The Deafening Roar of the Shrug

AFTER so much attrition from doping, we could be forgiven for expecting the winning rider today in the Tour de France to be a 3-year-old on a tricycle who tests positive for nothing more ominous than apple juice.
Sport’s despairing week has brought another puncture to cycling’s credibility; Barry Bonds’s continued grim chase of baseball’s home run record; a game-fixing investigation of a professional basketball referee; and gruesome dog-fighting accusations against the Atlanta Falcons quarterback Michael Vick. Now a scorecard, a urine sample and sometimes even a police lineup are needed to keep up with the players.
“I’m not sure pro sports have had something this serious confront them in the last 50 years,” said Peter Roby, director of the Center for the Study of Sport in Society at Northeastern University, who has just been named the university’s athletic director.
The confluence of scandals might suggest that sport has reached some shocking nadir, at which celebrity, commercialism, multimillion-dollar salaries, doping and bad behavior have won out over authenticity and integrity in the pursuit of athletic excellence. But has it, really?
The legitimacy of competition, after all, has repeatedly been cast into doubt for more than a century. The American Thomas Hicks won the Olympic marathon in 1904 after taking strychnine to stave off exhaustion. College basketball had betting scandals in the 1950s; the N.F.L. had gambling problems in the 1960s; and the N.B.A. had a cocaine habit in the 1970s. Academic fraud persists in college sports. The carousel of corruption has never stopped spinning.
Yet, fans keep making accommodations. They rationalize, even persist in willful denial about the transgressions of their heroes, staying devoted to sport as entertainment and facilitator of moral development, however quaint that notion can seem.
Fans may be concerned about drugs in baseball, but not enough to stop buying tickets. In the steroid era, the major leagues remain on pace to set an attendance record for a fourth consecutive year. Bonds is often booed on the road over suspicions that his body has been corked like a bat, but his home runs still draw cheers.
“I’m sure people are saying this is the death knell of sports,” David Malloy, a sports ethicist at the University of Regina in Saskatchewan, said of the current scandals. “But it’s a coincidence these things happened at the same time. I’m sure fans are still going to come and watch.”
Professional sports are “entertainment, business, pure and simple” and scandal should come as no surprise, Malloy said, adding: “I don’t think the average person cares that players are on steroids. I think they just want to see them hit the ball a mile out of the park.”
The gambling scandal involving the referee Tim Donaghy seems more troubling.
“In terms of impacting integrity, you can’t get much more serious than gambling,” Roby said. “If people don’t trust the games are real, it’s tough to keep them interested. You don’t want them to be predetermined. The beauty of sport is that a 1-6 team can beat a 7-0 team, and you want to think that is legitimate.”
But in truth, we don’t always care that the fix is in. One of the most popular programs on cable television features the theatrical fakery of professional wrestling.
The only real outrage displayed by fans in recent days was not in regard to sport, but to the government’s charge that Vick helped operate a dog-fighting ring that killed underachieving animals by hanging, drowning and bashing them into the ground. Vick was jeered on Thursday as hundreds gathered outside a courthouse in Richmond, Va., for his arraignment. He pleaded not guilty.
“People are animal lovers; if you own an animal, something he did becomes a little more personal,” said Richard Lapchick, director of the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport at the University of Central Florida.
While the world’s most famous bicycle race is now under threat, only the most naïve have considered cycling to be clean. It seems inhuman to ask athletes to pedal their bikes at great speed some 2,200 miles in three weeks, often up tortuous mountain passes, without chemical assistance.
Fausto Coppi of Italy, who won the Tour in 1949 and 1952, was once asked if he ever fueled himself with amphetamines.
“Only when necessary,” he said.
How often was that?
“Most of the time,” Coppi replied.
Jacques Anquetil of France, a five-time winner, once said with sarcasm, “Do they expect us to ride the Tour on Perrier water?”
History suggests that baseball should think twice before imposing stricter control on the use of performance-enhancing drugs. Cycling and track and field, the two sports that have tried most ambitiously to catch drug cheats, have suffered an unintended consequence, losing much of their credibility — and the cover of plausible deniability — by flagging many top stars.
“The reward for doing the right thing is being labeled as having a drug problem,” said Craig Masback, chief executive of USA Track & Field.
There is a small but seemingly growing movement to legalize banned performance-enhancing drugs. Given the widespread drug use in society, some say it is unfair to single out athletes for punishment. Why allow Viagra as a performance enhancer, but not steroids, the thinking goes.
“The minute you become an adult, you should have a choice of whatever you want to put into your body,” said Andrei Markovits, who teaches a course in comparative sports at the University of Michigan. Athletes doctor themselves with Lasik eye surgery and the so-called Tommy John elbow reconstruction surgery. Why not drugs? We can’t even agree on what an athlete should look like, given the hand-wringing about the South African sprinter Oscar Pistorius, who runs on prosthetic legs.
In an interview before his death in 2005, Steve Courson, a former lineman for the Pittsburgh Steelers and one of the first athletes to admit to steroid use, said it was time to acknowledge that the values taught in youth sport bore no resemblance to the values of elite sport. He suggested that childhood values were ethical fungo drills, for practice only, not applicable between the lines of big time sport, where athletes seek any edge they can get — from doping to stealing a catcher’s signs — and it isn’t considered cheating if you don’t get caught.
“Don’t give me any of that ‘Chariots of Fire’ stuff; cut the box of Wheaties bull,” said Charles Yesalis, a professor emeritus of health policy and kinesiology at Penn State University and a friend of Courson’s. “There’s nothing pure about it. The noble cause is all gone. These guys are entertainers, period, in the money sports. They’re not role models.”
In the end, Lapchick said, disappointment over these scandals will melt into numbness for fans accustomed to seeing corruption at all levels of society.
“I think we are a forgiving people and a sports-loving people,” Lapchick said. “We have the potential to forgive a lot of athletes who do stupid things, or at least the sports they play.”
But, he added, “I don’t think society is going to forgive Michael Vick, unless the charges prove wrong.”