Dying to Win: Doping in Sport and the Development of Anti-Doping Policy

  • Barrie Houlihan
Council of Europe Publishing: 1999. 210pp. £14.95

Elite competitors experience diminishing returns from training: the better they become, the harder it is to improve. Yet an improvement of less than one per cent in, for example, swimming or athletics may well make the difference between a gold medal or nothing at all. As an extreme example, runner Said Aouita broke David Moorcroft's 5,000-metres world record of 13 minutes 0.41 seconds by 0.01 seconds — or 0.000013%, (a margin less, presumably, than the accuracy of the measurement of the track).

Hence the unremitting search by coaches and competitors for techniques and substances to improve performance. Most use legal ‘ergogenic aids’, which range from nutritional supplements to swimmers' attempts to optimize their centre of buoyancy by sucking air into their rectums. But some use banned substances to modify their sports performance artificially, a practice officially known as ‘doping’. Cynics suggest, with some justification, that the difference between ergogenic aids and doping is that doping works.

Unfair game: Ben Johnson's winning Olympic medal was taken away when he tested positive for steroids. Credit: CORBIS/BETTMANN

The astonishment of the sporting world when Seoul Olympic 100-metres winner Ben Johnson tested positive for anabolic steroids was not so much that he used them, but that he and his coach had apparently been so remarkably careless as to be detected. Contemporary explanations in the Olympic village ranged from his simply mistaking the tablets, to the shoulder-shrugging certainty expressed by a Cuban team doctor who told me he “knew” the CIA had spiked Johnson's drink, “because the Americans did not want a Canadian to win the 100 metres”.

Barrie Houlihan, professor of sport policy at the University of Loughborough, sets his book on doping against this obsessively competitive background.

Most current books on doping concentrate on the pharmacology of the drugs and the technology of detection but, pleasingly, Houlihan takes much of this as read and pitches most of his book on the philosophical side. He defines the problem in terms of ethics and debates the evolution of antidoping policies. A crucial aspect is the need to harmonize policies on testing methods and on sanctions or penalties — not only among the various sports governing bodies within each country, but also globally. But this issue is a lot easier to debate than to solve.

Rule 29 of the Olympic Charter begins with the simple sentence “Doping is forbidden”. It is banned for two main reasons: sport is entirely an arbitrary activity, bounded by ‘rules of the game’, and taking drugs is as much a contravention of these rules as punching a soccer ball into the net with one's hand. It may also have adverse health effects.

Houlihan's discussion of the ethics involved is challenging and stimulating. His main point is that appealing to intuitive values is not enough. What is required is “the weight of democratic community condemnation and pervasive disapproval”. Doping policies are never intellectually secure, in his view, but in need of continual “defence, support and refinement” based on education and resulting community support. These can act as a bulwark against cynical public acceptance of doping as a chemical version of the professional foul.

Houlihan explores the ethical and legal aspects of the urine-versus-blood controversy, and notes that Jehovah's Witnesses are one group that could object to venepuncture on religious grounds. It is not entirely facetious to predict a sudden increase in this faith among competitors, in line with the dramatic increase in apparent cardiac complaints in shooting teams at the 1984 Olympics, when β-blocking drugs were permitted if medically sanctioned. It may not have been entirely coincidental that β-blockers improve shooting performance; they are now on the International Olympic Committee's banned list.

Michele Verroken, director of ethics and anti-doping at the UK Sports Council, ends an excellent preface to the book with “After all, it is only a game!”. That is the only statement of hers with which I disagree. Worldwide, sport is now a major industry, forming a large part of the entertainment industry. Participants are decreasingly club members and increasingly club employees. In Orwellian fashion, high-level sport is now work.

Overall, Houlihan has written a very readable, highly interesting and to some extent controversial book. It tackles the complex ethical, philosophical and policy problems head-on, and suggests more studies on the social reasons for doping. This book will greatly inform the often ill-informed debates on the topic, and will put into context the increasingly frequent legal cases in which disgruntled competitors who have tested positive sue their sport's governing bodies.