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Professor Examines Sports Doping
John Hoberman studies intersection of sport, science and politics
With high-profile athletes such as Barry Bonds and recent Tour de France winner Floyd Landis under the microscope for their alleged use of performance-enhancing drugs, the debate over sports doping has never been more intense. President Bush even spoke out against the practice in his State of the Union address.
The recent explosion of doping scandals that have left almost no professional sport untouched highlight a disturbing possibility. Almost every record of superior athletic performance by a human being could be invalid, depending on one's definition of "doping."
At the same time that journalists, sports officials and some fans are raising a hue and cry over doping in sports and castigating professional athletes who are "cheaters," several basic questions surrounding performance-enhancement drugs have yet to be answered. Why are some performance-enhancement aids, like Prozac, caffeine, ointments and sugar, okay and others, like human growth hormone and THG, not? Who is to say what is natural and what is artificial when it comes to the bottomless cocktail of pills and powders that professional athletes ingest? And what is so inherently wrong with pursuing improved physical performance in the absence of restraints?
Dr. John Hoberman, professor of Germanic languages in the College of Liberal Arts at The University of Texas at Austin, has been researching and writing about the complicated intersection of sports, politics, science, public opinion and the Olympics for the past 20 years. He has written four books on the political, historical, racial and pharmacological dimensions of sport and published close to 100 newspaper and magazine articles on these topics. He has been interviewed by every media entity from the BBC to The New York Times about athletes and doping. One conclusion he has reached after two decades of research centers on a puzzling fact athletes are the only performers left in modern societies who are stigmatized for the use of performance-enhancing drugs.
"Even when you go into Jester dorm, for example," said Hoberman, "you pass several soft drink machines and in one of them you can see cans of a liquid that is absolutely packed with stimulantsginseng, caffeine, guarana. This liquid may enable the user to stay up all night and complete a paper for class or study for a test. If you're a student who needs to use this drink to prepare for a competition, your final exam, it's okay. If you're an athlete who lives in the same dormitory and needs to prepare for your track meet by using anabolic steroids or stamina-boosting EPO, that's expressly forbidden."
In its campaign against doping in sports, the recently established World Anti-Doping Association has faced an uphill battle in determining acceptable versus unacceptable forms of performance enhancement. If coffee is a "natural" substance, does that make caffeine an artificial substance? Is getting pregnant to boost athletic performance "natural?" If testosterone is "natural," does that make anabolic steroids, which have the same effects, "unnatural?"
The dichotomy between what is natural and artificial enhancement and, therefore, natural or unnatural human performance, is at the heart of a complex debate and is one of many aspects of doping that Hoberman discusses in his book "Mortal Engines: The Science of Performance and the Dehumanization of Sport" (1992). The story of the obsessive drive for bigger, better and faster human machines reads like a cross between Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, an H.G. Wells hair-raiser and a particularly engrossing copy of Scientific American.
According to Hoberman, the desire to push the limits of human athletic potential can be found as far back as the Greeks, who consumed sesame seeds, dried figs, mushrooms and herbs for enhanced athletic performance. From that point to the present, performance-enhancing aids have included everything from monkey testicles and ultraviolet light to bat blood, dried tortoise and the banned anabolic steroids that create doping scandals on which the media feeds.
Although history is littered with examples of everyone from aviators and soldiers to professional musicians using bioactive substances to facilitate healing, heighten sexual pleasure, experience intoxication or increase productivity, it was not until the 1920s and '30s that a distinct stigma attached to athletic performances that were "artificially" enhanced. In the more extreme examples of state-sponsored doping in East Germany, for example, where young Olympians were given medically dangerous amounts of steroids without their knowledge, a form of criminal medicine was enlisted in the pursuit of excellence at any cost.
But fans have not stopped watching the athletes and attending the games.
"Society's reaction to doping and performance-enhancement drugs is surprisingly ambivalent when you get right down to it," said Hoberman. "There is fear of a world where everything that science can conceive will become a reality, and that there will be an increasing and dangerous dehumanization of life, sport included. And then there's the fact that, even though doping is known to be rampant in professional cycling, the crowds still gather and cheer along the side of the road during the Tour de France. Athletes, scientists, medical professionals and sports officials have to wonder if the public really does care all that much about steroid use. And if no one cares, why are we still penalizing the athletes?"