PEDs the problem in sports?
Are Performance-Enhancing Drugs (PEDs) the problem in sports?
I was reading a collection of reactions to what is happening with baseball (Biogenesis, Ryan Braun, A-Rod, etc), and I’ve also been following the fallout from France regarding the recent hearings around the 1998 Tour de France. One thing in particular that caught my interest was reading several different versions of the same thing – that players/riders/competitors are starting to talk about harsher penalties (lifetime bans, voided contracts) but that even the athletes themselves don’t think they’ll actually agree to it. There’s a lot of talk from competitors saying things like “I’m tired of being questioned because a few others cheat” or “I don’t want my kids comparing me to <insert known cheat>”, but they still won’t demand a set of rules that make that a reality. Part of the hesitation gets attributed to “well, we don’t want people to face harsh punishments for ‘mistakes’, we can’t agree on how to make the judgement call on whether someone was really guilty or just took something ‘unknowingly’.”
It made me think about this kind of situation:
- A sales employee regularly adds some kind of item to every customer purchase, like a protection plan/warranty/special finish – without informing the customer
- This makes the business more money, since they’re selling something the customer doesn’t even know they’re getting, so they probably won’t ever “redeem” it
- This makes the salesperson look good, since many businesses track attach rates and reward team members who do well on them
- What happens when this person gets caught? (i.e. when a customer comes in and complains that they didn’t want the item)
- If it’s the first time, there’s probably a warning conversation, some notes are made and filed, maybe some past sales are reviewed to see if it’s happened before
- If there’s a pattern of it happening, the salesperson is likely out of a job, and may be on the hook for making restitution to the business to avoid prosecution
- That former employee now has to find a new position elsewhere, either explaining why they were terminating or finding someplace to work that doesn’t ask
- There is a special case here – if the salesperson works for a corrupt manager, the manager may cover for the salesperson when a customer complains, and let the person keep on defrauding people, because it’s making him money
Compare that to what happens now in sports –
An athlete fails a test for a PED
- A ‘B’ sample must be analyzed to confirm the finding
- Every possible link in the chain gets attacked for weakness that might confuse an arbitrator/panel/judge enough to create doubt, and various “explanations” are floated to remove guilt
- If the finding is still upheld, then a temporary ban is enacted
- In baseball specifically, the ban means that while a player earns no salary during that ban (suspension), their overall contract is still in place – so 50 games later, come back and have your old job at the same salary (!)
- After all of this, it’s still likely that lawsuits end up getting filed to challenge any discipline
Welcome to the real world, athletes – people manage to make judgement calls on this every business day. Managers that make $30k a year have to decide if someone is honest or not; do you think that MLB/NFL/UCI can manage that just as well if not better? Afraid of getting caught by a false positive? Focus on better process and being transparent, not on enabling cheats by blocking common sense. With the amount of time and energy that athletes (even weekend warriors) put on what they eat, how they train, what supplements they need, is there really much room for ‘unknowing’ consumption? If you want to defend yourself against that, validate where your stuff comes from, at your own expense. Buy your supplements from someone that tests them, take a sample out of each batch you buy and have it tested, do what you need to do to protect yourself – because at the end of the day, your body and your athletic output is your business, your investment, and your income. If you’ve been taking “deer antler spray” that ends up testing positive for banned substances, you’ve then benefited from taking that banned substance whether you knew you were doing it or not. As someone who makes money off of your own physical performance, you should spend some portion of that money to ensure you are able to keep doing it – or don’t spend it and take the risks of losing it all.
Which introduces the role of money in PEDs. Players and owners both have huge issues with money – one group is a collection of spoiled, self-aggrandizing, self-entitled idiots with too much money, and then there’s the players.
Team owners by and large appear to not care about cheating – projecting an attitude of “The only people who get hurt are the fans, and there’s always more of them, right?” Think about the dishonest manager in the example above. The right thing to do if you realize an employee has been stealing from your customers is to make it right – get rid of the employee so it doesn’t keep happening, go back and find out who was taken advantage of and make them whole again to the best of your ability. I can certainly understand that it’s hard to quantify the damage – but how many teams have done anything at all other than make a non-apology apology and move on? I have to thank Mark Attanansio for offering vouchers good for $10 to fans coming to games in August – at least it’s an effort. Owners sign players who are known cheats, saying publicly “We believe that <insert name here> has turned things around”, and privately “Well, maybe it won’t blow up, and he was cheaper this way, since we could use that as leverage in negotiating.” What’s the risk to a player of getting caught, if he’s still going to be able to get re-signed (if he even gets released)? Where’s the risk if the owner says that “our organization does not tolerate PED use”, but won’t risk losing out on signing players by insisting on the ability to release PED cheats and void their contracts? Owners have to stop accepting the misbehavior simply because the reward of more advertising/merchandising/TV money outweighs the current lack of risk of employing a cheat.
Players – if you really care, if you’re tired of being questioned, then quit pretending you live in some special world without consequences. Demand that teams be able to void contracts for cheats. Demand that positive tests be reviewed by a panel with owner, player, and academic/neutral interests. Make it public. Don’t allow the money to create an excuse to cheat. Active-duty military spend more time on the “road” than you, get paid a fraction of most athletes, and do something immensely more important. Emergency responders work crappy hours, deal with people at their worst, and won’t make in a lifetime what many of you make in a season. Teachers can end up working summer jobs just to get by, and can be suspended or fired sometimes for bringing Advil to school. The rules shouldn’t magically be different because you make money for playing a sport. That money comes from the idea that your sport can be used to sell things. Between players and owners, you killed the ability to support a team on its fan base alone decades ago – by accepting advertising and TV revenue (which is funded by advertising) and expecting to get rich forever. Owners say salaries are too high? You’re sign the deals, it’s never going to kill you to not sign a player. Expecting that you’ll always be getting more money from your TV contracts/advertising, just because you always have, so you can go ahead and overpay? Really? Players, if you’re not willing to break the omertà and call out the cheats, if you’re not willing to stand up and say that it’s fair for someone to lose their contract when they fail a drug test – well, you get what you have now, where you’re consistently questioned for the failings of people who are too tempted and take the shortcuts to money. If, when a test comes back positive, an athlete can use his salary to hire a lawyer to create doubt, to find some mistake, technicality, or legally-sufficient plausible (for varying definitions of plausible) scenarios to exculpate their client (Alberto, how’s the steak?) – if that happens, you’ve failed as a peer group. Floyd and Tyler didn’t come out because there was an issue that they morally couldn’t accept – they came out when their own personal gravy trains jumped the tracks. I understand that it’s hard to put your livelihood at risk – but if it’s really important, there’s power in numbers. Go to each other and ask “Do you want to be on a team with cheaters?” Go to your union, to your owner, to the public and say “No more!” together, as a body. If someone won’t make that statement with you, do you want them around?
Ever wonder where all those millions of dollars worth of TV contracts come from? Networks get paid by advertisers and by cable companies. Where do they get the money? By charging more for the products they sell and for the TV content they pipe to you and me, the consumer. “Come spend $50-$100-$200-$whatever for a ticket to the game, buy a $10-$20-$whatever beer/food/soda, buy yet another jersey because we created a new “retro” look this year, and when you’re out shopping, remember that a little bit of everything you’re buying is also paying these players, these owners (who don’t open their books, who claim to be “on the edge of bankruptcy”, who always claim that their building is too expensive and needs to be paid for by you and your neighbors). It’s like a tax on gullibility, exploiting our desire to identify with a tribe.
This isn’t a baseball issue – this is pretty much every professional sport – NFL, NHL, NBA, PGA, UCI, FIFA, NCAA (yes, they claim to be about amateur sport while they pocket millions in TV rights contracts, merchandise sales, advertising, spending a pittance on their athletes). Find a local minor-league team to cheer for, drop your “mega-sports” package from your cable deal or cut the cord on cable altogether, quit buying the caps, the jerseys, the season tickets – better yet go out and actually participate in a sport that you enjoy and spend that money on yourself and your friends on the team. You don’t take PEDs, do you? Maybe Performance-Impairing Drugs, but probably not PEDs. Are there a lot of athletes out there who are clean? Sure. But being a silent majority doesn’t mean you’re right because there’s more of you – it just means you’re silent.
PEDs are the problem? PEDs are the straw man – greed, denial, and entitlement are the problem. (Yes, I know Betteridge’s Law of Headlines).