Essendon and the failure of the war on drugs
For all the coverage the forbidden thymosin beta-4 has attracted, it is still hard to say what performance enhancement it is meant to provide. That says a lot about the current approach to anti-doping, writes Jack Kerr.
"It is perfectly OK to demand that all sports should be totally free of doping," says Oxford bioethicist Julian Savulescu. "But that is not realistic."
Replace the words "sports" with "communities", and "doping" with "drugs", and you might start to think the war on doping is simply the war on drugs in another guise.
Given the never-ending cascade of doping scandals, the World Anti-Doping Authority's punitive approach certainly appears to be as ineffective - at least as a preventative measure - as the war on drugs.
There are other parallels to be drawn too.
A major criticism of the war on drugs is the way it funnels users into the prison system. You might wonder if the anti-doping movement has reached the same overzealousness.
In WADA's eyes, there has seemed to be little difference between a state-sponsored doping regime, which can make women's bodies masculine through years of systematic and clandestine hormone therapy, and a player pulling bongs on game day.
Which perhaps highlights the authority's moralistically biased, prohibitionist underpinnings.
"The USA was very keen to have it (marijuana) included (on the banned-substances list)," said Richard Pound, one of the founders of WADA. "From a sports perspective, I was rather ambivalent."
Savulescu, meanwhile, told Der Spiegel: "The mistake people make in their absolute zero tolerance approach is to put all the performance enhancers into one category."
Which seems to be what caught Essendon out. For all the coverage the forbidden thymosin beta-4 has attracted, it is still hard to say what performance enhancement it is meant to provide. It may just be the sport science equivalent of smoking banana peels.
"Modern drug cheats are not the East German she-men of the 1980s," wrote The Australian's Chip Le Grand. It would appear that way.
A Google search - encouraged now as a form of research by the Court of Arbitration for Sport - suggests thymosin beta-4 is an effective aid in a player's recovery, which will help them train better, and perform better.
And for this, the AFL and the Essendon Football Club, along with their players and fans, have had to deal with a relentless campaign of allegations, investigations and innuendo, and now a two-year-ban and the life sentence that is the label "drug cheat".
"Doping is little different to taking glucose during a race to help you perform as well as you can," Savulescu says elsewhere. "It's not removing the human element in the way that giving athletes bionic limbs would."
Writer Malcolm Gladwell even argues that doping could serve to provide a truly level playing field, where genetic disadvantages can be overcome.
Elite sports is currently, he says, "a contest among wildly disparate groups of people, who approach the starting line with an uneven set of genetic endowments and natural advantages".
Some, for example, have a natural stamina that most cyclists can only achieve through "blood doping".
The demand for athletes to be clean has, he says, "burdened high-level competition with a contradiction":
We want sports to be fair and we take elaborate measures to make sure that no one competitor has an advantage over any other. But how can a (competition between those with different genetic make-ups) ever be a contest among equals?
Access to such genetic bridges does naturally favour well-resourced athletes, teams, and nations. But that is true in all areas of legalised competitive advantage: from better facilities to improved sports analytics. Ever wondered why Australia consistently beats Zimbabwe in the pool?
The AFL signed up to the WADA code under pressure from the Howard government, and the threat of funding cuts. The league's reluctance stemmed, in part, from its own preferred harm-minimisation approach to recreational drugs.
Now it has discovered how cruel WADA sanctions can be in a team-environment. While an Olympic athlete can pick and choose their support staff - coaches, doctors, nutritionists, and other people who can provide them banned substances - an AFL player may not even be able to choose which state they live in.
Just as the US imposed its war on drugs on the rest of world, WADA's fight against doping is what Brendan Schwab, head of a major international union representing athletes and footballers, calls a "global one-size-fits-all approach".
"WADA has unfortunately, by trying to impose itself, resulted in a whole series of manifest injustices on players without actually solving the problem of cheating in sport," Schwab told Radio National earlier this week.
Such a body does not appear to be the antidote to the state-sponsored doping production line but a similar kind of terror, imposing its will on what a person will do with their body.
All of this comes at a price, of course. The war on drugs has been repeatedly described as as a trillion-dollar failure, and while anti-doping measures don't require that kind of funding, it does chew up money which could spent elsewhere.
It "raises the question of whether 'clean sport' is more important than, say, the National Disability Insurance Scheme", notes UNSW's Jason Mazanov.
"The war on drugs has failed, and it seems reasonable to assume the war on drugs in sport is going to end the same way."
