On Steroids…
Christopher ‘Logic’ Chilelli
Master Resistance Training Specialist
Muscle Activation Techniques Master Specialist

Barry Bonds was sentenced today to 30 days of house arrest for committing perjury.  Cue the histrionics.

Few things irritate me quite like sports journalism. I just cannot conceive of anything more obnoxious than overpaid hacks opining from behind a desk on the most inconsequential minutiae of sport politics as if they were matters of life and death. It’s adolescent: all gossip, scorn, and projected celebrity worship. Worse, sports writers steadfastly avoid engaging in any actual journalism lest they lose their precious access by printing or saying something the bosses or the teams don’t like. It’s precisely this dynamic that has the Skip Baylesses and Jim Romes of the world throwing hissy fits over missed plays and perceived character flaws while completely ignoring labor exploitation by the NCAA (or even supporting it), or that the NFL suppressed research showing the danger and prevalence of concussions among their players, or that the NBA likely colluded to fix games and extend conference series. Suffice to say I have trouble taking anything I see on ESPN at all seriously.

Of course, the failures of sports journalism are nowhere on more resplendent display than over the tried-and-true scandal generator that is performance-enhancing drug use. Whenever the subject of steroids billows its way to the grimy surface of our national attention we can always count on an entire song and dance of pretentious moralizing from sports journalists. It’s really quite the production. They clutch at their proverbial pearls on Sports Center, expressing amazement, just profound disbelief that professional athletes, who’s livelihood completely depends on their continued performance and consistency, would debase themselves into doing something that might improve…their performance and consistency. The shock!

I’m sure that putting logic and critical thinking completely on hold in order to pass judgment on people who earn more money than yourself feels pretty good; quite a massage to the ego. But beyond all that practiced melodrama about cheating and role models the use of PEDs in sports isn’t going anywhere. Until we as a culture can stop hyperventilating and discuss this issue like adults, more and more athletes will jeopardize their health and professional and collegiate athletics will only suffer as a result.

“Sports is to war as pornography is to sex” – Jonathan Haidt

Let’s get down to brass tacks here. Professional sports are about competitive advantage. Period. Sports evolved as proxies for war. The earliest athletic events like sprinting, javelin, and hurling, were simply contests of martial skills. And on up through today we have events like football predicated entirely around advancing on enemy territory. Then as now, sports are all about winning. Quaint notions about sportsmanship and character are nice and all, but hardly applicable to the big money world of professional athletics. No one wants to lose.

It’s true that sports and play are an integral means of developing motor skill and fitness during childhood, but I crack up laughing when people describe the character building effects of youth athletics like peewee football and junior soccer. Right. This character-building process apparently also involves glorification of violence, groupthink, rampant eating disorders, injury, and relentless pressure to win. I don’t want to suggest that children should not learn to challenge themselves or that competition itself is somehow inherently bad. It’s just that sports, like pornography, have a way of distilling some of the more anti-social aspects of human behavior into a discrete product. Does it surpise anyone when research has shows high school athletes demonstrate some of the most dishonest and antisocial behavior among their peers?

Naïve delusions about perfect moral conduct aside, I fail to see how the use of PEDs in the context of athletic training represent anything more than simply another practice that individual athletes and teams use to gain an edge. Sports organizations vie all the time to tweak rules of play and accepted training regimens to the advantage of one group over another. The fairytale of some neat, level arena where everyone competes on their own merits only seems to exist inside the minds of ESPN commentators. Is it fair that the New York Yankees have the highest payroll in the MLB and 30 something world titles to show for it? Is it fair that the unified rules in mixed martial arts severely handicap certain fighters and enable others? While were at this game, is it fair that Michael Jordon was born Michael Jordon? What, with all those built-in advantages in his genetic code? These questions are immaterial because sports are not about fairness. They are about winning:
W-I-N-N-I-N-G. The other stuff is utopian.

Athletes have similar obligations to their own performance as business executives have to the fiduciary operations of their companies. How can we seriously expect pro sports figures, people who have dedicated their existence on this earth to realizing athletic potential, to refrain from practices that move them toward that goal? How can steroid use constitute ‘cheating?’ Performance enhancing drug users still need to practice, to review tape, to show up at 6:15 in the morning and condition their bodies to survive the rigors their chosen profession. And they do all of these things while exposing themselves to additional health risks and the risk of getting caught. In this setting not doing steroids seems like the easier choice to me. By drawing the line defining acceptable behavior arbitrarily around PED use we undermine the work of athletes on the whole.

The larger risk in our current legal environment is in keeping the process under the table. The notion that sports are anything more than marginally concerned with athlete health is another howler. I mean have you watched a football game? But by maintaining this ridiculous stigma around what in a saner environment would be a viable if risky training strategy, we actively compromise their wellbeing. Again, whether you agree with my arguments or not, you have about as much chance of eliminating doping from the Olympics as you would trying to prevent teenagers from having sex with each other. Professional sports need to institute open disclosure of performance enhancing substance use under medical supervision if they are truly serious about prioritizing the long-term health and performance of athletes.

I think it’s probably clear from what I’ve written above, but the shaming atmosphere surrounding doping does nothing constructive. Aside from revealing more about some collective need to efface ourselves by denigrating others (a pervasive feature to national debates of all kinds), this holds athletes to impossible standards and diminishes their accomplishments. I respect figures like Barry Bonds who feel no need to grovel for our forgiveness and I feel nothing but sympathy for someone like Marion Jones. It takes a stern sort of intellectual dishonesty to pretend not to understand her motivations and the scandal obscures the fact that she was the fastest woman in the world for a while there, steroids or not. Moreover, athletes and media figures cannot assume responsibility for our nation’s children. That would be the role of parents. And an open dialogue that provides sober information about the risks and benefits of steroids as opposed to the reigning hysteria would better serve those children.

I want to state unequivocally that I do not advocate the use of performance enhancing drugs. Outside of professional sports environments, steroid use is just stupid. Even those newer, ‘designer’ steroids come with considerable risk to the user and some of the horror stories I’ve heard from bodybuilders involving staph infections and sexual dysfunction would keep you up at night. Personally, I have only worked with one client who I knew was supplementing human growth hormone – a female dancer of all things. She had good reasons for what she was doing, but what I took away from the experience was that HGH came with more trouble than it was worth.

However, the prohibition on steroids, like those on other arbitrarily banned substances, is irrational, anathema to civil liberties, and counterproductive in the extreme. Broader society has a self-interested obligation to uphold the rights of individuals to do whatever they want to their own bodies. Under no circumstances should we abide the state, or any organization for that matter, dictating these very personal choices. The only sensible means we have to affect the use of PEDs is through openly acknowledging that athletes use them, that they have potential benefits as well as appreciable risks, and perhaps by keeping in mind quotations like this one from John Wooden: “Sports do not build character. They reveal it.”

Christopher Chilelli is the founder of Logic Performance and Mechanics in Motion.  He is a strength coach and Muscle Activation Techniques Master Specialist.  He lives in New York City.
chris@logicfit.com