Lance Armstrong: Sports Drug Cheat or just another athlete seeking an unfair advantage

The whole Lance Armstrong saga has shown a great many people do not want to revere a champion who has taken an unfair advantage through performance enhancing drugs.

However, the modern professional sporting world is filled with situations where champions are champions because of an unfair advantage.

The Australian AIS was the envy of the world in the 90s and it led to Australia dominating in rugby, cricket, and becoming a force in football. Much of the funding was meant for the Sydney Olympics and as a result Australian soared to its highest ever rank in the medal tally in the Sydney Olympics and then again in Athens. The Chinese did the same for Beijing and the British for London. Huge money was spent on giving their athletes the best chances of winning.

Clearly the athletes of the Australian, Chinese and British Olympic teams had an unfair advantage over their rivals. They had better access to training, better coaches, better nutrition, and better performance enhancing technology.  

Athletes funded by the Government could dedicate their lives entirely to their sport. Athletes living in poorer places or countries that put less money into sports could not hope to compete with this, creating once more an unfair advantage

Rowers in state of the art boats could never be caught by teams using basic wooden craft. Swimmers using the latest space age swimming suits, on strict diets and coaching regimes, using vitamins and recovery drinks and protein powder for muscle growth are never going to be caught by those without assistance, let alone the African without access to a pool.

Now in Lance Armstrong’s case, the general consensus seems to be that we ought not to celebrate a cheat who had an unfair advantage by blood doping and performance enhancing drugs. Yet in all sport we celebrate the champion that had an unfair advantage by their country of birth or their access to training and equipment. Without even conscious acknowledgement we celebrate the sporting champion that soared to the top through unfair advantage brought by wealth.

Yet why the uproar when it comes to the use of performance enhancing drugs and blood doping? Sure it’s an unfair advantage which not all athletes which to choose, one that gives them a competitive advantage over their rivals that don’t dope, but this is prevalent in many aspects of sports and in may type of advantage.  Eating certain foods – egg whites or protein, drinking water or hydrating fluids, using protein powder, or training at altitude – are all examples where one sportsperson can choose an advantage over their competitors. At what point does it become cheating? When does the unfair advantage become unacceptable?

It would be easy answer to say that performance enhancing drugs are unacceptable because they are against the rules or outlawed by the sport.  But then many performance enhancing substances are being invented right now and are yet to be banned in sports. Is an athlete a cheat by taking these before they get banned? And if they are then it becomes a moral argument – and as soon as it is a question of right and wrong then all advantage should be removed and rich countries using their wealth or technological advantage to win world cups and bag vast numbers of gold medals are just as bad as Lance and all those cyclists caught up in an era where winning was everything and any advantage was worth taking.