Doping runs counter to the spirit of professional sport

The argument

What makes sport worth watching, on this argument, is the condition under which the result is produced. The essence of sport is to provide entertainment through fair competition: the competitors that excel in their field are afforded the opportunity to prove themselves against their peers, and what the spectacle offers is the resolution of a genuine question about which of them is better. The entertainment depends on that question being real, which means the contest must be one in which the outcome follows from the competitors themselves. The grounds on which an athlete may excel are already broad. Talent, hard work, determination and biology all count, and none of them is distributed equally. The competition does not require that athletes begin identical; it requires that the differences between them be differences in what they are and in what they have done. An athlete who wins because they trained harder, or because their physiology suited the event, has won the contest that was actually being held. Doping breaks this. It provides some competitors with an unnatural advantage, which is to say an advantage that is not an expression of the competitor at all but of what was administered to them. The result then measures access to a substance rather than anything the contest was meant to settle, and the notion of fair competition is destroyed because the competitors are no longer being compared on the terms the comparison assumed. The cost falls on everyone else: those that put in the hard work to excel in their discipline are unfairly penalized, beaten by a margin no amount of additional effort could have closed. Because doping undermines the entire premise on which sport rests, it runs counter to the spirit of professional sport and should not be allowed.

Context

The spirit of sport is about fair competition, excellence in performance, and determination. Performance-enhancing drugs and doping run counter to these values, and therefore, the essence of sport.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Fair competition is only a fringe component of modern sport. While fair competition governs the rules of the game, it has no bearing on who can participate or not. If it did, those with a genetic advantage over other competitors would also be prohibited, as would those from wealthy backgrounds that could access better training and resources. Performance-enhancing drugs afford some athletes an edge in the same way wealth and genetics do. If anything, they may help close the performance gap between competitors from more affluent backgrounds and poorer backgrounds. Therefore, while competitive sport allows participants from all resource backgrounds and genetic predisposition to compete, it should allow doping.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Fair competition is not a critical component of professional sport.

Framing

Fair competition is part of the essence of sport.