Thanks for the Memories, Peyton — An Appreciation of PEDs
So Peyton Manning has retired. He might be the best quarterback ever. And, according to Al Jazeera, he might have used PEDs.
We shouldn’t care.
On the same day Manning announced his retirement, Maria Sharapova, the highest paid female athlete for the past 11 years straight, also admitted to having tested positive for PEDs. Instead of vilifying Sharapova and Manning for making calculated career moves, maybe we should be taking a moment to appreciate PEDs for all they’ve done for us as fans.
If it turns out the allegations are true and Manning did use PEDs to make his comeback…aren’t NFL fans still better off for it? Even though I’m not a particularly big Manning fan, I’ve appreciated having him around the league these past few years. His presence alone made the NFL more entertaining. Professional athletes are characters in the mind of the public, and their lives are stories. The reality is: iconic characters playing against the odds late into their careers just makes for better stories.
It wouldn’t have been as compelling to watch Brock Osweiler lose to the Seahawks in the Super Bowl three years ago, and it certainly wouldn’t have been as compelling to watch Osweiler win the Super Bowl against Cam Newton and the Panthers last month. And if you’re wondering who Brock Osweiler is…that’s the point.
Athletes’ use of PEDs is an enormous win across the board. Who wouldn’t want to see stronger, faster athletes performing previously impossible, almost unimaginable feats? Isn’t that why we’re all watching?
Baseball’s biggest, most popular moments in my lifetime came from the juiced-up home run record chases of McGwire, Sosa and Bonds. Who wants to see more strikeouts and fewer home runs? Or how about Lance Armstrong’s performance-enhanced victories in the Tour de France? Has any average person paid attention to cycling before or after Armstrong’s insane ‘99-’05 reign? I know it’s the only time I cared. Clean cycling is boring cycling (apologies to current yellow jersey holder Chris Froome…of whom you’ve never heard). How is that good for the sport? How is that good for us as fans?
The reasons to ban PED use have always started with “anyone who uses them gets an unfair advantage.” So let’s just legalize and regulate PEDs. There’s no unfair advantage if everyone has access to the same compounds and, because PED use could then be out in the open, players would have no more incentive to hide their drug regimen than they do to hide the details of their meals and workouts.
There are understandable concerns about the athletes’ health, but honestly anyone pursuing that line of reasoning in regards to the NFL is clearly insane. And if PED use were regulated, it would be far easier to test and discover what was safe and what wasn’t. Legalizing PEDs could actually make our athletes healthier.
It isn’t even clear to me why we consider PED use cheating in the first place. We allow our athletes to train in any way they see fit, to get surgery for their injuries, to eat whatever diet helps them most, to take a dizzyingly wide range of prescribed drugs if they’re sick, or in pain, or tired, or distracted, or sad. To use ever more advanced equipment. There’s no reason to draw the line at PEDs.
We put enormous pressure on our athletes, both financially and emotionally, to perform at the highest levels. Of course they’re going to seek any advantage they can get. Just like all of us outside of sport. We glorify Steve Jobs’ use of LSD and Seth Rogen’s prolific weed smoking. Medical students use Adderall to pull overnights, prestigious VCs like Andreessen Horowitz invest in nootropics companies (read: natural PEDs), and we’re all wired on Starbucks all day because it has the most caffeine, the world’s most popular performance enhancer. Where do you draw the line?
On the occasion of the retirement of perhaps the greatest player in the most popular sport of our time, a player who may have relied on PEDs to give us one last iconic moment, it’s time to embrace PEDs for the enjoyment they have brought us. It’s a lot better than pretending we don’t know athletes are taking them, and then pretending to be upset when they get caught.
