Clean Olympics

How to ensure Clean Olympics

June 2014

On Friday August 5th, 2016, the 31st Olympic Games are scheduled to begin in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. As often happens in the run-up to such events, concerns have been voiced about timely completion of the facilities and about security. Those concerns we leave to others, however. Our focus here is different. It is Clean Olympics.

To understand the threat to this ideal, just consider one of the most iconic competitions: the 100-metre sprint race. At the 24th Olympic Games, winner Ben Johnson from Canada was subsequently stripped of his gold medal after testing positive for performance-enhancing drugs. Furthermore, the majority of his opponents in the final, as well as several winners of the same competition at later Olympic Games, were also implicated in drug scandals at certain points in their careers. And this is not even looking at the women's side, which had its share of doping controversy as well.

True, athletes often put forward innocent explanations for positive doping tests. But then, on the other hand, negative tests don't quite prove cleanness. Apparently there are techniques to evade detection. The Tour de France bicycle race, although a yearly and not an Olympic competition, is an instructive case here. Of five different winners overall from 1996 to 2006, all doped, only one was actually caught by testing during the competition. The other four passed their tests at the time. Three later confessed, including seven-times winner Lance Armstrong; one was retroactively tested positive.

Use of performance-enhancing drugs at the Tour de France has often been exposed through investigations into the doping scene, something not all countries and sports have, rather than through doping tests. The latter, it seems, do not really sort out the "bad apples" but serve merely to make an example of some careless or unlucky ones. For progress towards Clean Olympics, however, testing would have to catch not just more dopers than that, but almost all of them — otherwise, in competitions where doping provides a sufficient performance edge, the winner will be a doper who got away. And even if testing could be strengthened and improved to such a level, this would still only result in an arms race, since new doping techniques become available regularly.

Our quest for Clean Olympics has hit such forbidding obstacles that a radically different approach would seem to be needed. Can we find one? The solution is a change in definition. We shall henceforth examine the conceptual side of cleanness, too often overlooked. From this new angle, Clean Olympics no longer require a possibly hopeless struggle but could be obtained by simple administrative fiat.

Conceptual — what does that mean? Let us illustrate. The 100-metre sprint, our big worry just a moment ago, is now a paragon of cleanness. What could be more natural than to cover 100 metres, or some other distance, as fast as possible? Hurdles in the way, as in the men's 110-metre sprint, symbolise obstacles, which is conceptually fine. Jumping long or high is undoubtedly a natural challenge, and throwing spears a natural hunting activity.

One athletics competition that appears conceptually dubious at first is the race walk. What is the point, one might ask, of artificially slowing the athlete down by stipulating a foot on the ground at any time. Yet a deeper purpose is not inconceivable here. Think of a collective intelligence, such as the Borg in the Star Trek universe, that requires individual members to be connected to a central nexus. Due to the frequent instability of wireless connections, a requirement of physical contact may not be so outlandish.

What about the relay races? We can readily imagine the baton to be symbolising some important object that has to be sent as quickly as possible from one place to another. A team of runners can do better, one may suppose, than a single runner. However, the exact number of runners should be left to the participants to decide, as long as a given maximum is not exceeded. This is perhaps something that ought to be fixed in time for the Rio Olympics. If more runners always result in faster times, though, there won't be a difference in practice.

In any case, we find much graver violations of conceptual cleanness by switching our attention from athletics to swimming. Of different Olympic swimming races over the same distance, one is called freestyle, and this very name shows us that something has gone badly wrong in this sport. Never in a conceptually clean sporting competition will you encounter a mandatory "style", such as breaststroke or butterfly in swimming. "Free" style should be a matter of course, so that innovations are possible, at least in principle. And they can even occur in practice, as in the athletics high jump competition, where completely different styles have been used, at the highest level, over the years. The dominant one since about 1980 has been the Fosbury flop.