We had a pretty good idea of how the Kremlin would react to the doping scandal: by blaming everyone else and claiming victimhood. Under Vladimir Putin, the self-pitying defensiveness to which Russian leaders have long been prone has toppled into outright paranoia.
Still — and it gives me little pleasure to write this — Putin has a point. The use of illegal substances is hardly confined to his vast and chilly homeland. True, Russia is in a special category in that its authorities seem to have been in on the racket. But performance-enhancing substances themselves are used in most countries and most sports.
When Putin complains of “double standards,” he means that there are plenty of dodgy non-Russian athletes in Rio. The doping rules have turned some sports into pharmaceutical arms races, with vast rewards for those who can cheat undetected.
How could it be otherwise? When you create a set of rules, you create the possibility that someone will gain an advantage by evading them. That’s one of the many reasons why, as a small-government conservative, I want as few rules as possible.
What applies to politics applies to sports. The only way to ensure that no one gains a drug-enhanced advantage is to end prohibition, and allow athletes to become as formidable as their chemists can make them.
Most anti-doping rules date from the 1920s and 1930s. Before that, stimulants were as much a part of a sportsman’s preparation as diet or exercise. No one complained when ancient charioteers drank special herbal infusions, or when Victorian rugby players took opiates.
Why were bans introduced? Three main arguments were deployed at the time, and are still in use today: that drugs are deleterious to an athlete’s health; that they tilt the playing field; and that they are unnatural.
Let’s deal with those claims in turn. Are performance-enhancing drugs dangerous? Almost all drugs can be dangerous, depending on how they are used. The negative side-effects of steroids are not so very different from those of some of the stronger medicines that we can buy over the counter.
One thing that seems certain, though, is that legalization would make consumption safer by bringing it into the open. We might even see pharmaceutical companies sponsoring particular competitors so as to advertise the health-giving properties of their products.
The last thing they’d want is, say, their boxer getting bad skin. Their aim would be to enhance his performance while making the rest of us admire his fitness.
True, athletes are competitive people, and might choose to damage their long-term health for the sake of an immediate advantage. Then again, they can already do so through an excessively punishing training routine. We should work on the basis that rational adults have an interest in their own welfare.
Openness would also level the playing field. Instead of clean athletes going up against enhanced ones, they’d all be competing on the same basis. Sure, some might be able to afford better drugs, just as some can afford better coaches or better bicycles. But there would be no clandestine advantages.
It’s the third objection, the idea that chemicals are “unnatural”, that has the strongest appeal in this age of organic food and complementary medicine. But what do we mean by “unnatural”? If you think about it, the whole concept of sport is pretty unnatural. Our palaeolithic ancestors wouldn’t have spent their days hitting small white balls into little holes with metal rods, or trying to swim in patterned unison.
Look at the body of, say, a teenage gymnast, sculpted by years of training. From the point of view of her genome, those endless back-flips are no less “unnatural” than ingesting a substance that will boost her endurance.
The reason most people watch sports is to see human achievement stretched to the limit. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that there were two alternative Olympic Games in Rio this month: one for athletes who were allowed to prepare in any way they wanted, and one for those who were forbidden to consume certain substances.
Which would draw the crowds? I don’t think there can be much doubt. People would want to see the competitors who were free to go higher, faster, stronger.
Dan Hannan is a British Conservative MEP.
