The current investigation into alleged doping highlights one key point in the sports industry — professional athletes, by and large, are the powerless victims of the sports they try to excel in. Sure, a lucky few make millions, become legends and have honours bestowed on them. But for the vast majority of professionals it is a difficult, dangerous and demanding job where all the power rests with coaches, managers, teams, codes and bodies like Australian Sports Anti-Doping Authority.
The typical professional athlete has been heavily engaged in sport from a young age. Education inevitably comes second for athletes, as the lure of success, fame and money propel them into more sport. While some player associations, for example the AFL, commendably try to encourage further education and training, athletes have little time for educational pursuits. This leaves the majority of athletes who don’t make it big in a very difficult position when they leave sport, as they lack qualifications and experience. While statistics for Australian athletes are scarce, an AFL Player’s Association survey found a quarter of first-year players fell below year 10 standards for numeracy and literacy. A study of Irish footballers found only a third had completed secondary schooling.
Imagine for a moment that as part of your employment it is routine for your physical health to be closely monitored, including diet, sleep patterns and a full analysis of all the exercise and movement you do. Eventually you would get used to just going along with the testing and advice — after all, coaches, doctors, nutritionists, physios and sports scientists are there to make your body perform at its peak. It can hardly be surprising players went along with the advice of their support staff and did what everyone else did in the team.
But here is the rub: athletes work under conditions of strict liability for doping, and they are responsible for any substance in their bodies. Appeals based on “everyone did it” or “we were told to” don’t change an athlete’s liability. Even if athletes were informed of what was happening, you can imagine the pressure on them to conform to the team norm. The real victims in the Australian Crime Commission and ASADA investigation into doping in sport are the athletes themselves. As has rightly been pointed out, the broad brush approach of labelling many sports and athletes as drug cheats, with little evidence, has seriously dented the reputation of athletes and sports in Australia.
Perhaps the most egregious problem with elite sport is the damage it causes bodies. The risk of brain damage from repeated head trauma and concussion have only recently been acted upon by the main impact codes. Disturbingly, the latest research on American football players indicates the risk is mush more severe then first thought; for example, NFL players are four times more likely to develop Alzheimer’s than people who do not play football. The NFL is so concerned that after years of denial it has invested US$30 million in research and modified the rules on concussion and playing. We can only wonder at the long-term effect of our favourite contact sports on the brains of those involved.
Playing with injuries is commonplace, often at the urging of coaches. We might marvel at the feats of players like South Sydney player John Sattler, playing on with a broken jaw so that South Sydney could win a grand final, but the long-term damage to bodies and minds is staggering. Any normal workplace would be shutdown immediately for OH&S breaches — not so sport, where players are socialised to accept ongoing and constant pain as part of the their jobs. And we cheer it on.
In AFL, despite pathway programs, only 10% make it to the top. Even when they do make it, most last just three years — with fitter, younger, stronger players always waiting in the wings. A few years of reasonable pay and a body broken, with an increased risk of neurological disorders in the future.
Athletes have it all stacked against them. They put their bodies and minds on the line (with most damaged to various degrees permanently), forgo other life chances, become public property and carry all the risk of doping. They are also expendable — ready to be replaced when they are injured or become too controversial.
*Dr James Connor researches sport in the School of Business, University of New South Wales, Canberra
Yes they are playing the victim.? Are you saying that they are illiterate, that all their family are illiterate?
that they are below average intelligence and that their only option was sport?, that they had no realisation of the stats you have quoted about success and the longevity of success? that they had no idea on drugs? never heard of them?
No! they are not victims of insidious, Machiavellian control, the “normalisation” of drug use.
They are victims their own publicity and an elevation opinion of their own abilities and value.
I’d have to agree that elite athletes (and some coaches)are the scapegoats in this whole crusade. Surely the buck stops at ceo or board level. And why should ‘the government’ take it unto itself to be the moral and legal arbiter on what athletes are taking anyway – surely that is up to the relevant sporting organisations.
If gov’ts spent as much time and money investigating and legislating on the far more insidious (and socially harmful) issue of gambling and gambling advertising we’d all be a lot better off – though their budgets mightn’t be.
GF50, it shouldn’t matter how you or I or Dr Connor feel about sportspeople in general in the context of our respective worldviews. The question is should sportspeople be subjected to an inquisition style justice system that is markedly different to the system under which you or I enjoy our lives, in an attempt to support an unseemly mixing of corporate interests and what the senate human rights committee describes as ‘the right to culture of Australians’. There are five or so straight up violations of what many centuries of commonwealth tradition established to be good jurisprudence (double jeopardy, right to silence, interference in families etc…) that simply get the nod from the Senate Committee on Human Rights.
Anti-doping rules should be about the health of athletes, and how these relate to fair play within a context of game theory (see: Prisoner’s Dilemma). This idea revolves around imperfect information leading everyone to make the worst decision for themselves because they think everyone else is also making the worst decision for the group. There is nearly no mention of athlete’s health and well-being in the current mainstream media and Government rhetoric surrounding ‘cheating’ and ‘fair play’ in sports.
We also have a bunch of neat criminal laws that already cover the use of illegal drugs. Why do we need this bizarro-world police force known as ASADA to wander around the media publicly offering amnesty for so called criminals to offer themselves up? This is just odd. It’s an unreal situation that Dr Connor has been attempting to make light of in his work.
I’d presume the solution to all of this madness would be an attempt to separate amateur and professional sports correctly. The governance of these would be handled by the ‘owning’ or profiting organisations with an understanding that these organisations are responsible for the basic employee’s rights of athletes. The pro sports people live under whatever system the corporates determine to be the best thing, on top of this they get all the usual protections that Australian employment laws cover – just like the system we all live under.
Olympic sport also needs to be correctly identfied as ‘not amateur’, because it is not. Or steps need to be taken to actually make it amateur again. Actual, real, amateur competition.
We have reached the current stage of dialogue surrounding drugs in sport and it seems to be based on a blend of golden-age syndrome, corporate interests and good old fashioned moral panic. I really hope that we can overcome this and work towards letting the athletes currently suffering in silence (because current player strangely do not speak much on the issue) under what looks remarkably like a system of fascism in our elite sports.
Yes, GF50, the vast majority of them are less literate than the society they live in.
There is huge scope for players to appeal on the basis of denial of natural justice if they were unwittingly subjected to doping within apparently normal training methodologies. GF50 seems to be living under a rock, not understanding just how advanced, and how far beyond the average player, this sport science stuff gets.
Come into the real world GF. A player following the norms of the club culture, and trusting that they are looking after him, will have enormous potential to bring down the current drugs automatic banning system on the basis of a simple denial of natural justice case, and then sue the pants off every person in their club who was aware that they were being ‘doped up’.
These are not rocket scientists, and never will be.
Did anyone read the Christophe Rochus story. The ATP certainly did, they threatened him that if he did n’t shut up he would be in big trouble.
He pointed out the penalty for testing positive is 8 months suspension. Serena Williams? Justine Henin? and guess who?..a certain left handed Spaniard?
Some players and the games they play are just too big to fail.