An Afterword

Abstract

This trek and quest explores a range of man-made anomalies and challenges which are rarely considered by their stakeholders in the complex, dynamic, nonlinear, multi-dimensionalities of both “doping” and antidoping, closure-driven certitudes.

Keywords :

• anti-doping
• doping
• commodification
• compete
• enhance
• harm
• participate
• sportsmanship
• win

THE AUTHORS

Stan Einstein, Ph.D., clinical and social psychologist; student; academician (emeritus); researcher; journalist (newspaper and radio); editor/author (25 books; 58 topic-oriented special issues of Substance Use and Misuse listed as editor 7; unlisted as editor 51); journal editor-founder (Substance Use and Misuse; Drug Forum; Social Pharmacology; Violence, Aggression and Terrorism; Altered States of Consciousness); consultant, lecturer, conference, and training program organizer, exhibit curator, volunteer; awards (Pace Setter award, NIDA; Mayor of Jerusalem Outstanding Volunteer Award). Area of interest: the parameters of failure.

Notes

2 The reader interested in the complex processes, implications, and outcomes of losing and failing are referred to: Sandage, S. A. (2005) Born losers: A history of failure in America. Cambridge Mass. Harvard University Press; Ormerod, Paul, (2005) Why most things fail: Evolution, extinction and economics. Faber & Faber, UK; Miller, Matt, (2010).The tyranny of dead ideas; New York: Henry Holt & Co. and Einstein, Stanley, (2013), (ed.) Substance use(r) intervention failures., Substance Use and Misuse, 47:13–14

3 Personal and team doctors, soigneurs—a romantic French term designating “one who cares for others,” individual athletes and team managers, team owners, sports medicine clinic directors, and staff who instruct athletes in how to use, but do not themselves administer the pharmacological-helpers in order to avoid “chemical culpability,” mechanics when needed, hotel room maids who removed the doping athlete's trash bag filled with syringes and empty vials from the enhanced temporary hotel room guest's waste can, spouses, and other significant “others … ” who “mule” the enhancers across geographical and other borders and boundaries; all able, if they choose to, to innovatively rationalize their abetting the chemistry of cheating—both the competitive and the doping testing—even by: it's not cheating when everybody is doing it. And many people and systems KNOW and have known. Just as the “anti-dopers” can, and do, legitimate their potential, and actual, violating of others by “mathematicalizing” 2 of 3 man-made, sports prohibition-listings of a substance or a method having (1) the potential to enhance performance; (2) representing a potential health risk, and/or (3) violates the (unmeasurable, stakeholders-designated) spirit of sport. Going beyond, this Holy Trinity for “clean” sports and sporting is prohibiting the use of substances which can and do potentially mask “doping.” Akin to anti-doping groups and activities enabling fans to feel and be secure in their beliefs that someone else is taking care of “clean competitions;” the soigneurs of prevention.

4 WADA, the World Anti-Doping Agency, was created as an international independent agency, November 10, 1999 subsequent to the first International Conference on Doping in Sport initiated by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and held in Lausanne, Switzerland, during February 1999. Its mandate is to “set unified standards for antidoping work and coordinate the efforts of sports organizations and; public authorities.” WADA arose 31 years after the term “commodification,’ and its processes, was introduced into the English language but long after athletes had become commodities. Intervening in what could be relevant to de-commodifying athletes, clean or “dirty” ones, and their activities, is not part of its fairness in sports mandate. <http://www.wada-ama.org/en/About-WADA/History/A-Brief-History-of-Anti-Doping/> downloaded 4/15/14.T The IOC's and WADA's relationships between sports, sportsmanship, athletes, their performances, their wellbeing and their necessary contingencies, their unending efforts to raise money for … their relationships with their major sponsors and the communities of “fans” whom they are to serve is not an easily understood one.

5 Consider the mega-irony of tainted Western colonizers who, for hundreds of years exploited, and enhanced, the endurance of their overworked, colonized, and often enslaved, less than/human-worker/profit-source commodities with “imported” alcoholic beverages … ” enslaving spirits”  … and/or native-natural-” intoxicants and violating techniques … performance enhancing drugs and methods … and OUR God's WORDS … and who have yet to be sanctioned for the creating of a vibrant, valued, culture of “getting-away-with-it.” Jankowiak, William and Bradburd, Daniel Eds. (2003) Drugs, Labor and Colonial Expansion. Tucson: The Arizona University Press; José C. Curto, (2003) Enslaving spirits: The Portuguese-Brazilian alcohol trade at Luanda and its hinterland, York University, Toronto.

6 The word “doping” was first mentioned in an English dictionary in 1889, describing a mixture of opium and other narcotics which were administered to horses at races. Horses continue to be “doped” throughout the world; maimed and dying to perform. Define “doping” as a violation of ethics, morals, sportsmanship, and fair play, which merits sanctioning and temporary or more permanent punishment, is not an easy task given the vagueness of these terms and processes. Creating a consensualized list of what is prohibited by “consensualizing adults” resolves any legal problems. If the + tagged athlete can't read in his or her mother tongue, hopefully the coach and/or the soigneur can. The current and official definition of doping, based on the World Anti-Doping Code, reads as follows: “Doping is defined as the occurrence of one or more of the anti-doping rule violations set forth in Article 2.1 through Article 2.8 of the World Anti-Doping Code,” which, simplified, note: Presence of a prohibited substance in the body (pursuant to the updated Prohibited List); (Attempted) use by an athlete of a prohibited substance or a prohibited method; Refusing or failing without compelling justification to submit to sample collection; Failure to file whereabouts information (“whereabouts filing requirements”); (Attempted) tampering with any part of doping control; Illegal possession of prohibited substances or methods; (Attempted) trafficking in any prohibited substance or method; (Attempted) administration of any prohibited substance or method.

7 Cerebral concussion is common in collision sports. The chronic effects of recurrent concussion, such as cognitive impairment, “mild” or “other,” which are part of “the game” are not well understood. In a general questionnaire-based health survey of a subset of 758 “collisioners”, from a sample of 2,552 retired US professional football players, with an average age of 53.8 (±13.4) years and an average professional football playing career of 6.6 (± 3.6) years, 61% reported sustaining at least one concussion during their professional football career, and 24% sustained three or more concussions. There was a statistically significant association between recurrent cerebral concussions, clinically diagnosed and self-reported significant memory impairments. Retired football–collision players with a remembered history of three or more concussions had a five-fold prevalence of a mild cognitive impairment (MCI) diagnosis and reported having three times more significant memory problems when compared with retirees without a history of concussion. The study noted that although they were not able to statistically document a generalizable relationship between “recurrent concussion and Alzheimer's disease”, “we observed an earlier onset of Alzheimer's disease in the retirees than in the general American male population.” The authors concluded “that the onset of dementia-related syndromes may be initiated by repetitive cerebral concussions in professional football players.” A caveat. Collision-contact-athletes, their families as well as additional “significant others,” including sports organizations who are/should be ostensibly sensitive to the wellbeing of their sport and its community of performers and leisured-time observers, may have some difficulty discerning between substantive and statistical significance. Guskiewicz, Kevin M. et al, (2005) Association between recurrent concussion and late-life cognitive impairment in retired professional football players. Neurosurgery. 57:4,719-726. I remain challenged in a “doping”/anti-doping culture, and context, to adequately understand the value boundaries and necessary enabling, acculturating, and institutionalized conditions between tainted performance enhancing and “clean” collision enhancing.

8 College-university, student–amateur athletes is often a misnomer. First, it is important to distinguish between a university's revenue producing sports and nonrevenue producing sports. Second, these athlete-students are really “employed” fulltime athletically. They somehow have to fit their studies into their daily “work,” solutions being created and “enhanced” by a range of academic and nonacademic staff who, by the nature of this college–sports reality, can be and are engaged in corrupt and, at times, criminal activities which become traditionalized and institutionalized. Third, these athlete-students can and do graduate from university without the education that the university was created and mandated to give. They graduate, in a sense, with a “dirty education” and not a “clean education” even if their urines were clean. Athlete-students have been and are accepted into the university not equipped to successfully carry out college level studies even as they successfully “carry the ball.” This situation worsened in 2008 when the US NCAA (National Collegiate Athletic Association) changed entrance requirements and lowered SAT (Scholastic Aptitude Test—which measures critical reading, math, and writing abilities) scores depending upon a student's GPA scores (grade point average; e.g. average grades earned over a period of time during high school). The GPA is used to determine the student's educational achievement during his/her course of studies. The NCAA, mandated to determine impermissible and academic benefits for the student-athlete, was created due to President Theodore Roosevelt's demand to reform college football because even then football, a contact—competition, was an extremely rough sport which caused many serious injuries. The contacts which student—athletes can and do make with important and influential alumni who can help them during their college years as well as after college, enhancing their lives, are yet to be adequately studied in terms of their physical-contact costs on the playing-field or “playing” in independent study “paper” courses in which a single paper and no classroom attendance or contact with a teacher denotes academic achievement. More than 150,000 student-athletes apply to universities in the United States annually. Readers interested in enhancing their knowledge about this piece in the “doping” puzzle for a very specific population are referred to: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Student athlete downloaded 5/11/14; http://www.newsobserver.com/2012/05/11/2057064/unc-chapel-hill-might-take-action.html#storylink=cpy She had to tell what she knew Joe Nocera, New York Times, May 6, 2014, page A25.

9 Lance Armstrong, conqueror of cancer and competitions, treading the line between dying and winning in his linear, legitimizing, lean, lacerated, (L⁴) “traitorizing” of one of his many sponsors—the Trek Bicycle Corporation-claims that Trek's revenue was $100 million when he signed with the company and reached $1 billion in 2013. “Who's responsible for that?” he asks, before cursing and saying, “Right here.” He pokes himself in the chest with his right index finger. “I'm sorry, but that is true. Without me, none of that happens.” http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/02/sports/cycling/end-of-the-ride-for-lance-armstrong.html downloaded 3/2/14. Was Lance the rare lancer of the legacy of peripheral, pasteurized purity?

10 The interested reader can Google Victo Conte and the Balco scandal for a case study in-site/insight into the realities and limitations doping testing and its false +s and −s. More than 20 elite athletes were investigated. Marion Jones, Olympic field and track champion, for example, tested negative more than 150 times for performance-enhancing drug (PED) use during her career, lied about her use of PEDs to a grand jury, was sentenced to six months in jail for perjury but was not tripped up by a positive drug test. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marion_Jones downloaded 4/22/14

11 Readers interested in the roles, influences, sources of powers and impacts of individual and systemic stakeholders in the broad area of substance use(r) interventions and which are critical to an understanding of “doping” and anti-”doping,” and which remain under-researched, are referred to Beccaria, Franca, et al. (eds.) (2013) Stakeholders in opioid drug user treatment policy: Similarities and differences in six European countries. Substance Use and Misuse 48:11

12 “What is doping?”, the question enveloping the quest for a useful and useable delineation is shorter than Shakespeare's to be or not to be. Both questions have triggered a great deal of unresolved controversy.

13 In a binary world of winners and losers, of “clean” competers and “dirty dopers”, of positive and negative urine and blood testing results, you, the reader, are invited to learn about the outrageous human rights abuse associated with the “testosterone tyranny”—testing of tagged female athletes. “The Trouble with too Much T,” Katrina Karkazis and Rebecca Jordan-Young, NYT, April 12, 2014, page A 21. Current policies of international sports governing bodies (i.e. IOC—International Olympic Committee and the IAAF—International Association of Athletics Federations amongst others) test women athletes whose bodies produce testosterone levels which are higher than is typical  … (remember the bell-shaped curve … ). When the judgment, which is a consensualized one and not an empirically informed one, is made … most often by men … that the T level is too high, the group's chosen medical team  … another consensualized judgment  … creates a “therapeutic proposal.” A socially constructed, influential-stakeholder-agendaed, gender-associated, medicalized-mongered PROBLEM becomes resolvable either through irreversible and medically unjustified surgery (removing a nondiseased woman's “guilty”-gonads, which causes sterility, or partial surgical removal of the clitoris, which impairs her and not his sexual functioning and sensation) or using non-doping hormone suppressing medicine—drugs, which potentially are associated with life-long health risks, to lower the naturally heighten T level to a consenualized “normal” T level. The tagged high-T level female athlete, if successfully, and invasively, treated will be allowed to return to compete, and if she becomes a special kind of winner, even to BECOME a commodity. If, however, she  …  gender-sure of WHO she is, and who she is not  … refuses to cooperate in the investigation and its subsequent “medical mongering,” she is banned, permanently, from competing in elite women's sportsmanship-like events. A caveat is obviously necessary to distinguish between “doping” testing and testosterone testing; the former is self-inflicted, the latter is  … It takes lots of testosterone and genderless-b_ _ _s to create and sustain such an intrusive, shameful, and humiliating policy and its procedures.

¹¹The American legendary college football coach Knute Rockne stated that, “Show me a good and gracious loser and I'll show you a failure” and the professional football coach Vince Lombardi contributed his philosophy that, “winning isn't everything—it's the only thing.” Unpublished manuscript by M. Bahrke.

14 It's written here: “In the Beginning was the Word!” Here I stick already! Who can help me? It's absurd, Impossible, for me to rate the word so highly I must try to say it differently If I'm truly inspired by the Spirit. I find I've written here: “In the Beginning was the Mind.” Let me consider that first sentence So my pen won't run on in advance! Is it Mind that works and creates what's ours? It should say: “In the beginning was the Power!” Yet even while I write the words down, I'm warned: I'm no closer with these I've found The Spirit helps me! I have it now, intact. And firmly write: “In the Beginning was the Act!” Faust Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe lines 1223-1237 http://www. gutenberg.org/files/14591/14591-h/14591-h.htm downloaded 4/30/14

15 When athletes, coaches, trainers, and the other co-opted and co-opters do not and did not debate the morality or propriety of “doping”; debating, rather, which drugs were/are more effective, and when national doping programs go beyond the documented, collusion of a few blamed, sanctioned, elite athletes, coaches, “rogue physicians”, laboratories and sport scientists?