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Game of Shadows by Mark Fainaru‐Wada and Lance Williams (2006), Gotham Books

2006; Wiley; Volume: 20; Issue: 14 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1096/fj.06-1203ufm

1530-6860

Diane C. Zelman, Luis Concepcion,

Doping in Sports

The uncomfortable fact about steroids in sports is that they work. Anabolic steroids and the hodgepodge of doping tricks used by athletes—including erythropoietin, human growth hormone, insulin, and stimulants—increase endurance, muscle mass, and strength. They can get an athlete jazzed up and focused on a race; after a tough day of training, they make you feel like new; after a major injury they can have you slugging or sprinting in weeks instead of months. But their extensive side effects include increased risk of kidney and liver damage, tendon tears, impotence, sterility, aggression, depression, and elevated cardiac risk. These risks do not deter the estimated 75% or more of professional bodybuilders, up to 7% of adolescents, and an unknown percentage of professional athletes who use steroids. In the winner-take-all world of professional sports, those who get caught “juicing” insist that everyone does it. They maintain that professional sports these days are really about entertaining the fans and that steroids make sports more entertaining. Once you're at the top, they imply, everyone knows that you are either a cheater or a loser. Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams, reporters for the San Francisco Chronicle, provide an engaging popular press primer on the phenomenon of steroids in elite sports in Game of Shadows (Gotham Books, 2006). They reserve their greatest revulsion for the Giant's home run king Barry Bonds, whom they claim began juicing in 1998 out of deep rooted narcissism and jealousy towards the publicity of Sammy Sosa and Mark McGuire as they challenged the single season home run record. The story of Bonds leads to an even more remarkable antihero, Victor Conte, whose San Francisco area company Bay Area Laboratory Cooperative (BALCO) allegedly supplied doping strategies and supplements—legal, illegal, and undetectable—to dozens of elite athletes including Olympic sprinters Marion Jones and Tim Montgomery and baseball stars Barry Bonds, Jason Giambi, and Gary Sheffield. Conte and BALCO represent a scary postmodern science, one that earns its legitimacy because it looks legitimate to its audience. With a junior college education that prepared him for a career in accounting, Conte boned up on biochemistry and nutrition, threw on a white coat and chatted up bodybuilders about the ignorance of physicians and scientists to the health needs of athletes. He purchased a room-sized “inductively coupled plasma spectrometer” to detect trace mineral deficiencies in athletes' hair, urine, and blood. To compensate for these so-called deficiencies, he provided a scientific product-with-an-acronym, ZMA (which stands for either Zinc Magnesium Aspartate or Zinc Monomethionine Aspartate). He bragged about his connections with rogue chemists who supplied mysterious new or discontinued steroids. Based on records seized by the FBI, his supplements were administered to athletes according to highly sophisticated daily and monthly doping schedules, including three weeks on steroids and one week off when steroids were replaced by the women's fertility drug clomiphene, to stimulate FSH and safeguard the body's ability to produce endogenous testosterone. Athletes must have felt that his systematic doping schedules were both scientific and familiar, like the training regimens they are accustomed to. And, the results inspired their confidence. A Game of Shadows runs along two currents: a well written and thoroughly researched history of the BALCO scandal, and an expose on Barry Bond's character flaws. The latter distracts from the former. Evidence of Bonds' steroid use is summarized in two appendices—and they are unconvincing. Support for Fainaru-Wada's and Williams' claim relies heavily on statements by Bonds' former lover, steroid dealers, and former friends. The only concrete evidence provided is a coded calendar purporting to show the dates and doses of Bonds' drug regimen. More persuasive, but still inconclusive, is the second appendix, which outlines Bonds' extraordinary performance gains after the age of thirty-three, when most athletes suffer a steady decline. Convincing circumstantial evidence is the photos of Bonds as a rookie and Bonds after his association with BALCO. Bonds' physique is radically changed, appearing more like an NFL linebacker and less like the lean young man of his Pittsburgh Pirates days. Fainaru-Wada and Williams correctly suggest that Bonds' phenomenal muscle gains are unfathomable for a thirty-three year old. Who is the villain in this book? One has no trouble finding liars and opportunists on every page, but if one searches for the real villain, one quickly finds oneself in the moral quagmire of twenty-first century medical enhancement. In a consumer driven society in which we are driven to be more perfect, stronger, more attractive, happier, and more instrumental, and in the age of Botox and cosmetic surgery, what is wrong with self improvement via steroids? In his discussion of modern neuropharmacological and genetic science, Francis Fukuyama (Our Posthuman Future, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002) argues that such interventions threaten the principles of naturalism set forward by Aristotle, that human nature consists of a set of physical and behavioral characteristics that are good primarily because they are natural. Other philosophers challenge enhancements based on the inherent human value of authenticity, the drive to be or become more of who we are. Such arguments are in turn opposed by those who say that what is natural or authentic is debatable. When we are failed by the naturalistic argument, the utilitarian argument may provide our rescue: the use of steroids in sports leads to escalation. One athlete will always be willing to go a little further than the last, and only the last one alive and breathing wins. Tagging steroid-facilitated sports records with an asterisk or Rx will not solve the problem. Fainaru-Wada and Williams offer only a glimpse into the “cheat or lose” mentality that pervades athletic competition in the post-steroid era, and the dilemma of athletes around the world who feel forced to join the chemical contest, or quit athletics altogether. BALCO did not create this mentality, although it promoted and cashed in on it. Steroids have been used since the 1940s and 1950s in athletics, primarily in bodybuilding, weightlifting, and power track events such as the shot put. East Germany is known to have begun systematic widespread doping of its elite athletes from the 1960s to the fall of the Berlin Wall. International demand grew among athletes during the 1970s, and the 1980s saw the extension of steroid use and widespread use of nutritional supplements from the bodybuilding world to both professional and amateur athletics. Bodybuilding bibles of the time, including Arnold Schwarzenegger's Encyclopedia of Modern Bodybuilding(Simon and Schuster, 1987), promoted a new male body ideal requiring two- to three-hour daily workouts. Steroids were not explicitly encouraged, but few bodies could follow the demanding recommended training regimen without them. In those days Joe Weider, the don of bodybuilding and supplement marketing, used steroid abusers to market nutritional supplements to frustrated athletes, a tactic later copied by Conte. If you find mass-market journalism cloying you will not like this book, but it's an attention-grabbing introduction to the world of performance-enhancing drugs, how they are made, distributed, used, and detected. The book will serve up just about any ideology you're seeking—it's about the hypocrisy of heroism in modern athletics; it's just another example of the press exploiting the athletes for a good scoop; and it's a morality tale about the sickness of our cosmetically-transformed society. With the August detection of an abnormal testosterone-epitestosterone ratio in samples provided by Floyd Landis, the winner of the 2006 Tour de France, and the banning from Olympic facilities of the controversial track coach Trevor Graham, cheating in sports continues to plague athletic competition. As the World Anti-Doping Agency struggles to remain one step ahead of the cheaters, they are hard at work on the next phase of this cat and mouse game: gene doping (see Genetically Modified Athletes, Routledge, 2004).