This Is Your Nation on Steroids

[question everything]

Monday, Dec. 13, 2004

This Is Your Nation on Steroids

Why does a performance-enhanced society scorn performance-enhanced athletes?
By JAMES PONIEWOZIK

Turn on a football game, and you'll see cheerleaders with seam-popping breast implants, aging sportscasters with suspiciously tenacious hairlines and commercials for pills that promise Olympian erections. Turn on the news, and you'll hear about how athletes have got the notion that it's O.K. to use artificial substances to improve their bodies. Appalling! Where would they get an idea like that?

On its face, the baseball steroid scandal is simple. Athletes who break the rules to win are cheaters. But ask why we have the rules in the first place, and you have to confront a basic irony. We decry performance-enhanced sports. Yet we live performance-enhanced lives.

We all know about Hollywood celebrities who get plastic surgery to extend their careers. (You want to see performance enhancement in sports, look courtside at a Lakers game.) But plastic surgery has become positively democratic. Businessmen get nipped and tucked to win promotions; other people, just to look hot. And there are plenty of other ways that we augment nature, medically, technologically and financially. The elderly can extend their sex lives beyond what God and their grandchildren imagined. Kids take expensive prep courses to ace tests that are supposed to measure inborn aptitude. Short but healthy children are given human growth hormone for their self-esteem. Adults take Ritalin to sharpen their senses. Pop singers have their vocals, ahem, "sweetened" with additional recorded tracks. Yet no one is threatening legislation against Ashlee Simpson.

So why are steroids the exception? One obvious answer is that sports are supposed to be fair in a way that life is not. But sports are full of institutionalized unfairness—ask anyone who's ever rooted against the Yankees. Olympic runner wins a gold medal because of blood doping: Cheater! Olympic team wins dozens of medals because it has tens of millions of dollars for training: U.S.A.! U.S.A.! U.S.A.! In the steroid debate, what's often cited is fairness, not to current players but to the records of retired and dead ones. Yet middling athletes of today routinely outdo greats of the past thanks to legal advances in everything from nutrition to sports medicine to biodynamics to equipment. If Roger Bannister had the advantage of competing today, wouldn't he run better than a mere 3:59.4 mile?

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http://www.time.com/time/columnist/poniewozik/article/0,9565,1006842,00.html