Are we tired of the PED scandals enough to actually do something intelligent about it yet?
I was going to make a flippant comment about how Ryan Howard ought to get a refund, considering he hasn’t hit above .230 in the past two seasons, but I think I’ll simply repost the suggestion I seem to make about twice a year with regard to PEDs…
We love sports (yes, I know, not everyone does, but if you don’t care about sports why are you even reading this?). Not only that, but we love spectacular sports feats. Self-identified sophisticated baseball fans claim to love close games and “small ball” but I’ve never seen one of them (myself included) fail to get wound up over a home run crushed into the stratosphere. Likewise, we claim to love finesse pitchers, (and honestly, I do), but I also pretty much get a sports boner over any pitch that crosses the plate at close to 100 mph. I’m not a football fan, but even I get pumped when I see a receiver or running back avoid a tackle by jumping over another player.
I could cite lists and lists of stuff like this. We want and crave spectacle. Think about it — Sports Center or Baseball Tonight both have climaxes to every episode in the form of a series of clips of the top plays of the day. I cannot think of a single play that makes these highlight reals that fails the “is it spectacular” test.
Sports is entertainment. The performers, and really, be honest with yourself, they are performers, on your screen and on the field are vying for your attention. They are vying for the biggest paycheck and the most glory. In the case of a guy like Peyton Manning there can be no doubt his ambition is to be ranked as one of the, if not the, greatest quarterback of his era, if not all time. The motivation for injecting yourself with something that will enhance your abilities is easy to spot, and the thing is, if you understand the science of what PEDs actually do, it’s not even about making you a better quarterback, or pitcher or hitter or cyclist. It’s about making it possible for you to grind harder day in and day out and stay in the game.
Along with out expectations of spectacle in the sports we watch we expect these folks to play every game and perform at a high level on every play. The reality of human physiology simply makes that unlikely for a young man or woman, and impossible for an old dude like Manning or Ryan Howard. Now, objectively neither of these men is “old” in the conventional sense, but in the competitive professional sports sense, they’re ancient.
Here’s the rub — to be great at something you need to put in lots of hours at it. Tons of hours. We, the fans, expect stunning levels of competence from our sports performers. That level of competence is rare in young, inexperienced players. Think of it from this perspective: A baseball hitter who is approaching his late 30s is finally wise enough to know when to swing and when not to, but by that time his body isn’t likely to cooperate. Not without some help.
We want awesome. Pretty good just won’t cut it. How many non-explosion-based films did you go to the theater to see last year? When was the last time you saw an actor take his shirt off on screen who didn’t have outrageously defined abs, pecs and chiseled biceps? We live in a culture that is demanding amazing from every experience. How likely would you be to watch an NBA game where the winning team scored under 70 points?
If we’re going to be scandalized every time we find out some athlete has used PEDs to deliver precisely the level of play we demand as fans then we need to adjust our expectations of the level of spectacle we want from sports down to something resembling what the natural, unenhanced human is capable of delivering on a daily basis.
Want a Tour de France without doping? Then get used to a lot fewer riders finishing the event, much slower average speeds and less dramatic finishes. Want professional baseball without PEDs? Then get used to fewer strike-outs, fewer home runs and lots more guys riding the disable list bus in the last third of the season (or perhaps satisfy yourselves with about three weeks of games lopped off the schedule). If you want the spectacle, then stop being astonished when you find out it was delivered via a needle.
Personally, I think everything needs to be reigned in. We’ve gone overboard as a culture. Once big event film every year was special. Having an entire season devoted to them (and having most of them actually be quite disappointing) just isn’t. When pop song was super-compressed and much louder than everything else that was interesting. Now we just live in a world where music is missing all the dynamics.
This is kind of where we are as a society. Everything is on 11 and subtlety is hard to find. I’d like to think we could pull back from that cliff but I think most of the bus is already over the edge. So, maybe, the best we can do is stop whining when our sports heroes give us exactly what we’re demanding of them and focus on accepting that technology is going to be applied as liberally to the human body as it has been to the equipment athletes use (which, by the way, no one complains about at all). Instead of outlawing PED use, sanction it and require transparency.
The thing about transparency is that it will actually reduce the use of PEDs overall. Think of it this way — Ryan Howard was named in the report by Al Jazeera. Like my comment above, if Howard had to publish a list of the drugs he used to hit below .230 the past two seasons, and be on the DL for a good part of 2015 that information would help other players know what drugs probably won’t enhance their performance. It would also serve to remind them all that no pill or injection is a substitute for working hard.