Professor Andy Miah, Chair in Ethics and Emerging Technologies at the University of the West of Scotland, said the narrow obsession with performance-enhancing drugs deflected attention from the other means used by elite athletes to boost their performance, such as clothing and equipment.
If steroids were made legal, he said, attention could be focused on managing the health risks they pose, “rather than rushing simply to condemn athletes for using them”.
But UK Anti-Doping, which ensures sports bodies comply with the World Anti-Doping Code, said flatly: “Doping is cheating.”
The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) said recently that more than 30 athletes were prevented from competing at the Vancouver Olympics for breaking anti-doping rules.
Prof Miah noted that several athletes had tested positive for “relatively well-known doping substances” but said that while people should care about keeping rules, we should question what those rules should be.
“After all, while there may be widespread support for cleansing sport of doping, we should consider why we spend time prohibiting performance enhancement in sports when what we ask athletes to do is break the known limits of human capability. This is what elite sports require, so athletes should be permitted the use of whatever means are available to them to optimise the chance of this taking place.”
He said 21st-century sport was being pulled in two directions: the first embodied the values of amateur athletics, but the second pointed to an era rooted in the pursuit of human enhancement, where our biology was a “work in progress”.
Prof Miah asked whether it would “really matter” if an athlete took a nasal decongestant containing a tiny amount of a banned substance, when their psychologists, nutritionists and physiotherapists “will have provided a far greater performance advantage”.
Writing from Vancouver, where he chaired a debate on human enhancement yesterday, he elaborated: “Athletes are technological beings. Their performances are already lab-generated, with or without doping.
“Some technologies we like and consider valuable, like treadmills or hypoxic chambers. Others, we think are fiendish, like steroids. However, if only we made steroids legal, that moral judgment would disappear and we could focus on managing the health risks they pose, rather than rushing simply to condemn athletes for using them.
“Overall, we need to recognise that enhancements are becoming more prevalent and sport will soon need to embrace them more fully.”
A spokesman for UK Anti-Doping said: “We believe doping is cheating and is therefore fundamentally opposed to the spirit of sport. We also believe athletes have the right to compete on a level playing field -- which is simply not possible where doping is concerned -- and we protect their right to do so. ”
At national agency sportscotland, a spokesman said: “We believe it is crucial to the enjoyment of sport that all individuals participating in Scottish sport also condemn doping to ensure it is eliminated from the sporting environment.”
Laurier Primeau, head coach at Scottish Athletics, said: “Our position and mine would be that we support the UKA [United Kingdom Athletics] and WADA anti-doping rules and would take a strict stance against doping.”
