F. Tierney (D-Mass.) thinks this sudden, 268 percent increase looks suspicious. "When you see the number 28 one year go all the way to 103, it makes you think that we have a loophole here with performance-enhancing drugs," he said at a congressional hearing yesterday. You think?

Since Adderall (a mixture of amphetamine and dextroamphetamine) and Ritalin (methylphenidate, a drug with pharmacological effects very similar to cocaine's) enhance the performance of people diagnosed with ADD, and since Major League Baseball has decided to give medical exemptions to people with that diagnosis, this "loophole" is not an accident; it's a deliberate policy decision. Presumably Tierney thinks the recent diagnoses are mistaken or fraudulent. But maybe a bunch of baseball players with bona fide, genuine ADD (not the fake kind) were self-medicating until the amphetamine ban and have now decided to come out of the shadows. The New York Times lends support to that hypothesis:

Dr. Steven Safren, an associate professor of psychology at Harvard Medical School, said it was estimated that 2 to 6 percent of the adult population had attention deficit disorder.
Rob Manfred, baseball's executive vice president for labor relations and the official most directly involved with the drug-testing programs, said Tuesday night that the commissioner's office was not overly concerned about the increase in attention deficit disorder exemptions.
"Nobody really knows why it jumped," he said, noting that 103 therapeutic-use exemptions out of a baseball population of 1,354 players in 2007 meant 7.6 percent of those players were claiming attention deficit disorder as an affliction, a percentage not that much out of line with the general adult population.
Dr. Safren, asked about baseball's numbers, and the surge from 28 exemptions to 103 in one year, said: "It certainly is a big jump. It could be that people weren't disclosing it. At the same time, the percentage is at the high end."

Intriguingly coincidental as the spike in ADD diagnoses looks, a more important question is why this is any of Tierney's business. "We shouldn't have to have hearings like this all the time to stay on top of these problems with baseball," he said. They don't have to, of course; they choose to. They can stop anytime they want. And given that the Constitution does not grant Congress any authority to dictate the rules by which baseball is played, that would be a good idea.

Nor is it clear what "problems with baseball" Tierney has in mind. Amphetamines were first marketed in the United States in 1932. Seventy-four years later, Major League Baseball, under government pressure, told players to stop using them. This does not seem like an emergency of any kind, let alone one that should occupy the federal government.

Bullying the Musclebound

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 19:07:00 EDT

A Stockholm police officer recently forced Tomislav Boduljak, a well-built 27-year-old, to undergo a drug test because he had "unusually large muscles, particularly large arm muscles, which are a sign of steroid use." She did not buy Boduljak's cover story. "I asked if she didn't think it possible that I work out a lot and eat well," he told Metro. "She said that if someone looks like me, she assumes they have taken drugs." A narc with the Stockholm Police called the officer "a bit too ambitious."

[Thanks to Frank Booth for the tip.]