Vol. 38, No. 18

2-27-2007
By: Adam King

Juiced to win in the future

Professor predicts steroids in sports are here to stay

Sports fans in Professor William Morgan’s vision of the future would not vilify baseball greats like Barry Bonds or Mark McGwire.

Morgan, who teaches in the School of Physical Activity and Education Services, sees a day when athletes will wear logos for performance-enhancing drugs on their clothing, celebrated for their prowess rather than maligned for circumventing the purported standard of competition.

The sports world is already on its way there, worried more about protecting its brand images rather than leveling the playing field, Morgan said during the Feb. 15 John Glenn School of Public Affairs “Food for Thought” lecture.

“As performance-enhancing drugs are gentrified, in 20 or 30 years, they’ll be widely accepted,” Morgan said. “Athletes will be advertising these drugs as super human beings. But does anybody really care, as long as they win? I’m not sure.”

Morgan, who grew up in the home of the Little League World Series, Williamsport, Pa., has spent his career studying sports ethics and philosophy and how it affects popular culture. His second book, “Why Sports Morally Matter,” was published in August by Routledge.

He is amazed and at the same time struck by how hypocritical society is about athletes. Every day people take enhancements to overcome their deficiencies — drugs to help their sex life or to feel more socially confident, caffeine to keep alert and motivated or ingesting testosterone to feel good. Yet when athletes enhance their performance, it’s seen as taboo.

“Carl Elliott, a bioethicist from the University of Minnesota, suggests in his book ‘Better than Well’ that by our behavior, we’ve changed the rules for us, the average Joes, to excuse our use of drugs and we haven’t done the same with athletes and are accusing them of not following the rules,” Morgan said.

Critics like to use the “harm to the athlete” reasoning as to why performance-enhancing drugs should be outlawed, but Morgan pointed out that nobody is in a rush to outlaw smoking or drinking.

If the industry was truly interested in ridding itself of drugs, Morgan suggests, it would take away athletes’ reason for cheating — money. But those trying to regulate doping have as much interest as the athletes do in sports being a cash cow.

“The moral of this story is there are no good guys. And will moral issues such as fair play ever figure directly into sports as long as money rules? I’m not sure they will,” Morgan said.

Especially when avoiding capture by regulators is so easy. Big-name figures such as Bonds have been accused of using drugs in the BALCO scandal, but if it were not for a track coach sending a syringe of the steroid THG to a California testing lab, the names of Bonds, the Yankees’ Jason Giambi and track star Tim Montgomery never would have surfaced.

That’s because there are millions of ways to disguise drug use from testing, Morgan said, and only about 160 different tests. As soon as a new test is developed, designer drug creators find ways around it.

So only those athletes mentioned in criminal cases and “the stupid ones” are the ones getting caught, Morgan said. Still, Morgan adds he doesn’t see anything inherently wrong with athletes enhancing themselves chemically.

“My beef with performance-enhancing drugs is that it reflects a professional view of sports — one in which winning at all costs is the norm — that we have every moral reason to discourage,” he said.

Morgan is concerned about how such behavior trickles into society. Such hyper-competitiveness to be better, stronger and faster is leading parents to give their average-height kids growth hormone so they can be taller and overcome that “social disadvantage.”

If the push toward a utopian society continues, it will create even bigger gaps between the rich and the poor, Morgan said, and that clashes with his own ideals of being a progressive and helping those who are less well off.

“We’re definitely headed in a perfectionist direction, which means we’ll all be keen to find ways to enhance our performance in all spheres of life,” he said. “In some ways, this will be a very exciting society; in some a very scary one for those of us who lack the financial means to be competitive in such a high-performance culture.”

onCampus Home