By Peter Singer
The inaugural Enhanced Games, held in Las Vegas in May, allowed participating athletes to use performance-enhancing drugs. The Games’ founder, Aron D’Souza, claimed before the start: “We’re going to obliterate the world records … it will be a watershed moment in the history of humanity—a new generation of superheroes.”
The Games failed to live up to D’Souza’s hype. Only one participant broke an official world record: the Greek swimmer Kristian Gkolomeev, whose time for the 50-metre freestyle beat the mark by less than one-tenth of a second. Even then, it may not have been performance-enhancing drugs that made the difference, because Gkolomeev wore a high-tech swimsuit banned under World Aquatics rules. Three athletes who said they were not taking any performance-enhancing drugs won their events anyway.
One justification for the Enhanced Games was that we would learn how to surpass the biological limits of human performance. Ironically, the main lesson appears to be that the performance-enhancing drugs currently available make less difference than many people believe for the sports featured at the Enhanced Games—athletics, swimming, and weightlifting. The Games produced no superheroes, nor any watershed moment for our species.
The Enhanced Games do, however, raise serious questions about current rules for international sporting events. Why, exactly, are performance-enhancing drugs banned?
Statements from international sports bodies condemning the Enhanced Games tended to focus on the dangers they pose. For example, a joint meeting of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) Athletes’ Commission and the World Anti-Doping Agency issued a statement saying that the use of performance-enhancing drugs can lead to “serious long-term health consequences—even death—and encouraging athletes to use them is utterly irresponsible and immoral.”
Yet the Enhanced Games restricted the drugs that competitors could use to those that are approved by the US Food and Drug Administration and used under medical supervision. Prescriptions for one of these substances, testosterone, now exceed 11 million per year in the United States alone, and the extent to which medically supervised doses of testosterone are a health risk is unclear.
Perhaps the most intriguing issue raised by the Enhanced Games is that of personal autonomy. D’Souza regarded himself as liberating athletes from the paternalism of governments and sports federations: “My body my choice, your body your choice,” he said, with the only qualification being that participants must be adults who give free and informed consent.
In contrast, the philosopher Byron Hyde has argued that the large cash prizes offered at the Enhanced Games risk coercing impoverished athletes, thus undermining rather than increasing their autonomy. Hyde quotes one athlete, Ben Proud, as saying that the first memory he has of learning about the Enhanced Games was that anyone breaking a world record would receive $1 million, which “just felt like too good an opportunity to turn down.” Hyde claims that this is empirical evidence for his concern “that the Enhanced Games’ financial incentives might have coercive effects on athlete autonomy.”
If taken seriously, however, the leap from Proud’s statement to the implication of “coercive effects on athlete autonomy” would have bizarre consequences. Consider the career of the Nigerian soccer star Victor Osimhen, one of seven children born to an impoverished family in an area of Lagos known for its malodorous dumpsites. (It was from those dumps that Osimhen got his first football boots.) Osimhen was good enough to play in the Under-17 World Cup, where talent scouts noticed him. Soon he was receiving offers from European clubs that he could barely have imagined as a young boy. Those offers were, no doubt, “too good to turn down.” Accepting them enabled him to provide for his entire family. Who would suggest that the European clubs should not have made those offers to Osimhen, because they would be coercive, and his acceptance could not have been an autonomous choice?
Paternalism can be justified. Laws requiring those travelling in a car to wear seatbelts prevent many tragedies because we are so poor at taking precautions against very small risks of severe harm. But to say that fully informed adult competitors at the Enhanced Games were coerced by the substantial prize money on offer takes paternalism too far.
Finally, there is fairness. A spokesperson for the IOC said: “If you want to destroy any concept of fair play and fair competition in sport, this would be a good way to do it.” True, if costly drugs really do enhance performance, that would make the competition unfair to those who cannot afford them. But the same can be said of the Adidas running shoes that Sebastian Sawe used earlier this year to run a marathon in under two hours. They cost $500, and don’t expect them to be durable. Adidas’s Stephen Scholten acknowledged that the shoes can be used only for “a couple of marathons.”
If fairness in sports required a level playing field that all who wish to compete could afford, that would be a reason for banning expensive performance-enhancing drugs. But it would be a reason for banning expensive high-tech swimming suits and expensive high-tech running shoes, too.
The writer is Emeritus Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University and Visiting Professor of Medical Ethics at the Centre for Biomedical Ethics at National University of Singapore.
