Embrace an Inclusive Future for Sports Participation (2/8)

Policy One from the Future of Sports & Society Discussion Project

The Basic Idea: An Open Door to Participation

What if, instead of focusing on reasons to exclude athletes from participation, we embraced a more inclusive attitude in order to expand sports participation? What if our policy for sports was open to the evolving understandings of human identity? What if we took a welcoming approach to technological advances that can enable, enhance, and optimize human performance? Such a policy option that adopted these approaches could expand sports participation by removing some of the barriers to open participation, such as restrictions on gender pluralism or performance enabling or enhancing technologies.

This policy embodies an open embrace of the future for the world of sports. It asks us generally to rethink how we group people for athletic competition. It urges us to do so in a way that expands participation. For example, we could reorganize competitive youth sports to counter the automatic boost given to those born early in the calendar year (in what’s called the “relative age effect,” children who are born early in the year end up dominating in youth sports that organize enrollment around the calendar year). Further, the policy would generally focus on allowing athletes to perform openly as they choose rather than focusing on reasons to exclude athletes from participation. The underlying motivation for the policy is to remove impediments to participation. Some key aspects of this might be:

Stop Policing Gender

This policy approach would affirm a more open attitude about the complexities of human identity in relation to sex and gender. It would eliminate the degrading practices of policing gender and sex traits of athletes. It would allow athletes to compete openly according to their self-determined gender identity. It would encourage ways to reconfigure sports competitions to enable more open participation and more optimal performance from more athletes.

Consider the case of Dutee Chand, a female sprinter from India who has naturally occurring high levels of testosterone. She won her preliminary legal challenge to the international governing body of track and field, the IAAF, who required that she undergo hormone suppression therapy in order to compete as a woman. They argue that her high levels of testosterone give her an unfair advantage over other women, but they don’t address how testosterone variation in male athletes could confer similar advantages to high testosterone males in the men’s competition.

Given that any elite athlete has distinctive physical features that confer advantages, why should sports policies take into account these differences only in relation to sex and gender — or only with athletes who identify as female? Some people naturally have more fast-twitch muscle fibers which gives them an advantage in sprinting over those with more slow-twitch fibers. Should any person with natural physiological advantages be banned from competitions?

Stop Policing Performance Technologies

This policy approach would affirm the open use of technological enhancements by athletes. Athletes have always sought to use the best equipment or technology to help them excel. A time is at hand when some technologies could be integrated with our bodies to augment our abilities. For example, in the next generation we might have smart contact lenses (or bionic lenses) that could provide improved vision, equalizing the visual acuity that currently separates some premier athletes from the rest of the pack. Such lenses could provide AR, augmented reality, capacity, providing relevant data to the athlete during performance (imagine a lens that could help a quarterback identify an open receiver). This policy asks us to be more open to these technological advances.

Elite competitions have always been something of an arms-race for better gear. One recent case is Nike’s Zoom Vaporfly shoes that include a carbon fiber plate that critics charge functions too much like a spring and unfairly allows athletes to run faster. Where should we draw the line on technological advances that improve performance?

This open approach would get rid of the need for black markets when it comes to performance enhancing technologies. It would move the use of performance enhancing drugs (PEDs) out of the shadows, enabling their safer usage. We might end up drawing new lines for what is allowed, but this policy strives to embody more of a humane, non-arbitrary, and transparent approach to drawing those lines.

The documentary Bigger, Stronger, Faster explores how the myths surrounding steroid use are likely just that — stories intended to scare off potential users with little basis in actual research.

Some Possible Features

• Recognize the non-binary complexity of sex and gender, that not everyone fits neatly into categories of “male” and “female,” and empower people to compete in whatever way matches their own gender identity. This would eliminate the dehumanizing scrutiny that is most often applied to female, intersex, or transgender athletes whose gender status is questioned.
• Encourage a rethinking of how competitions are sorted, with a focus on groupings that are more likely to optimize athletic participation equitably for more people
• In general, this policy would remove the need for intrusive investigation of people’s bodies
• Allow individuals to openly use performance enhancing drugs (PEDs), which would make their use safer, since they could be used openly under medical supervision. This would eliminate the black market or PEDs.
• Remove the need for anti-doping regimens, which constantly lag behind the advances of the doping industry, appear to set up arbitrary boundary lines of what’s allowed or banned (if you’re wealthy enough you can sleep in a hyperbaric tank to boost red blood cells, but you can’t take EPO to do the same), and often exert degrading pressures on athletes who want to comply (e.g. submitting to 24/7 tracking 365 days/year to submit a urine sample in front of an observer)

At what point might we say that the War on Drugs in Sport is not worth waging?

The film Doped: The Dirty Side of Sports offers a frank look at our anti-doping policies. One of the many stories it tells is that of the sprinter Phil DeRosier, who was suspended from competition for six months (effectively banning him from making a living) for consuming a nutritional supplement that contained a stimulant that was not on the product label and not on the banned substances list. The film also recounts the intrusive process athletes have to follow in order to be compliant, essentially placing themselves under constant surveillance for possible testing (which means producing a urine sample under the observation of the test collector).

• Encourage development of alternative competitions for those who want to compete “naturally” and those who openly want to use PEDs or other performance enhancing technologies.
• Just as with PEDs, having an open policy about technology would allow them to be supervised openly, which should improve safety. Advances in technology whether outside or inside the body could help improve performance directly or provide fitness feedback. They could also have a spillover benefit outside the world of sports.
• Given the trajectory of technology, some performance enhancing technologies are likely to be implanted into or fused with our bodies. This policy embraces that future.

Exploring Possible Impacts

• What are other areas for more inclusive participation that might be targeted by this policy?
• How else could we organize athletics to enable more optimal athletic participation by more people? What are the implications of different ways of drawing lines for athletic competition, in terms of what is allowed or who is included?
• What might be the health implications for this policy approach?
• How might this policy impact the landscape for sports, including sports participation, and sports competitions? How does it relate to our notions of fairness and fair competitions?
• What impacts might it have on gender and sex, or on disability status, especially in regards to equity in sports?
• What other broader social or cultural implications might this policy have? What tradeoffs might we face?

• Go back to the Future of Sports & Society Introduction and List of Seven Policy Options
• Go forward to Policy 2: Sports for Healthy Communities