company called BALCO (for Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative), went to jail for supplying Olympic sprinter Marion Jones, baseball superstar Barry Bonds, and others with illegal drugs.a Conte alleges that the “majority of world track and field records were set” by athletes taking such prohibited substances.1 The list goes on and on. I haven’t yet mentioned soccer’s governing body FIFA (Fédération Internationale de Football Association) and its longtime president Sepp Blatter, who stepped down amid a series of scandals and arrests connected to a culture of corruption at the very heart of international soccer.b
The various allegations that sport is dealing with are explosive. For instance, a 2015 German TV series claims that pervasive doping took place in the Olympics over the past decade and that, remarkably, the organizations that are supposed to police such cheating turned a blind eye. The series alleges that one-third of all medals won at the Olympics (and the track and field World Championships) from 2001 to 2012 were awarded to athletes who subsequently had suspicious blood results. Russia and Kenya were identified as having an especially large number of athletes with suspicious test results, but the shadow of suspicion falls on athletes around the globe.c
In the meantime, two athletes who experienced incredible performances during the summer of 2015 were Alex Rodriquez, a baseball player for the New York Yankees, and Justin Gatlin, an American sprinter. The good news is that both athletes were performing better than they ever had, and at ages well past the point when such performances might be expected. The bad news is that both had previously served suspensions for doping offenses. Their stellar accomplishments had people wondering about what, exactly, they were seeing. Were these rousing stories of athletic triumph or sordid tales of undeserved benefits collected by those who had gone over the edge?
Other debates are under way as well. Just one week before the broadcast of the German doping series, the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) in Switzerland issued a landmark ruling on “sex testing” by the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF), which oversees track and field. For more than half a century, athletics organizations have tried—and consistently failed—to figure out how to determine eligibility for participation in women’s events in athletics. It turns out that biological sex is not a simple binary set of categories, but is far more complex and better depicted in shades of gray than in black and white. Since 2011, the IAAF had used a policy based on female testosterone levels. The arbitration court struck that policy down in 2015, leaving the sport in limbo.
In short, the sports world of today is characterized by battles on multiple fronts, each characterized by a need for rules and regulations to govern what happens when the quest for a performance edge meets the boundary of what is allowed or acceptable.
This book is designed to help people make sense of these battlegrounds. There are a number of excellent books about athletic performance and doping.d And there are plenty of narratives written about colorful but flawed characters in sport, such as Lance Armstrong and Marion Jones. But there is no book that looks at the edge, the place where the quest for athletic advantage runs into the rules governing what is allowed, what is fair, what isn’t, and what is really behind the “spirit of sport.”
The fact that there just isn’t a book like this is pretty exciting for an author. Over the past decade, I have moved the focus of my research on science, policy, and decision making away from space exploration and climate change and toward issues related to sport. Policy researchers are like sharks in the sense that if we are not moving forward, we can’t thrive. We are also like sharks in the sense that we are attracted to blood in the water, something (metaphorically speaking) that sport has plenty of these days.
But it’s not just the blood that appeals—it’s also the sweat and the tears that sport produces. When I was a child in the early 1980s, my father, then a professor at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, would often take me to campus with him when I was on holiday from school. I would wander the campus while he taught or did research. I would marvel at the rotunda, and regularly made a point of checking out the astronomy department (then my favorite). But most of all, I’d hope for a chance to catch a glimpse of Ralph Sampson or Jeff Lamp, stars of the Wahoo basketball team.
The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, and more than thirty years later I am a college professor. I am also one of those college professors who landed a job at his alma mater. I attended the University of Colorado in the late 1980s and early 1990s, earning three degrees along the way. The era of big hair and New Wave was also the time when the Colorado football program rose from obscurity to winning a national championship. It was an exciting time to be a student at CU.2
When I am older and most memories have long faded, I have no doubt that one that will remain will be a sunny September afternoon in 1989 when the Colorado Buffaloes had their way in a 38–7 victory over the University of Illinois. I remember defensive linemen Alfred Williams and Kanavis McGhee tormenting Illini quarterback Jeff George, and those of us in the student section tormenting him too. Seeing Williams and McGhee on the Boulder campus was a thrill then just like it had been for me in the early 1980s to catch a glimpse of 7’ 4” Ralph Sampson eating at the University Cafeteria near UVA.
An uncomplicated world is one of the benefits of being a teenager, I suppose. With age comes learning and experience, and the teenager’s simple view of the world inevitably grows more complicated. One week after that beautiful fall day and thrashing of the Illinois football team, the quarterback who had led the Buffaloes the previous two seasons, Sal Aunese, died from inoperable stomach cancer.
Occasionally during the previous few years, before he got sick, I had played basketball with Aunese and other football players at our neighborhood court on Canyon Boulevard, just off campus. From my perspective as a fellow student, one moment Aunese was young, strong, famous, and seemingly invincible. The next he was gone. Just like that. For me as a twenty-year-old, it was a brutal reminder that the fantasy world of sport and the real world of life are not so far apart. It wouldn’t be the last time that I learned this lesson.
I earned an undergraduate degree in mathematics and ultimately decided to pursue an academic career in science policy—that messy place where science and decision making meet. As a graduate student, I earned some money by working as a “mentor-tutor” at the university’s athletics department. The job involved working with specific students on specific subjects. Because I was pretty good at both math and writing, which every student had to take, and because I liked teaching, eventually I earned the privilege of working with some of the scholarship athletes who most needed tutoring help. In particular, I was assigned to the men’s and women’s basketball teams, and even sat on the bench with the CU men’s basketball staff at the 1993 Big 8 tournament in Kansas City.e This experience marked my transition from starry-eyed sports fan to a budding academic with a deep interest in how we govern sport and its role in broader society.
Over the years that I have immersed myself in scholarship related to sports, I have come to appreciate that there are lots of smart, thoughtful, and creative scholars working on a remarkable array of issues related to the governance of sport. Sport probably receives more commentary and analysis outside of academia than any other human endeavor, except perhaps politics.
But at the same time, sport suffers a certain kind of prejudice in academia. In the United States, at least, more than a few university academics are offended by, if not openly hostile to, big-time college sports on their own campuses. This is perhaps understandable, given the amount of time and money that college administrators invest in athletics. (To take just one example: In 2016, Nick Saban, the superstar football coach at Alabama, received a salary equivalent to that of about seventy professors.)f As well, many academics look down their noses at sport. As this book explains, this prejudice has deep roots in class and culture that date back to the nineteenth century and that persist today. Although there are plenty of university research centers focused on (to pick one I’m familiar with) the environment, there are only a few focused on the study of sport.
Yet sport is everywhere. Arguably, the enjoyment of sport offers as close as a universal value we can find among the more than 7 billion of us who inhabit planet Earth. Consider that nations as diverse as Iran, China, North Korea, and the United States are among the 183 countries that