All athletes dope.

 July 15, 2022

All athletes dope. No matter how pure and clean the reputation they built up is, all athletes dope. That's because everything an athlete does aside from their particular repetitive stress activity can be considered doping – food, drink, and the endless medical care, etc. Before you object, consider that the "sketchy" area of athlete's performance–boosting activities is, these days, nutrition.  The vitamins that coincidentally trigger blood doping tests.

The only issue with doping is when it positively affects their performance. No one cares if they only feel better because of it. Back when they used to extract blood from their own veins in track and field during training and re-inject it in themselves the day of the big race, the defense of that was "well, it doesn't really enhance my performance; it just makes me feel better during the race and after." This is before synthetic EPO was available, which had the same effect as this self-vampirism strategy. And if you've taken a long view on the structure of athletic organization, have you noticed that "sports medicine" is now a "fully legit" look – while sports nutrition is fully sketchy? How much do you think that has to do with the fact that your sports medicine doctor is no longer the one helping you with the blood doping if you're an athlete, but instead it's your nutritionist and or health consultant that is getting you your blood doping drugs? I think it has everything to do with it.

Now from a more enlightened view, doping really only matters if the doping affects other peoples performance negatively. No one would care really if it was an individual and/or non-competitive activity that someone was doing doped. But the common objection is not that it makes everyone else discouraged, but rather that it is an unfair "advantage".

Now, let's take a second look at this part of the situation: the assertion that is roughly like "I don't care if the athletes do weird stuff as part of their training and preparation as long as it doesn't make them better." There's two layers of problems with this attitude: the first is, that perspective on the athlete, that everything they do in sport is inside a bubble that can't be touched by the outside world, keeps the athlete servile and the sport's progress stale. Second is, that it removes the humanity from the athlete; denies that the athlete's life outside sports could affect their life in sports.

Really think about this, and notice that this anti-doping rhetoric and policing structure actually reinforces the notion that "doping is only for athletes." The way the system works, by emphasizing anti-doping, is that there is an ongoing arms race to dope athletes and in ways the system can't catch at the moment. And even that obscures a deeper fact: which is, we dope the ones we want to win.

The military, for example, has liberally distributed the drugs that are needed for soldiers to do whatever they need to do. World War II air pilots had all the stim pills that they needed to fly multiple shifts in a row. And lurking on the 'net parallel to the sports 'nets might have shown you the variety of stimulants for mental functioning – Modafinil, for example, which used to be prevalent. By the time you can talk about these, though, their use has been out of widespread use for a minute.

But that buttresses my next point. The frontier of sports doping, even sports cheating, if you will, is in the mental health of athletes. Observe, if you're not into athletics even, that that show Ted Lasso is trying to convince everyone of the need for mental health for athletes. (Somewhere in season two right before I stopped watching.). Now the question arises – are they going to make mental health treatments and drugs, "doping for athletes" and therefore "for athletes only" and not for the rest of us? Let's admit at least that the system is broken. 

This gets very thorny when we look at the Caster Semenya case. She's biologically a woman and chemically strong in the ways that a man is. It's not that it's not fun to watch her run, just as it wasn't not fun to watch Oscar Pistorius run. It's that we don't want them to win, you see? Even if you don't agree with that fact, you have to admit that when it came to Caster Semenya the authorities said "we want anyone but Caster Semenya to win once in a while" and then doped her performance downward in quality. The system is broken. It reserves the right to nerf any athlete, and precludes any athlete from increasing their performance in any way except those closely guarded by the other part of the system. I'm fully aware that the two halves of sports mentality are genetics and inherent talent vs. training and fortitude. The training and fortitude side of the apparatus crossed over to slap Caster Semenya on the wrist for being inherently talented at what she does.