I write this, somewhat jetlagged, from my parents’ dining table as I decamp to London for August. If you’re in London this month, let’s hang out! I have a series of panel events at Runlimited on August 12-14, so you’ll know exactly where I’ll be then. Take a read of what we’ll be talking about.
Recently, I’ve been thinking about the positive drug test of women’s marathon world record holder Ruth Chepngetich a couple of weeks ago. It was a masking agent, often used to cover up the use of illegal substances, rather than a banned substance itself, but the doubt… the doubt.
Now, upon her return from a four-year ban for testing positive for nandrolone, Shelby Houlihan immediately and controversially became the U.S. Champion in the 5,000 meters. The doping conversation has always gone hand in hand with athletics, so I don’t necessarily want to talk directly about the shadow that doping casts on all competitive sport. I want to talk about what we want from running as followers rather than competitors.
When does sport become a spectacle?
What changes the emphasis from competition to entertainment? Money, essentially. Advertising, gambling, media coverage, athlete endorsements, paying customers demanding value for their hard-earned money.
In its purest form, however, sport doesn’t need an audience. It’s only about the athletes competing against one another. Think of two college wrestlers in a spartan gym trying to get the pin. Consider a pair of boxers sparring for that knockout punch. A full track of runners racing their lanes to the finish line.
That is competition. That is sport.
The thing is, those vulgar displays of human excellence make for incredibly compelling events that the rest of us want to witness first-hand. It’s entertaining to see humans fiercely pitted against one another. It’s the ultimate in reality television, and while pure competition has its merits, many simply want to see a human body taken to its limits. It might not actually matter to the viewer if the person breaking a record is juiced up to the gills on performance-enhancing drugs.
That is entertainment. That is the viewing of a spectacle.
What do we want?
While there are myriad tangible reasons (sponsorships, glory, decades of hard work) for athletes to crave being the name at the top of the list, we want to see a level playing field, because the best games have clear boundaries set out, even if the rules are constantly updated to reflect new technologies and other nuances. The sport’s doping rules allow every athlete to believe that they can reach their maximum level with the right effort and infrastructure in place. It’s clean, fair competition.
Life isn’t fair, though. With the Olympic Games, the pinnacle of athletic excellence, only coming around every four years, peak training must be timed to perfection. A rogue injury or unseasonably warm day might relegate a lifetime of discipline to a footnote rather than a headline. It makes it slightly easier to understand why someone might choose a shortcut to glory, even if they’ll always know it’s not real.
Where do you draw the line?
A friend once gave me a hack that allows you to neutrally walk into any discussion by simply interjecting, “Yeah, but where do you draw the line?”
It’s hilarious in its simplicity (thanks, Ron), but it was so helpful in framing in my own mind that everybody has a different line that has been drawn and redrawn according to their experiences on that subject.
For instance, an Olympic-level running coach might publicly have a zero-tolerance stance on drugs while getting as close to the laws on banned substances as possible with their own athletes, but the purist hobbyist runner might truly take zero supplements in the quest to explore their own body’s natural limits.
In another part of that everyday athlete’s life, however, they might inject botox to game a different system in terms of looks, and the likelihood of one of their peers taking steroids, for instance, is greater than you might think. Read this article by the esteemed Rosecrans Baldwin on GQ, for an interesting perspective.
Can we co-exist?
The same difference between amateur and professional wrestling now exists in running, posing a new question. I wrote about the Enhanced Games last year to a flurry of concerns over the health of the athletes willingly engaging in the taking of performance-enhancing drugs with the goal of being the fastest, strongest, best in exchange for vast sums of corporate money.
If the goal is to create a spectacle, when attendances for ‘real’ track meets like Grand Slam Track fall short of both hype and expectation (and funding), we wonder out loud – via social media and news headlines – what we need to do to make pure sport more worthy of attention. Maybe it’s this?
There is a linked conversation about how running influencers, with their bite-sized content snacks are the natural progression of this argument, becoming micro-spectacles, consumed constantly on the go. The concept of competition that they adhere to is less related to split times and more to follower counts, but millions care deeply about that eminently more digestible running information.
There’s a deeper connection to be made here with Debord’s 1960s theories on spectacle and the commoditization of ourselves, but, ultimately, we have to recognize that we don’t exist in a vacuum. Everything we create and think about is linked back to how people interact with the wider world, and if more attention, in general, is now being given to entertainment, it makes sense that sports are leaning further and further into the spectacle again. If body modification is becoming normalized in everyday life, it makes sense that the Enhanced Games has a place on the sporting calendar.
Just as Olympic wrestlers like Kurt Angle can go on to become multi-millionaire WWE athletes, Olympic sprinters might find a second wind in another franchise. It’s maybe always been clear that more of the general public cares about facile, mindless entertainment than about serious, chin-stroking sport. In my mind, there is room in the world of running for both clean, pure competition of the Olympics and the doped-up spectacle of the Enhanced Games, just as there is room for both David Lynch and Love Island on your televisions.
In a world where variety is the spice of life, and we want to have something for everyone, I say we can adhere to the ethics of perceived properness and acquiesce to the demands of the braying masses.
Where do you draw the line?
Last week on Running Sucks
I wrote about Rajpaul Pannu, an elite Indian-American athlete who turned down the opportunity to race for India because of the ethics and morals that come with being a great person. Go and read it.
I was interviewed by a running fashion guru
of took the time to ask me some questions, and I drop some BIG NEWS towards the end of it. Cole’s newsletter is well worth a read if you like to know what cool, trendy people wear. SUBSCRIBE.
Running Sucks Haiku of the Week
Thoughts on strength training:
”Are you a hybrid athlete?”
Not now. Not ever.
I’m still thinking about how multiple people are predicting Hyrox as the Next Big Thing in running, and I can’t but feel that it’s kinda gross how it’s a copyrighted brand being highlighted rather than a form of exercise.
Is strength training for runners the gateway drug to the inevitably temporary corporate cult of Hyrox?
Housekeeping
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Thanks for being able to read below the paywall,
Raz x