Wider effects

Wider effects

Wider effects of fair or unfair conduct

What effect do cheating athletes have on the honest ones? How else can sports be unfair?

Skill or riches

Formula One motor racing has been criticised for being more dependent on a team's budget than on the driver's skill. This criticism, though, can be increasingly applied to any sport.

Wealthier countries and teams can give their athletes access to better training facilities, doctors, dieticians and kit.

We may need to ask ourselves to what extent sport should be a competition of science and technology, instead of human skill.

Allowing drugs or other body modification would immediately give another advantage to competitors with more money to spend - although the reality is that some teams are already using these methods illegally.

When huge riches are required to achieve, the world of professional sport seems even further removed from that of amateur and hobbyist players. Making the transition from amateur to professional appears more than ever a matter of luck, not talent. Not very encouraging to young beginners.

Rich teams are also in a better position to defend themselves legally, if they are caught cheating.

A healthy pursuit?

There are health risks associated with most or all of the available performance-enhancing drugs.

That causes some ethicists to say that drug-taking interferes with society's interest in promoting sport as a healthy pursuit. Legalising drugs would only add a seal of official approval to unhealthy practices that are already going on.

This point is expanded in the arguments against legalising drugs.

Drug testing and its pitfalls

In efforts to stamp out drug-taking, stricter tests have been introduced. The disadvantage here is that a stricter test returns more false positives.

A false positive is a test result that seems to detect a drug which isn't there.

Testing is made more difficult because some drugs are broken down quickly inside the body. The only way to detect the drug is to look for the chemicals it is broken down into. But the athlete can protest that these secondary chemicals may be the products of another bodily process. It is sometimes hard to prove one way or another.

False accusations can have an adverse effect on an athlete's career - even if she or he is later proven innocent. The loss of earnings is usually significant.

Public respect for all sports professionals suffers if there are frequent drug scandals. It becomes harder to believe that all athletes aren't cheats.

That may cause all victories to be viewed with suspicion. This is hardly fair on the honest athletes, and it's no fun for the spectators either.