As Graeme Fife’s thorough and engaging recent book “Tour de France” makes clear, the Tour is an exceptional event (in what other sport is the United States represented by its postal service?). In drug use, though, it is simply at one end of a spectrum. Cyclists–competitors in the only motor sport where the driver is the motor–probably take drugs more routinely than other athletes and have been at it for longer. Some relied on strychnine-and-speed-ball boosts to get through the 19th century’s hellish six-day endurance races. But the difference is one of degree, not of kind.
The sporting establishment decries drugs as the product of an unsportsmanlike win-at-all-costs mentality. It then says that it must, at all costs, win the war on drugs. When this accepted truth is challenged, two justifications are offered. One is the protection of athletes, particularly young ones, who worry that they will have to use drugs in order to compete. Second, it is said that to use a drug is to be untrue to the ideal of what an athlete should be. Both of these objections are understandable, especially the first. But neither is an argument against the open use of drugs in sport, as long as events for the undrugged take place in parallel. An honorable division of the spoils could end the war for good, by giving fair opportunities for victory both to those who take drugs and to those who don’t.
Imagine two Olympics: Olympics Classic, without drugs and with stringent random blood tests and lifetime bans to keep it that way; the Open Olympics, with pharmaceutical enhancements of all kinds openly reported, medically monitored, perhaps sponsored by drug companies. In the first you find athletes who believe that, while high-tech equipment is fine, high-tech drugs and scientifically augmented metabolisms aren’t. In the second you find those who have made the decision that citius, altius, fortius requires whatever it takes.
Some will argue that the Open Olympians would be putting themselves at risk. After all, a number of young cyclists have died in the past decade and circumstances suggest that drugs–notably the blood- thickener EPO–were to blame; the tell-all memoir by Willy Voet, the Festina team’s soigneur, whose arrest with a car full of dope set off last year’s fiasco, is called “Massacre a la chaine”–serial murder. But it is the unsupervised use of unsuitable drugs and of regimes designed to disguise that use from the authorities that are deadly. The Festina team’s approach of systematic and supervised drug enhancement, though it broke the rules, at least tried to ensure a certain amount of safety for the cyclists.
“Vous etes tous des assassins!” screamed Lapize as he reached the top of the Tour’s first-ever Pyrenean stage; he was shouting at the race’s marshals, not its drug peddlers. On something as grueling as the Tour, athletes risk their health, whether they take drugs or not. Sporting accidents of all sorts regularly cripple and kill both adults and children the world over. Drugs taken voluntarily, openly and with professional advice will add to these risks far less than they do when taken in a culture of hearsay and secrecy. The need to hide drug taking is currently a significant added risk to the cheats who indulge. And openness builds much- needed expertise. In an Open Olympics, especially one in which pharmaceutical companies were involved as sponsors, there would be a strong incentive for effective but comparatively safe dosing regimes to be found and promulgated. Ways might be found to make drugged sports safer than undrugged ones–and in the long run, such knowledge could help the nonathletic masses.
Those masses, after all, are no strangers to drugs and their effects. And as scientific understanding of the body’s workings grows, and as pharmaceutical companies find new products and strategies for appealing to the healthy–a larger if less motivated market than the sick–drugs of enhancement will reach into more and more lives. The tricky trade-offs between the benefits a treatment might bring and the tolls it might exact will become decisions faced by all. Athletes who refuse drugs may eventually come to be seen as quaint anachronisms, a touch perverse even if oddly admirable–rather in the way that vegetarians were a few decades ago, or those who champion vinyl over CDs are today.
People have long since moved beyond a state of nature in the ways in which they make things, go places, reproduce themselves and spend Saturday nights. In the next century our bodies will move farther and farther from the imperfect state in which evolution left them before being interrupted by medicine. The boundary between the human and the technological will become increasingly blurred. In this the man-machine symbiosis of competitive cycling, the quintessential cyborg sport, shows the way. The technological redefinition of the human will be the cultural main event of the coming century. By showing that what we value in the human spirit can survive this new symbiosis, sport can play a vital part in it. But only if the drugged and the undrugged are treated equally.
