2015, prior to the Cricket World Cup jointly hosted by Australia and New Zealand, the New Zealand cricket team participated in a training session that, rather than involving bats, balls, and stumps, centered on a ninety-minute video on how to avoid the threat of match fixing. Among the threats players were warned about in the session was the so-called honey trap. A honey trap refers to the use of a beautiful woman (or man, as the case may be) who uses her (or his) sex appeal to get a player in a compromising situation, which is secretly filmed and then used by match fixers to blackmail the player. A player might be told, for instance, to score less than ten runs or to let in a goal. The scenario is not so far-fetched. In Singapore, for example, several years ago a soccer referee was sentenced and jailed for trading sex for match fixing.20
Although documented cases of the successful use of the honey trap remain rare, the threat of match fixing is very real, and the number of players and officials found guilty of it is on the rise. For instance, a German soccer referee was jailed in 2006 for fixing games, including one in the prestigious German Cup.21 Soon after, Italian soccer was rocked by a match-fixing scandal that included one of its most prestigious clubs, Juventus.22 Wikipedia has a list of top-level cricket stars who have been sanctioned for match fixing that totals more than thirty names.23 In 2016, the South African government investigated widespread allegations of match fixing.24 Worldwide, such cases are almost always tied to organized gambling, and, in recent years, they often have occurred in Asia, where gambling is popular and unregulated.25
It turns out, however, that defining what is meant by match fixing, and thus developing rules and regulations in response, is more difficult than it might seem upon first impression. Furthermore, studies have shown over and over again that many people, including sports fans, just don’t see match fixing as a major problem. I argue that because of the stakes involved, match fixing is typically found in lower-tier competitions, where simple economics means that athletes and officials are more easily bought off. But that’s not to say that match fixing couldn’t happen in the biggest sports settings, just that it is unlikely. Ultimately, however, match fixing is more a problem for the gambling industry than it is for the sports fan.
Doping: Lance Armstrong Gets the Last Laugh
Doping refers to the use of methods or substances that enhance athletic performance and are prohibited because they are unsafe or deemed unfair. One example of a method is the drawing of an athlete’s blood for subsequent transfusion back into that same athlete just prior to competition to boost oxygen capacity, via greater blood volume, and thus endurance. An example of a substance that boosts performance is the anabolic steroid, which contributes to added muscle mass and strength. We can divide performance enhancement into three different categories, which I call “stronger,” “longer,” and “better.” Some drugs can act on all three categories at the same time. In 2015, WADA included almost 300 specific chemicals and three families of methods on its prohibited list.
Sport has faced crisis after crisis related to doping. Athletes have been caught violating rules, and more recently sport organizations have been caught covering up doping and even extorting athletes. A few years ago, Lance Armstrong and cycling were at the center of this storm. More recently, international track and field, especially in Russia, China, and Kenya, has been at the center. Then Maria Sharapova and meldonium pushed athletics off center stage. Swimming, football, baseball, and even soccer and tennis have al leged doping problems. Rather than getting better, doping in sport seems to be getting worse.
There is ample evidence to suggest that doping in sport is endemic, and little evidence to indicate that antidoping efforts actually do much at all. It is time to take a good hard look at the notion of “cleanliness” in sport in favor of a more evidence-based, transparent approach to the regulation of banned performance-enhancing substances. I argue that the current approach to antidoping has been a complete and dismal failure, and that athletes most of all suffer the consequences of this failure.
Technology: Hacking the Athlete and the Games
Another edge battle surrounds what has been called the “technological augmentation” of the biological human. Beyond doping, athletes routinely take advantage of modern technologies to improve their performance. Golfers and baseball players have laser surgery on their eyes, not just to get to 20/20 vision, but to take their eyes to the limits of human visual capabilities. Ligaments and tendons are not just repaired, but improved. Athletes today run on and jump off of prosthetics that enable them to go faster and farther than human legs allow; they have surgeries after injuries that make their bodies stronger than they were previously. Some athletes go to extremes, such as fighters who have their facial skin replaced and bones shaved in order to reduce the odds that they will bleed in a fight. Cutting-edge genetic technologies offer the promise of techniques to create potential superathletes—perhaps not so far in the future.
Technologies also change the games themselves. Tennis, cricket, soccer, football, and basketball are among the sports that use technologies to aid in enforcing rules. High-definition television and ultra-slow-motion replays give spectators a way to watch games that allows for a better view than that possible for referees on the field. With such vision, referees’ mistakes and on-the-field action can pose challenges to the legitimacy of sport. Consequently, new rules are invented. Some are simple to implement, like goal-line technology in soccer to help the referee determine if the ball crosses the line. Others, like video review of football catches in the NFL, force us to confront the uncomfortable fact that a “catch” is a subjective event in sport. Technology can go only so far in helping officials, and at times it can make their jobs harder and enforcing the rules impossible.
Technologies threaten the integrity of sport itself. Hydrodynamic suits in swimming, grooved wedges in golf, and sophisticated brooms in curling have all been judged to aid the athlete too much for use in those sports. Technologies also allow for new ways to cheat: in early 2016, a professional cyclist was caught with a hidden electric motor in her bike.f When put to good use, technological augmentation of sport holds the promise of making sport better; when it is used improperly or unthinkingly, the opposite is possible.
Technology provides another challenge to the idea of the “purity” of sport. Technological changes will force changes to rules governing athletes as well as to the games themselves. I argue that we are overdue to open a discussion of technology in sport. That means that sport might change. Fasten your seat belt.
Sex Testing: When Mother Nature Cheats
The final battleground centers on what might seem to be a simple question: How should sports organizations determine who is eligible to participate in women’s sports and events? After all, pretty much everywhere you go has a public restroom for men and one for women. We all pick one. Easy, right?g
Biological sex is anything but simple, as scientists and sporting officials have learned. Western societies (in particular) over the past century have gone to great lengths to distinguish two genders—male and female—and to hide, erase, or gloss over any ambiguities that exist in the space between male and female. Sport has been a central part of this trend. For more than a half century, sport has looked to science to offer a definitive way to classify what it means to be female. Over that period, controversy after controversy has arisen showing that efforts to delineate once and for all what it means to be a woman for sporting purposes have failed again and again. The consequences have been significant for some athletes, who have been denied the right to compete or suffered public shaming. I argue that today we are in a position to end the half-century of debates over “sex testing” once and for all. Sport can serve its highest ideals by leading the way to a more just and equal world.
How to Win the War for Sport
The keys to winning the war for sport are the focus of part III. There I discuss science, governance, and how we might apply twenty-first-century values to sport.
Experts, including scientists, can be handy to have around. When an athlete is badly injured, he or she goes to a surgeon to get fixed. It is logical, therefore, that when sport is broken, we turn to relevant experts to fix things up. However, winning the war for sport will require more than simply calling