ABSTRACT
As we noted in the previous chapter, the second major justification for the ban on the use of performance-enhancing drugs relates to the maintenance of fair competition; as the Sports Council policy statement, cited in Chapter 2, bluntly puts it, ‘doping is cheating’. Could it be that it is this concern with cheating and fair competition, rather than a concern for health, which constitutes the primary objection to the use of drugs in sport? That this might be the case is suggested by the relatively tolerant attitude which was, at least until fairly recently, taken by many sporting bodies towards the ‘social’ use of drugs such as marijuana and cocaine, the latter of which may have potentially dangerous side-effects and both of which – unlike many of the drugs on the list of banned substances – are illegal in many countries. (It should be noted that from the mid-1990s, many sporting bodies began to take a less tolerant attitude towards the use of ‘social’ drugs. This policy shift is examined in more detail later in this chapter; for the moment, we wish to examine the debate around the use of ‘social’ drugs in sport in the period up to the 1990s, for this debate was in some respects very revealing about the underlying rationale for banning the use of some drugs but not others). Let us first consider the use of marijuana by sportspeople, the recent
history of which is particularly instructive. There was no testing for marijuana at any Olympic Games before 1988. However, prior to the Seoul Olympics of that year, the IOC was asked by several countries to test for marijuana ‘to see whether there was a problem among top-class competitors’. A small number of competitors at those games were found to have smoked marijuana recently. The possession of marijuana is a criminal offence in Korea, but the names of the athletes involved were not released because the use of cannabis was at that time neither banned nor restricted by the IOC. The rationale for this was perfectly clear; in the words of the then president of the IOC’s medical commission, ‘Marijuana does not affect sporting performance’. A similar position was expressed by Professor Arnold Beckett, another leading member of the IOC medical commission,
who argued that ‘If we started looking at the social aspect of drug-taking then we would not be doing our job’ (The Times, 14 September 1988). Some sporting bodies at the time took a similarly tolerant position in
relation to the use of cocaine which, although technically a stimulant and therefore on the list of prohibited drugs, is also very widely used for ‘recreational’ purposes. It was presumably this latter consideration which, during the 1980s, led the tennis authorities at the Wimbledon Championships to adopt a similarly tolerant attitude towards tennis players found to be using cocaine. Thus when tests for cocaine were introduced for male tennis players at Wimbledon in 1986, it was revealed that no action would be taken against those who tested positive; instead, psychiatric help would be offered (The Times, 14 September 1986). These examples would seem to suggest that the major basis of differentiation
between those drugs which are banned and those which are permitted may be found not in the fact that the former pose a threat to health while the latter do not – such an argument is exceedingly difficult to sustain – but in the fact that the former are perceived as being taken in order artificially to boost performance, thereby giving competitors who use drugs an unfair advantage over those who do not. Perhaps, then, the more fundamental objection to the use of drugs lies in the fact that, in the words of the Sports Council, ‘doping is cheating’. But why should the practice of cheating be regarded as so objectionable?
At first glance the answer may seem self-evident, for such is the strength of feeling against cheating that we might be tempted to think that the idea of cheating ‘naturally’ arouses strong hostility. The matter is, however, considerably more complex than this, for an analysis of the development of the concept of cheating and of the associated notion of ‘fair play’ raises some interesting questions about the development of modern sport. There is a taken-for-granted or ‘commonsense’ view that the values asso-
ciated with what we now call ‘fair play’ and which are institutionalized in the rules of modern sports are universal values which have always been shared by those involved in sport and sport-like contests. Such a view is, however, quite wrong. Elias, for example, has pointed out that central to the ethos of the ‘sports’ of Ancient Greece were values such as honour and glory rather than the values of fair play; indeed, he points out that the Greek games – despite the way in which they are sometimes misleadingly depicted as representing the ‘true spirit’ of sport – ‘were not ruled by a great sense of fairness’ (Elias, 1986a: 138), at least in the sense in which we understand it today. For example, one aspect of ‘fairness’ in the modern sports of boxing and wrestling is that each fighter is matched against an opponent of roughly similar weight, but neither the ‘boxers’ nor the ‘wrestlers’ of Olympia were classified according to weight. It is therefore essential to see concepts such as ‘cheating’ and ‘fair play’
not as cultural universals, but as relatively modern concepts which have emerged as an integral part of the development of a broader pattern of
social relationships. More specifically the development of these concepts – at least in the sense in which they are used within modern sport – can be seen as part of that process which Elias termed ‘sportization’. Though the concept of ‘sportization’ may jar upon the ear it does, as Elias noted, fit the observable facts relating to the development of modern sports quite well. Elias’s (1986b: 151) argument is that, in the course of the nineteenth century – and in some cases as early as the mid-eighteenth century – with England as the model-setting country, some leisure activities involving bodily exertion assumed the structural characteristics which we identify with modern sports. A central part of this ‘sportization’ process involved the development of a stricter framework of written rules governing sporting competition. Thus the rules became more precise, more explicit and more differentiated whilst, at the same time, supervision of the observance of those rules became more efficient; hence, penalties for offences against the rules became less escapable. One of the central objectives – perhaps the central objective – of this tightening up of the rules was to ensure that sporting competitions were carried on with proper regard for what we now call ‘fairness’, the most important element of which is probably the idea that all competitors must have an equal chance of winning. It is worth noting that this developing concern for fairness related as
much to the interests of spectators – and specifically to the interests of those who placed wagers on the outcomes of sporting contests – as it did to the interests of the players. Thus, describing the development of what he calls the ‘English ethos of fairness’, Elias writes:
