MALE PATTERN FITNESS: Comment on False Equivalencies

False Equivalencies

February 06, 2007

Rannoch Donald sent me this outstanding article on the past and future of illegal performance enhancement in sports, which was published in Observer Sports Monthly this weekend.

There was one niggling little thing that bothered me about it, which I'll get to in a moment. First, check out this anecdote from the beginning of the article:

Lee Sweeney was relaxing in his office in the physiology department of the University of Pennsylvania when his phone rang. The call was from an athlete who had been reading about the geneticist's remarkable experiments in creating muscle-bound rodents -- Schwarzenegger mice, as the press called them.

Sweeney's experiments were simple but dramatic. He had isolated a gene responsible for manufacturing a protein called IGF-1. In mammals, IGF-1 boosts muscle growth and helps their repair. When we exercise vigorously, our bodies naturally churn out the stuff. But as we age, production drops off and our muscles weaken. Sweeney wanted to find a remedy so he could help the elderly and people with muscle-wasting diseases.

So he spliced his gene into a virus and infected mice with it. The engineered virus carried the gene into each mouse's cells, where it was incorporated into the animal's DNA. Then it began pumping out excess IGF-1 directly into its muscles. The results were spectacular. Sweeney's rodents developed mighty biceps and thighs 50 per cent stronger than normal mice. He had created a super-mouse with genetically modified, pumped-up muscles.

And that is what attracted Sweeney's caller. The sprinter simply wanted to know if Sweeney could do the same for him. No, said Sweeney. The techniques used to create his Schwarzenegger mice would not yet work on humans. Our complex immune systems would block his genetically engineered viruses and prevent them from getting into our cells with their IGF-1 cargo. Many more tests and trials would be needed.

"I thought I had explained it very carefully and made it clear how far away we were from carrying out gene therapy like this on people," Sweeney told me. "But the guy wasn't having any of it. After I had finished he said that was fine, but could I please use him as his first human guinea pig and start experimenting on him as soon as possible, please?" At that point, Sweeney hung up.

Later that day there was a similar call from another athlete and the next day brought several more. By the end of the week, Sweeney had received dozens.

The author, science writer Robin McKie, makes the very strong point that athletes will do anything, legal or illegal, to improve their performance if they even suspect their competitors are doing the same.

Which is all scary stuff, and certainly correlates with stories I've heard and read.

McKie also gets into the silliness of some of the anti-doping regulations:

Andreea Raducan was only 16 when she won the combined exercises at the 2000 Olympic Games. The Romanian gymnast was a short, elfin figure with an innocent, childlike demeanour. Hence the shock when she was stripped of her title for taking pseudo-ephedrine. The drug was part of a cold cure given to her by her team doctor. Tough luck, you might think, but rules are rules. The trouble is that the rules are constantly being changed. In 2003, Wada removed pseudo-ephedrine from its banned list. "Let's be reasonable," said Dick Pound, the agency's chairman, at the time. For Raducan, the decision was anything but reasonable. She lost a medal for taking a substance now used happily by athletes. "All I did was take a cold pill, which didn't help me at all during my competition," she complained at the time.

But here's the part I don't like, which comes up in a lot in the anti-anti-doping argument. (Yes, there is such a thing.) How come some performance enhancements are perfectly legal, but others aren't? Consider this one about laser eye surgery:

Why, for example, is it acceptable to permit laser surgery to improve an archer's eyesight while the boosting of an athlete's body mass by chemical means is forbidden?

I've had laser eye surgery. It certainly helped me play sports better -- I had peripheral vision for the first time in my life -- but I could've achieved the same effect with contact lenses.

If I were a world-class archer, I could've gotten perfect vision several different ways, and not one would give me an advantage over anyone else, because they'd all have perfect vision as well. What would give me an advantage is a drug that would slow down my pulse so I could shoot between heartbeats. Those drugs are illegal in competition, for good reason.

There's a world of difference between eye surgery and steroid-enhanced muscle mass. In a sport like baseball, there's a fence around the outfield, circumscribing the field of play. If a hitter takes a drug that allows him to hit the ball over that fence more often, then he has a clear advantage over the defense.

The pitcher can take drugs, too, but no matter how hard he throws the ball, the size of the zone in which he can throw it hasn't changed. And the drug-taking hitter has matched the juiced-up pitcher's enhanced fastball with his own improved hand-eye coordination and reaction time.

Thus, there's an absolute advantage that rests with the hitter who chooses to take steroids and who has the genetic propensity to take advantage of the drugs. I have no personal experience with this, but I've heard and read many times that individuals have broad and varied reactions to steroids. They work better for some people than for others, which is why baseball statisticians have had so much trouble detecting a true "steroid effect" by looking at broad trends, as opposed to individual records.

And that, I guess, is something that will never be "fair" about sports. Some individuals will always have a genetic advantage that can't be matched with training or coaching or individual will. Allen Iverson is just quicker than everyone else, and that's the way it is. Yao Ming is taller. Mickey Mantle had more natural power than just about anyone who's ever picked up a ball and bat.

But the individual differences are what make sports fun to watch in the first place. And the players who're truly transcendant are rarely the one with the freakishly outlying physical traits. Roger Federer, Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, Wayne Gretzky, David Beckham -- they all have or had something that couldn't be simulated in a lab.

Hell, even Barry Bonds had that something before he turned himself into a cartoon character. I despise the man as deeply as I can despise anyone who's never been accused of mass murder, and I'll concede he was the best player in the National League in the early to mid-1990s, and it wasn't even close.

The key to the future of sports, it seems to me, is to avoid giving in to the cheaters. Someone's always going to cheat; as McKie points out, athletes have been pushing the envelope as long as we've had athletes (and probably before we had envelopes, for that matter). But wherever you find cheaters you also find snitches who'll rat them out.

So you can have a balance, if you want it. I just hope sports officials keep wanting it.

Posted by LouSchuler at February 6, 2007 06:13 AM

False Equivalencies

February 06, 2007

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