When I was young my family would spend most of the summer in Denmark. Around age 14, I started to get serious about swimming, which made these long trips a bit of a problem. So I joined up with the local team and started practicing.
By the second summer I had friends on the team. As I was about to enter my senior year of high school, 2001, I was well into swimming nerd-dom.
So I was shocked when I brought up Michael Phelps and my friend Emil deadpanned back to me:
“He’s totally on drugs, right?”.
I was shocked, offended, angry and more than a little defensive. How could he! Michael Phelps was totally legit (by the way in case of any ambiguity, this is something I still believe) When I recovered, I learned something pretty important. Your perspective on who is and who isn’t clean in sport has a lot to do with what passport you hold.
Does America Have a Doping Problem?
YES! OF COURSE!
NO, HOW COULD YOU SAY THAT?
I wrote about the doping sanction and subsequent retirement of Conor Dwyer last week, but only tangentially. Beyond how we have very different empathy for him despite a blatant violation of the rules, there’s another couple really important angles to this story.
The first is to disentangle the question of whether “America” swimming has a doping problem. There have been several prominent doping violations at the elite level of American swimming, ranging from being a total dumb dumb head (Ryan Lochte) to Dwyer’s big cheat.
Part of the problem in discussing this is that it’s clear that there are really two lanes for athletes doping. After all, doping controls are not completely inept, and therefore it takes coordination and resources to evade detection.
One way to do this is through a state coordinated program. There is ample evidence that both China and Russia have such systems, and I’m not going to get into the weeds of that conversation here. There are likely others but those two are by far the most prominent.
The second lane is one where on an individual level, there is sufficient money on the line. The slow growth of “professional” swimming unfortunately also increases the monetary incentive to dope, even as the newfound ISL has tried to address that with its zero tolerance policy towards dopers.
The second path is what we’re likely to see more in the US. I’m not so cynical that I believe that an NGB is actively coordinating a doping program. Although, when you consider everything else they are willing to ignore and obfuscate, it’s not surprising to find out that a coach like Alberto Salazar in Track and Field was able to operate so blatantly for so long.
That is to say, if we have such bad actors in swimming, I have little faith in the authorities to root them out.
Competitive Logic
There’s one more big thing to discuss here, and that is some paradoxical logic I see around this topic, particularly in swimming. Somehow, there are many Americans who believe wholeheartedly that doping is a huge problem, and that cheating is rampant and confers a significant competitive advantage.
And yet, the United States dominates in swimming at any international competition they go after. Do we truly believe that everything we do is so much better than our competitors that despite their cheating we still win?
I still remember the first Olympic Trials I ever watched on TV in 2004. During the course of the meet, swimmers training at Stanford conspicuously wore patches on their arms. It drew some scrutiny at the time, and both Stanford coach Richard Quick and this blog’s favorite (s) swimming boss Chuck Wielgus bristled at any question of a doping violation. If the patches were just what Richard Quick said, where did they go?
It went barely without mention when swimming legend Matt Biondi was named in “Game of Shadows” the book about doping mastermind Victor Conte. According to the book, Biondi was a client of BALCO, the company that Conte used to provide “undetectable” performance enhancing drugs to athletes. It’s hard to imagine that Biondi was the only elite swimming athlete in the talent rich Bay Area that availed themselves of Conte’s “cutting edge” approach.
Sadly, it’s not only “elite” athletes who have felt strong enough motivation to do this in the US. One of the great shames of my coaching career was in my second year as an assistant at Penn. An athlete all but admitted steroid use to us (the coaching staff). You know what we did? Nothing. We closed our eyes and hoped it wasn’t true. I’d like to think I’d handle it differently if I got another chance, of course I probably would be even more ostracized than I already am.
Perhaps the most dangerous aspect of American swimming is that we are so successful, so dominant that a collective groupthink justifies, ignores or condones all sorts of horrible behaviors. We’re good at pointing the finger outwards but much harder to reflect on our own problems.