Moonwolf's Lair

Golf isn’t a sport you usually associate with doping scandals, the use of performance-enhancing drugs, but that’s now changed with the news of Doug Barron, a PGA Tour player who has been suspended for a year.

His offense is to have taken beta blockers and artificial testosterone.

Artificial or natural testosterone has been used by other athletes because it preomotes muscle mass, and strength.

Beta blockers help enhance focus and concentration.

So, it looks like a slam dunk case of trying to cheat, right?

Not so fast

What if you consider that Doug Barron needs to take beta blockers for a heart condition, and testosterone because his natural levels are one fifth of those other males have in their system?

The CNN article, as is normal for “journalism” these days, makes a big deal with the title of its article, “Sex drive vs golf drive”, but the issues Doug Barron faces are much more involved and affect a large part of his day-to-day living, if he doesn’t take the meds.

Now comes the tricky part – If we agree that beta blockers and testosterone in healthy athletes are performance enhancing to gain an edge over their competitors, that’s cheating.  But if those meds are required for clearly laid out medical reasons, and their only effective “enhancement” for the athlete is to offset the debilitating effects of health conditions so the player can participate on a level playing ground, is that cheating?

The PGA Tour has faced a similar question before, back in 2000, when they were accused of breaching the ADA by Casey Martin, a case that went all the way to the United States Supreme Court which ruled in Martin’s favor (as had the lower courts before them).

Casey Martin had a degenerative disease that wasted away one of his legs.  He wanted to be able to use a cart to go between holes, since walking to all 18 would cause pain and extreme fatigue.  The PGA Tour declined, saying that walking was an essential part of professional golf – a view echoed at the time by such luminaries in the golfing world as Jack Nicklaus and Arnold Palmer.

That had me shaking my head.  it doesn’t require any sort of skill to walk between holes, you aren’t scored for how you walk – the game is about hitting that little white ball.

The Supreme Court obviously felt the same way, in their 7-2 ruling in favor of Casey Martin.

The tip of the iceberg

These cases in such a “gentle” game such as golf highlights something I believe few want to admit, a built-in automatic prejudice in professional sports against people with disabilities.

Athletes have been promoted for so long as being such “perfect specimens” of humans.

The current gossip-mill surrounding Tiger Woods is an example of this – people eagerly eat up every scrap of tabloid gossip about the private life of Tiger Woods, and the condemnations and expressions of disappointment for his alleged transgressions in his private life fill comments sections of tabloids and blogs everywhere.

People don’t like thinking their idols have flaws.

So for someone with a disability, or even a hint of being different, it appears professional sports really wishes you’d go away.  The whole system is set up to promote these perfect specimens of humanity – if you have a disability however, you’re screwed.

Admittedly, there are some sports where it’s against common sense for someone with a disability to compete – but even then common sense doesn’t always rule.

The common-sense assumption about Master Chief Carl Brashear was that a man with one leg couldn’t be a Navy diver – an assumption he blew right out of the water (no pun intended).

But the professional sporting world, geared as it is to displaying feats of prowess, skill, stamina, and strength, is uncomfortable with such examples that disprove the rule.

The Special Olympics is the sporting world’s way of trying to segregate disabled athletes from the “mainstream” ones.  Have a disability?  Oh, you can’t be in the Olympics, but the Special Olympics would be fairer for you.

Any disability.

Examples of the prejudice against non-standard humans in sports

A recent example, look at Oscar Pistorius, the South African sprinter who is missing both legs below the knee.  He uses specially designed “blades” for his prosthetic lower legs.

There were no rules against these legs when he first began to make a name for himself.  But right after the first time he took part in a professional meet, the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) changed the rules in such a way they can only really be interpreted as being designed specifically to bar Pistorius from competing in the able-bodied contests.

IAAF, of course, stated that the rules change wasn’t aimed specifically at Pistorius – which is strange, I don’t know of any other athletes who use “any technical device that incorporates springs, wheels or any other element that provides a user with an advantage over another athlete not using such a device” (Pistorius’ legs are carbon fiber “springs”).

Then we also have Caster Semenya, another South African.  The way she was treated by IAAF is nothing short of scandalous in and of itself.  Whilst some might not consider she has any “disability” per se, the IAAF violated her intrinsic privacy in what’s been thought to be an attempt to intimidate her into dropping out of the Berlin World Championships.

IAAF’s stated reasons for demanding a gender test of Semenya, after the doping tests proved she wasn’t using any performance enhancing drugs presumably, was to determine if she had a “rare medical condition” giving her an unfair competitive advantage’.

Some might see it as they were looking for an excuse to disqualify her.  The leaking that she was being tested, the day she was supposed to run in the 800m, might be construed as a last ditch effort to railroad the girl into not participating, thereby preserving the illusion of “perfect specimens” in sports.

The problem is, the professional sporting world’s definition of “perfect specimen” seems to be exclusionary and elitist against any who have the skills, but perhaps not the “normal” body of their able-bodied peers.

“Advantage”?  Yeah right!

Having a hormone imbalance isn’t cheating, and doesn’t necessarily give an advantage – and even if it did, if a woman tests as a woman, she just happens to be built like an East German athlete from the Cold War, does that mean she should be disqualified from competing against other women?

Likewise, if someone is missing their legs, running hurts, not to mention the laws of physics do tend to negate any perceived advantage human-powered prosthetics might provide.

If you have a bad heart, and no testosterone, you’re not taking drugs to gain an unfair advantage – you’re taking them to offset your intrinsic health-related handicap – the same way using a cart between holes does.

(And why are male athletes never subjected to this gender test by IAAF?)

Perfection vs the perception of Imperfection

Professional sports doesn’t like anything messing up its image – and it’s just that, an image.

In the case of Casey Martin, the PGA Tour brought up that it would look bad if people saw him using a golf cart while everyone else walked.  Semenya’s appearance and the furore it caused is obvious.  Would IAAF have done a gender test if she’d looked “normal” for a woman?

Society looks upon athletes with something akin to adoration.  you need only look at the fans of professional athletes, be they football, baseball, golf, swimming, NASCAR, or anything else to see how much effect these athletes have on the general population.

As a result, professional sports have become entrenched in maintaining their image in line with that adoration – it means more asses on seats in stadia, more lucrative endorsement deals – money.

Anything that even looks like it might remotely jar this image of professional sports as being “perfect specimens” of mankind is squelched, isolated, segregated, and shunted into obscurity because such things, such “imperfect specimens”, damage the carefully crafted image professional sports bodies try to cultivate.

Think such subconscious prejudice doesn’t really exist in society?

When have you ever seen a car salesman in a wheelchair?

When have you seen a politician with missing limbs?

Know any Aspie CEO’s of Fortune 500 companies?  Or even just on the boards?

This isn’t about breaking down the barriers to improbable situations.  Someone in a wheelchair isn’t going to be able to play football for the NFL – there’s no way to make a reasonable level of accommodation to make it happen.

But that doesn’t preclude reasonable accomodations being made with such blanket disregard for the abilities of athletes who don’t fit this image of perfection.

Underlying Prejudices

Those that control professional sports don’t seem to think of reasonable accommodations for athletes with a disability.  In many cases, those bodies seem to feel they don’t have to make any accommodation, because an athlete with a disability has the segregated version of many sports to participate in instead.

This ideal that an athlete with a disability would be at a disadvantage against their able-bodied peers is in and of itself prejudicial.

I think some sporting bodies are perhaps victims of their own hype in search of the “perfect specimen”, they simple are unable to conceive that a disabled athlete can compete in such a situation and it be fair.

Judging from comments on websites related to the various people I’ve mentioned here, that certainly seems to be an undercurrent within society at large.

It gets worse when there exists some way for a disabled athlete to overcome any inherent disadvantage their disability causes in relation to their able-bodied peers.  Automatically, the presumption seems to be that any method that can bring the disabled athlete up to parity with their peers, must then automatically take that athlete’s ability beyond that of their peers.

In Semenya’s case, it looked a lot like IAAF had to find some reason why she had improved so much.  She tested clear for doping, so because she looked like a man, it appeared as if they automatically assumed that must be it.

Not once do they appear to have considered she might just have gotten that good on her own, and the results of their invasion of her most intimate privacy to prove it shows the depths professional sports can dive to in order to prove there must be an unfair advantage going on.

The same with Pistorius – even before scientists weighed in with data, the assumption was that his artificial legs, that made him as capable as his peers, must give him an unfair advantage beyond that level of parity.  They even re-wrote the rules with unseemly haste to exclude him, before they even saw any data (or looked for it).

The Future

Doug Barron isn’t the first professional athlete to suffer from this quest to keep professional sports the domain of the perfect specimens of humanity.  He won’t be the last, either.

The question is, how long will it be before professional sports wakes up and realizes people with disabilities don’t want to cheat – they generally just want to play on the same level as everyone else.

Given recent doping scandals, it’s the able-bodied athletes you have to watch out for, it seems.

Makes you wonder who are the better representatives for sports.