Had Lance Armstrong nudged one of his Tour de France rivals over the edge of the Alpe d'Huez he would have likely received a less hostile response than he has in recent weeks for breaking a simple sports rule.
And we should remember that’s what the furore is essentially about: a professional cyclist took substances that were banned by sporting organisations, thereby breaking (repeatedly and with deception) a sporting rule.
Early last week, I listened to callers to a local radio station defending the decision by Nike to drop its sponsorship of Armstrong, while retaining the sponsorship of Tiger Woods. Callers were adamant that all Woods had done was cheat (repeatedly and with deception) on his wife.
Withdrawing Armstrong’s sponsorship was deemed right on the basis that no company would want to be associated with a drug cheat, but association with a cheating husband was considered no problem.
After all, Woods remains a wonderful golfer, golfers play the game in the “right spirit,” and how a person plays a game is the major indicator of their character.
It’s important to repeat that Woods remains a golfer after cheating on his wife. Michael Vick, another athlete currently sponsored by Nike, has returned to the NFL with the Philadelphia Eagles after going to jail for his part in an illegal dog-fighting ring.
In 1999, Graham Rix returned to his job as assistant manager of Chelsea in the English Premier League after serving a six-month penalty for sex with an underage girl of 15.
Ruben Patterson was able to return to the NBA after pleading guilty in 2001 to the attempted rape of his childrens’ nanny.
Andrew Krakouer returned to the football field for the Collingwood AFL team after serving 14 months in a Western Australian jail between 2008 and 2009 for assault.
Other athletes have raped, sexually assaulted, physically assaulted and committed acts of vehicular homicide without the hostile reaction Armstrong has received.
In 1996, the Australian sports ethicist Terry Roberts wrote a fantastic paper for Sport Science Review on cheating in sport.
In his review of sport philosophy literature, Roberts made two observations that are pertinent to the hysteria surrounding Armstrong. The first was that cheating in sport is now synonymous with drug-taking.
Roberts considered that there were no other rule violations in sport that carry the same moral judgement that an athlete is of bad character. I would add that, perhaps in modern times, forms of vilification and gambling against your own team may also carry this sanction.
Fortunately for Armstrong, he does not appear to have racially vilified other riders nor bet against his own success.
The second observation is directly related to the first. Roberts argued that a shift had occurred at some stage in the history of most sports whereby athletes no longer had a moral obligation to follow rules for “the good of the game”, but instead used a cost-benefit analysis towards rules. He described this orientation to sport in the following way:
If rules are understood by athletes, coaches, officials, and fans not to prohibit certain actions but simply to identify those for which there are associated penalties, then, by definition, it becomes very difficult, if not impossible, for athletes to cheat.
Penalties become not the punishment for cheating, but simply the price for performing certain actions permitted and costed by the rules. The immoral connotations associated with wilful rule violation, what used to be called cheating, may have been replaced with perfectly acceptable and sensible cost accounting.
The easiest way to demonstrate this cost accounting is by case study. When the Australian rules footballers of the 1980s determined that the cost for deliberately slowing down the play-on style of their opponents after a mark or free kick was only a 15-metre penalty, and the benefit of slowing the opponent down far outweighed this cost, those footballers chose to deliberately break this rule and accept the penalty.
They did so with no regard to how the game should be played: the decision was about maximising their teams’ chances of winning. In 1988, the response by the organising body, the Victorian Football League, was to impose a harsher penalty.
It was not to train players to attempt to strictly observe the rules to maintain the integrity, or even the entertaining flow of the game.
The interesting thing is that athletes across the world are conditioned to approach rules in this way. Watch the NBA any night and you will see defenders deliberately break a rule, and foul to prevent any breakaway layup.
You will see players who are poor foul shooters routinely get hacked by opponents to send these poor shooters to the line.
And players who do not engage in these strategic rule violations are condemned by coaches and commentators alike as not being intelligent performers.
Keeping accounts
Why does this second consideration (that athletes apply a cost-benefit analysis towards rules) remain pertinent to the Armstrong case?
I am going to assume, despite the lack of a confession from Armstrong, that he knowingly engaged in illegal performance-enhancing techniques during his cycling career. Further, I am going to assume that he made the type of cost-benefit analysis that Roberts suggests is common to all deliberate rule violations in sport.
So Armstrong decides the benefits of using performance-enhancing methods, including increasing the potential for winning races and the prize money and endorsements that go with Tour victories, outweighed the costs of potential health damage and the types of bans imposed by WADA, USADA and the UCI at the time.
His accounting led him to decide that his doping was a rational choice to make.
To take this accounting analogy one step further, the cyclists who were supposedly coerced by Armstrong and his team into engaging in similar methods of doping also made a cost-benefit analysis that demonstrates why any allegation of coercion is utterly out of place here.
Coercion refers to threatening a person’s welfare interests to gain their compliance, and involves placing a person in a situation where he or she has no viable option but to comply. Given the generous welfare systems that most countries have, losing a professional cycling job is not a welfare interest.
It is important, particularly to those who have suffered real coercive conditions, that we don’t misrepresent pressure as coercion. Those other cyclists decided that the benefits of remaining associated with Armstrong’s team outweighed the costs of losing a spot on that team.
They may have been pressured to engage in practices that they felt guilty about, but they still engaged in those practices and the guilt became part of the cost-benefit analysis.
But now, organisations such as WADA and ASADA, and media commentators, are considering a retrospective change to the cost-benefit analysis.
So rather than punishing Armstrong in the way he would have been punished in the early- to mid-2000s, he has been banned from the sport for life.
Would Armstrong have made the decision to dope at the time if he had realised that the costs were this high? Moreover, is it fair to punish Armstrong with these penalties now, when the penalties were different at the time of his rule violation?
I suspect that very few of us would like our past choices and behaviours judged by today’s standards.
Dennis Alexander
logged in via LinkedIn
Without condoning drug-taking, or other forms the activity formerly know as cheating but now known as cost-benefit accounting, this article actually does capture some important truths and makes some ethically profound points. I particularly like the Woods example because it leads to the notion that to get a competitive advantage in golf, one should set up an opponent to repeatedly cheat on their spouse and then make it public because Woods' game really went down hill after the revelations - call it a long term investment. The kind of condemnation dished out to Armstrong, who was one among many making the cost-benefit calculation and arriving at the drug taking conclusion has been bordering on hysterical.
Rosco Hamilton
logged in via Facebook
Michael please correct me if I am wrong, but it seems the main points of your article were that Armstrong cheated because the potential benefits were greater than the potential consequences and that his team mates were not coerced to dope due to the benefits to themselves. Further, that we should expect athletes to cheat due to the benefit.
I dont think this is realistic. From reading the entire USADA report, it seems that many of the confessed dopers and many of Armstrongs other contemporaries…
Read moreSue Ieraci
Public hospital clinician
A stray thought about the concept of a "level playing field":
We know that humans come in a huge variety of shapes, sizes and abilities. Is it "fair" if a huge eleven-yr-old competes with a tiny one? Is it "fair" if someone has genetically big muscles, or large feet, or more or less fast fibres in their muscles?
Maybe we should put people into categories to compete according to their physical status at the time of competition - not according to how they got there.
Why not have height and weight divisions for children instead of age?
Then, we could classify adults according to their muscle mass, or haemoglobin/haematocrit level, and create classes or handicaps for those characteristics - whichever way they were acquired.
Vashek Bednarski
logged in via Facebook
Thought provoking and interesting article. However, Armstrong is just one man, and the framework of what is going on is much larger. Several organizations are part of that equation, UCI, WADA, USADA, CAS, IOC, and the Amaury Sport Organisation. Each has some agenda of their own, which really means incompatible interests, and different levels of influence. For example, what is astonishing to me is that USADA/WADA ascension to power is relatively recent by comparison to 100 years of tour de France…
Read moreDonncha Redmond
Software Developer
Armstrong has been banned for life because his transgressions were far more than just a single failed doping control, for which the usual ban is two years.
His transgressions continued ate least up until 2010, so it is incorrect to argue that he is somehow being judged by newer standards that didn't apply during his reign. WADA was created in 1999 and its code has been implemented in cycling since at least 2004, so Lance has had ample time to behave according to its rules.
Indeed, the USADA's Reasoned Decision site includes links to the relevant doping rules in place during Armstrong's time, and, even in 2001, the rules were 2 years for a first failed test and up to a life ban for a second, PLUS it also allows up to a life ban on the first offence if a rider is complicit in another rider's doping (including encouragement). So the penalties now applied to Armstrong were available to be applied even back in 2001.
Laurie Strachan
Writer/photgrapher
This article is little more than a collection of statements of the bleeding obvious followed by a conclusion that pays little attention either to the facts of the Armstrong case or the question of cheating in sport in general. Every crime, other than a crime of passion, is committed with an eye to risks and benefits. It's not just a sporting phenomenon. As for the examples of other cheating sportsmen being taken back into the fold, the answer is again bleeding obvious. They cheated on other people, not the sport. Tiger Woods cheated on his wife, not on the sport of golf so he got a life ban from his wife, not from the PGA. Armstrong systematically cheated on the sport in which he was competing, and making money, and thus deprived honest sportsmen of their living. So the sport kicked him out. QED.
Pera Lozac
Heat management assistant
The only way to remove doping from sport is to remove sponsorship from sport. No big money - no big pressures - no incentive for doping. I am even prepared to say that there is no sport at the professional level these days where athletes do not use some performance enhancing chemistry. So, what is the point then - why not allowing all performance enhancing drugs and see if athletes will be prepared to limit their life span to 35-40 years for $100K a year? It would be a very interesting couple of years before they change their minds and go clean (or switching back to honey and walnuts before the race).
We lost the real reason why people should practice sports and compete - winning big bucks is not one of them.
Dennis Hemphill
Associate Professor of Sport Ethics at Victoria University
I enjoyed reading this piece and the comments to it. I hope that I can add something to the conversation on this.
I think that one of the implications of the view of athletes as 'rational calculators' seems to be that Lance Armstrong didn't cheat. He simply made a choice to use Method A (i.e., actions with possible penalties) rather than Method B (i.e., actions without penalties) to enhance his performance, perhaps thinking that the likelihood of being caught was so low that it was worth the risk…
Read morePera Lozac
Heat management assistant
What is sport ethics? At least how do you define such a thing when you are in the world where a notional victory means millions of dollars in the bank. Time of the Hellenic Olympic ideals is long gone if it ever existed - reality of dollar is the preacher, rule maker, judge and jury. We are the ones who want to be entertained by seeing world records beaten every year while we sit in front of our 60" screens with two bags of chips. We are replacing our personal incapable bodies by short term empowerment of faceless heroes that break records for us and their sponsors. Where is the place for ethics in that picture?