Performance Enhancement

It is not quite correct to say that the age of chivalry is dead. More accurately, it never was. As its inheritors, we learned all about the chivalric ideal. Code of honor. Gallant knights defending fair virtue. All that stuff.

The very characterization of chivalry as an ideal offers a hint of the unhappy truth: It was a goal to be strived for but was rarely attained. In fact, the evidence suggests that, for most folks in the Middle Ages, chivalry wasn’t even strived for very often.

Violent crime in Europe occurred at a rate that would have made the South Bronx of the ’70s look like Shangri-La. The chevaliers who by mythology were standard-bearers for good more often were roving brigands who were singularly focused on murder, rape and general mayhem. You can even make a strong case that Pope Urban proclaimed the First Crusade not simply to rid Jerusalem of the Saracen dogs but to get as many of the thugs in shining armor as possible out of Europe’s countryside.

In its own weird way, this bit of history gives me encouragement about our sullied Olympic Games, and about all of our other sporting games, too. Perhaps it should not be surprising that we so often fail to live up to the Olympic ideal. What’s encouraging is that we’ve managed even to come as close as we have.

Most of the hoo-roar during these games, of course, has centered around the rigged judging in the pairs figure skating competition. Set aside for a moment that the offense was egregious even by the relaxed if not downright recumbent standards for this sport; in this case, the collusion did not involve merely a quid pro quo between two rogue judges but between two national skating federations. And never mind that the leading offenders were the French, who would always sweep the quadrennial competition if cynicism were a medal event.

The vote-fixing last week illuminated a need for the International Olympic Committee to assert control over its games. Instead of allowing the International Skating Union to set the rules at the Olympics, the IOC ought to impose its own standards.

Throwing out high and low judges’ scores would be a good start. So would banishing corrupt judges, like the froofy Frenchwoman Marie Reine Le Gougne, not just for a year or two but for life. If the skating union doesn’t like it, they can stage their little competition somewhere else.

But what this scandal illuminated even more is that fixing has been a regular fixture in figure skating. The old Soviet bloc may have raised it to an art form, but they hardly invented it.

The reputation of ice dancing is even more sullied—though that’s misleading, since it implies that the sport ever had been regarded as honestly run. Just four years ago, a Ukrainian judge in this event was caught on tape fixing a competition; sure enough, he was back on the job in Salt Lake City.

But the problems in these skating events only illuminated the history of corruption in other Olympic events. Some commentators, for example, recall how cheating judges defrauded American boxer Roy Jones in a fight he clearly had won at the Seoul Games. That bout brought to mind other fixes, both proven and suspected, at other Olympiads. And those cases of rigged judging recalled highly subjective marks occasionally given in gymnastics, the Summer Games’ equivalent to figure skating.

And the occasional deviltry of judges leads us directly into the even more frequent instances of cheating by athletes as they seek to get an Olympic edge. Just last year, evidence of doping led officials to strip Finland’s cross-country ski relay team of a crown it had won the day before. In Sydney two years ago, several dozen athletes were sent home after testing positive for banned drugs. Most sobering of all, a majority of Olympians surveyed in a 2000 poll said they would use a performance-enhancing substance, even with the knowledge that it would cause their death within 15 years, if taking the drug would guarantee them a gold medal.

The cheating by Olympic athletes, from sprinter Ben Johnson to the testosterone-clanking East German women of the ’70s, should only serve to remind us that the Olympic ideal is mostly ignored even by Olympic organizers. Salt Lake City, for all its Mormon purity, paid bribes to get the games—and IOC executives, led by the now retired Juan Antonio Samaranch, who made Castro look like a democrat, aggressively solicited them. Atlanta paid bribes to win the 1996 Summer Games. Sydney paid bribes. At least until now, just about everyone else has showered the selection committee with cash and prizes, too.

Free and honest competition may be the ideal, but cheating and corruption are the norm for just about every game we’ve ever devised. Perhaps it is our human nature to seek an edge by any means available.

Pick your sport. In professional baseball you can point to corked bats and, according to some players, usage of illegal steroids that reaches almost epidemic proportions.