Ask Vest Christiansen, Aarhus University and John Gleaves, California State University, Fullerton
Compared to football-players cyclists are virtuous role models. Yes, Lance Armstrong, Michael Rasmussen and other riders have doped, and because of this they have received the predicate as the most immoral athletes in the sporting world. But if morality is not only a question of whether a person has enhanced his or hers performances by the use of various drugs (and lied about it), but also is about human beings’ relations and interactions, then cycling isn’t as depraved as we like to tell each other. Football is much worse.
The Vuelta a España is rolling, and with Quintana, Froome and Contador as very prominent contenders it promises to be one the most interesting editions of Spain’s largest stage race for years. This summer we have already witnessed Vinzenso Nibali as a surprising and very dominant winner in the Tour de France, and earlier this year Nicki Terpstra won the spring classic Paris-Roubaix with the highest average speed ever. That together with Nibali’s evading answers to questions concerning doping during the Tour once again spurred allegations of doping in cycling. A prominent idea seems to be that cycling is depraved by a fundamental lack of morality. That at least was the impression one got when in 2010 the former WADA-president, Canadian Dick Pound, with reference to cyclists called doped athletes for “sociopathic cheats”; human beings without sense of responsibility and respect for social norms. For Pound professional cyclists embodied the world of sports’ immoral athletes par excellence.
Also this spring we saw Spanish teams’ superiority in football’s Champion’s League and a dominant German team win the World Cup in Brazil. Yet, despite the impressive speed of today's matches ‘The Beautiful Game’ is surprisingly free of doping accusations.
The conclusion seems obvious: Football and football players not only represent drama and intensity, but they can also, as the philosopher Albert Camus said, teach us important lessons on morality and the conditions of man. This is why we celebrate the game and the players. Cyclists on the other hand are cheating, drug-enhanced, liars. They always have been and likely always will be. Hence, we condemn the riders and the sport.
Hold on a tick! An analysis that alone assesses moral characters in sport based on the prevalence of doping will miss some essential elements. If moral acts have the intention to improve the other’s welfare, and immoral acts have the opposite intention, then cyclists may not come out worst in an overall analysis.
On the contrary, in that light football is riddled by a lack of moral unknown to cycling. In the soft end, we find banalities like pulling and holding an opponent‘s shirt or shorts, so he cannot move freely. That is harassment which breaks the rules of the game and hinders the opponent in fulfilling his potential. Worse though, is the notorious element of diving and simulating injuries; players’ attempt to convince the referee that they have been tripped when that isn’t the case, or that they are much worse injured than they actually are. Such situations are usually followed by intense arguments with the referee in order to persuade him to give yellow or red cards to opponents. All with the purpose of gaining an advantage one should not have had or to impose a handicap on the opponent contrary to the regulations. If a ball crosses the line after a duel between two players both will appeal passionately that it’s theirs. One of them is of course wrong and usually is quiet aware of the deception their actions tell. In football, referees are tools players can cheat, fool and deceive rather than authorities whose decisions one needs to respect. If a player is successful in deceiving the referee he is lauded by his fans and teammates. On top of this there are all the dirty tricks like gobs of spittle, pushes, punches, bites and verbal attacks. Worst are of course the attempts to downright injure opponents or take them out of the game by means of dangerous tackling or stamping. Examples are numerous which one could be assured of by watching the world cup this summer or by following the weekly matches in any of the larger European leagues.
You won’t find violations like that in cycling. Yes, there are sticky bottles and aggressive sprints, but I’ve never seen a rider holding on to an opponent who tries to break away. Riders don’t punch (or kick) their opponents or attempt to injure them in any other way, and they (most often) respect decisions from officials during races. Riders don’t spit after each other and I know of no examples where a rider offended an opponent because of his skin-colour or sexual orientation or where someone said obscene things about the others’ mother or sister. Despite the ruthless competition riders display a paradoxical form of social responsibility and respect towards each other. This is for instance seen when they give a bottle of water to someone who can’t get one from his own service car; when they lend an opponent a wheel to sit on back to the pack after a mechanical problem; or by sharing the burden of work in a breakaway. And if the rider in the leader’s jersey has to obey the call of nature in a stage race, there is a general consensus to suspend the competition until the rider in question is once again able to defend himself. In light of that cycling is – despite the extensive use of drugs over the past 20 years – if not exactly morally homiletic, then at least no more problematic than football.
A critical reader may object that even if we find far more instances of unpleasant, cheating and immoral behaviour during football matches than we generally do in cycling, there is a fundamental difference. While football’s dirty tricks takes place in the heat of the moment, doping is planned, goal oriented, conscious behaviour. And if morality also is about conscious and planned behaviour and not only concrete acts that can erupt in a heated moment, then the immorality associated with doping is far more serious than that attached to foul duels, manipulation of the referee and dirty tricks in football.
A central question for an overall assessment thus seems to be how we evaluate acts that have a spontaneous here-and-now character against more planned behaviour. In civil law conscious and planned violations of the law are usually punished harder than offenses that happen spontaneous and precipitous. In this light the analysis comes out to the advantage of football.[1]
Yet, this conclusion misses two important aspects. Firstly, the dirty tricks and attempts to manipulate the referee in football isn’t only an expression of spontaneous acts of frustration, but also learned and socially and culturally accepted behaviour patterns, which also managers are known to encourage. Secondly, doping in cycling is indeed planned behaviour, against the rules and therefore cheating. But from autobiographies of and interviews with former doped riders we also know that the decision to dope rarely is based on a consideration of obtaining an advantage that was regarded unfair or morally dubious. Rather it has predominantly had a functional character: the drugs were regarded as a necessary evil one had to accept in order to participate. The moral verdict rose from the public, not the athlete. An argument analogous to this cannot be made for football players’ diving, manipulation of the referee, gobs of spittle, bites and punches.
There are a number of reasons why it is easy to love football. The talent, the strategies and the skills that are unfolded by the best teams and players at the World Cup and in the Champions League are fascinating and make the game everything but boring. But the dirty tricks, the conscious manipulation of the referee and the glorification of the cheating among fans and players are hard to respect. In this domain, football on the elite level promotes and condones fundamentally immoral behaviour.
In the last 15 years cycling has been accused of being destroyed by doping. Every great achievement has been followed by questions of the validity of the performance. That reputation is not undeserved. Cycling’s governing body, UCI, its leaders and sponsors have all turned a blind eye to the extensive use of doping, while the sport’s market value just rose. Only when some media and sponsors began to withdraw and public investigators in a number of countries got involved the anti-doping effort became more reliable. It is naïve to believe in clean cycling, but some of later year’s measurements of wattage on climbs indicate a less exorbitant use of drugs than earlier. Doping or not, riders rarely demonstrate an intention to injure or cheat competitors or officials. Many years has passed since a rider made a shortcut and hoped the officials wouldn’t notice. Cycling is a sport that, despite all of its problems, has a code of conduct and a mutual sociality between its athletes that makes it almost noble compared to football.
Therefore it is misleading when ex-president Pound describes cyclists as sociopaths without consciousness or morality. Moreover, by doing that he excludes any possibility of influencing the riders’ behaviour through education or cultural change, so that it would be more in line with the norms and standards of anti-doping. And he ignores the fact that the ways races unfold aren’t characterized by cheating and immorality but rather by a respect for tradition, history and great achievements that gives the sport an almost aristocratic aura. Football has for the most part dodged allegations of doping. But the way the game is played doesn’t bear any witness of football players’ moral superiority. On the contrary, if one is prepared to adopt an unprejudiced attitude in a comparison between football and cycling the opposite conclusion appears patent: Cyclists may dope, but when it comes to moral behaviour they are no less role models than football players.
[1] In order to provide the strongest possible argument in favour of football we won’t include the obvious destructive element of match-fixing in football. Fixing matches in advance (which is thus planned and goal-oriented behavior) subverts the whole nature of the contest and is thus much more destructive than doping which on the contrary is an attempt to compete with all available means.