By Austin Lombard
In Motion Staff Writer
In 2016, the former head of the Russian anti-doping lab responsible for drug testing Russian athletes during the 2014 Sochi Winter Games blew the whistle on a large scale, state-sponsored doping program that he claimed was ordered by the country’s sports ministry.
After an independent investigation determined at least 1,000 competitors from Russia had gained from doping cover-ups, the IOC announced that scores of Russian athletes would be banned from competing in this year’s winter games in PyeongChang, South Korea. In addition, some winners would be stripped of their 2014 Winter Olympics medals — those athletes from Russia who had not been banned from competing in this year’s Olympics would be allowed to compete only under the condition that they go under the OAR banner, or Olympic Athletes from Russia. They also were ordered to fly the Olympics flag, rather than that of Russia.
The decision drew heated criticism from both the international anti-doping community, who viewed the punishment as a feeble slap on the wrist. President Vladimir Putin and other Russian officials decried the sanctions both as a plot by the United States to meddle with Russia’s presidential elections, as well as an underhanded attempt to circumvent honest competition by eliminating Russia.
It is, of course, unfair to suggest that the signs of rampant doping within competitive sports is limited to Russia’s Olympic team. Growing up in a family of cycling enthusiasts, I watched the unbelievable rise and dizzying fall of Lance Armstrong. As a teenager in the 2000s, I watched an endless string of baseball stars indicted for using performance-enhancing drugs in events like the infamous BALCO scandal involving Barry Bonds. Scandals in cycling and baseball highlight just how long a competitor can get away with skirting the rules and undermine many spectators’ perceptions of the integrity of the sports. Even within competitive video gaming — a new form of competition that, for the first time, has had an official relationship with the International Olympic Committee this year — the use of stimulants that boost cognitive function remain a contentious topic.
So far, sporting organizations’ responses to the doping epidemic has been straightforward. Committees have attempted to engage athletes and organizations involved in doping in a costly arms war, with increased drug testing the weapon of choice. The nature of forensic drug testing, however, is not precise, and can result in false positives as well as efficacy when faced with the newest performance-enhancing techniques.
The result, as witnessed by the 2014 Sochi games, is doping’s stubborn persistence. Because the nature of human performance-enhancement often lies on the cutting edge of technology, anti-doping efforts are perpetually playing catch-up and many performance-enhancing techniques have not yet been officially disallowed. New techniques such as neuropriming — where users subject their brains to an electrical field before training in order to increase neural plasticity, increasing the efficiency of muscle memory learning and decreasing the perception of fatigue — are beginning to be adopted by professional athletes and leave no chemical trace. To eradicate doping and performance-enhancement from sports, in the longterm, certainly seems futile.
Competition and sport is a universally-understood language among our species. Since the event’s Hellenic origins, and especially since the conception of the modern Olympic Games, this has been at the core of the event. Sanctioning performance-enhancement in sports, especially the Olympic Games, then, is an especially tricky subject.
Since the days of the original Olympic Games, competitors have ingested compounds to relieve pain to gain an edge. As our understanding of the human body advances rapidly in the 21st century, we, as humans, will have to ask ourselves what the very meaning of sport is: is it an expression of purity, a celebration of what we are capable of as a species, naked and unaided as the early adherents of gymnos, athletic nudity?
Or is it a challenge to prove what we are capable of as a species — a celebration of our technological ingenuity and willingness to take risks to be the best?