"athletes had to choose between succeeding in sports and obeying the law"

http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/how-to-think-about-our-steroid-supermen


How to Think About Our Steroid Supermen

Lance Armstrong, the Baseball Hall of Fame, and the Meaning of Sports

Jeremy Rozansky

As we gather distance from our athletes’ feats of a decade ago, we must come to grips with how to treat those giants we once worshipped. This week, Lance Armstrong alternatingly apologized and made excuses in front of Oprah’s cameras. Last week, Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens were denied induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame. As we cajole our once-sainted into the national atonement ritual and as we deny immortality to the players we once cheered, we need to ask why. We can only punish correctly if we correctly perceive the dimensions of the sin. If we get the crime wrong, we will err in the punishment. Unfortunately, the public discussion of the problem of doping — at least as presented in the work of many sportswriters — lacks a clear understanding of the moral meaning of sports and athletic achievement.

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Tom Verducci shares the concern for fairness, but argues that the playing field actually was not level during the steroid era: “The hundreds who played the game clean were harmed. Many lost jobs, money and opportunity by choosing to play the game clean. I think of them every time I get a Hall of Fame ballot.” But why would anyone choose to play the game “clean” when being “dirty” carries no official sanction from the sport? One possibility is that some performance-enhancing drugs, while not explicitly banned during that era by Major League Baseball, were not legal in the United States and therefore athletes had to choose between succeeding in sports and obeying the law.

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In choosing to use performance-enhancing drugs these men chose to participate not in sport but in a spectacle that  bears only a mocking resemblance to true athletic achievement. As such, we cannot induct them into our temples of great sportsmen, nor can we consider them the best sportsmen in a corrupted era. Armstrong, Bonds, Clemens, and the rest all chose to be supermen rather than sportsmen. They cannot be both.