Mapping modern elite sport through the lens of performance-enhancing drugs

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Sociologist and co-author of Doping: A Sporting History, Dr April Henning, discusses the spirit of sport, why context in policy matters and the proposed Enhanced Games.

What would happen if elite athletes were allowed to compete at a global sporting event that actively encouraged performance enhancing drugs? That’s the question being asked by Aron D’Souza, the Australian businessman behind the proposed, highly controversial Enhanced Games. It hit the headlines recently when it was revealed that Donald Trump Jr - through 1789 Capital, a fund that has been described as focusing on ‘anti-woke’ companies – will contribute several million dollars to its organisation (he’s not the first high-profile backer: billionaire Paypal co-founder Peter Thiel who has a well-documented interest in longevity is also an investor). The plan, in theory, is that these annual Olympic-style games will kick off later this year or in 2026 with athletics, swimming and strength disciplines, offering rank-based bonuses such as a $1 million prize for the first sprinter to break the 100-meter record. In other words, big monetary incentives for athletes to produce extraordinary, unprecedented performances.

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“I am unconvinced that the Enhanced Games will ever materialise,” says Dr April Henning, a sociologist who specialises in substance use in sport and exercise at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, and is also co-director of the International Network of Doping Research where Aron was a keynote speaker at a conference last year. “In many ways the logic doesn’t work. How are elite athletes who live in countries such as Sweden, where possession of doping substances is criminalised, going to get them and use them? If the games are going to have full medical support, where will it come from, because the World Anti-Doping Agency doesn’t allow doping doctors?”

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There are many other unknowns too, not least the health risks involved and whether anyone will even sign up. “We know the side effects of some substances but others are not as well understood. There are questions around whether risk can be mitigated or if harm reduction is possible when they are used in certain ways or with medical oversight or in small doses but in many substances, these remain unanswered, especially when it comes to the longer-term,” says April. “Also, if you want athletes to break world records, they need to be close to doing that under the current rules and they are the least likely to say yes as it invalidates all that they’ve achieved before.”

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Elements of the Enhanced Games appear commercially driven. “Part of what Aron was discussing at the conference was almost using the games as a way of partnering with pharmaceutical companies to highlight the benefits of certain enhancing drugs so that they can then be marketed to everyday individuals – which is a very different goal,” continues April. “Whenever someone uses language around creating super humanity it raises red flags because historically it has not ended well. Within the academic community we’ve all had thought experiments about what the Olympics would look like if we took away anti-doping regulations or let athletes use enhancing substances but this has moved to something that seems to be questionable in terms of ethics.”

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The notion of prohibiting performance enhancing substances in elite sport has only been in serious contention since the 1950s when amphetamines (which have a history of being used to treat a range of medical issues) naturally made their way onto pitches and playing fields and anabolic-androgenic steroids became part of bodybuilding culture. Doping: A Sporting History, a book co-written by April and published in 2022, states that prior to the beginning of the 20^thcentury, “there was little concept of doping, let alone the opinion that it constituted cheating, and consequently there was no real prohibition of it. Accounts are rare, but we know that strychnine was given to the top marathon runners in the Olympics in 1904 and 1908, and in 1925 the manager of Arsenal Football Club wrote a detailed description of giving pep pills to all his players for Cup ties against rivals West Ham United.”

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The book traces the evolution of today’s anti-doping policy, citing high profile cases such as the US cycling team’s employment of blood transfusions in the 1984 Olympic Games; the scandal of Canadian Ben Johnson being stripped of his gold medal in the 100-metre race at the 1988 Olympic Games after testing positive for steroids; the Lance Armstrong evidence published in 2012; and the years long Russian doping system which was exposed in the run- up to the 2016 Olympic Games, as all being key moments that have shaped the current approach taken by sport’s top governing bodies. “Many of us who do this work agree that Ben Johnson’s case was the crystallising moment for public awareness and pressure around getting on top of the issue of steroids,” recalls April. “Such a global spotlight was shone on steroids in sport that it couldn’t be ignored. The International Olympics Committee was pushed by governments to investigate what was happening and for the development of what we now know as anti-doping, which came in its current incarnation over a decade later.”

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There are many arguments around why an athlete might choose to take performance enhancing drugs – from feeling like everyone else is so they need to keep up with the competition to the notion that it’s an extension of an already manufactured training regime that includes everything from nutrition plans to specialist equipment. “We know through surveys with athletes that they might have more favourable attitudes – and attitudes don’t predict behaviours – towards doping when they feel that it’s rampant in their sport,” says April. “Elite athletes, by definition, are different from everybody else: they don’t live the same life, they don’t train the same way, so this idea that they would have a hard stop on what it is they would do to win, doesn’t make a lot of sense. Where do they stop along that continuum?”.

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The challenge for anti-doping bodies has always been how to draw a clear line between what is and isn’t acceptable. In 2003, the World Anti-Doping Agency gave three criteria for determining if a substance should be prohibited, and any substance must meet two of them: presenting a potential risk to health, potentially performance enhancing and contravening the spirit of sport. A long-standing argument within this field, says April, “is that the spirit of sport already includes health and fair play, or not enhancing, so anything that violates either of those can be put on the list.”

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April believes that one of the major flaws in the anti-doping system is the strict liability principle. “It doesn’t matter how a substance got there or the amount, it translates into someone being a doper and therefore being sanctioned,” she continues. “Yet there is so much outside an athlete’s control. For instance, supplements that contain an ingredient not on the label or eating meat that has been treated with a growth hormone. Strict liability is black and white when there are many shades of grey. In other situations, you would look at intent, yet there is very little recognition of inadvertent doping.”

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She cites an almost decade-old study by a colleague, looking at adjudicated cases to determine which ones on the balance of probability would have been inadvertent. “It found that up to 39 percent of those cases were likely to be inadvertent. A graded system based on contextual factors and the idea that anti-doping needs to engage with athletes in a substantive way was the crux of the main recommendation in the book.” Whether or not the Enhanced Games ever gets off the starting blocks remains to be seen but what it has done is reignite discussions around doping in sport, which April concludes, is a positive thing: “I think it’s great that the Enhanced Games has opened debates around the marketability and acceptability of some substances but it’s going to be very difficult to pull off.”

In this article

Dr April Henning

Socologist

Written by