How To Address Drug Use In Pro Sports

I’ve been thinking about the Lance Armstrong doping scandal that’s rocking the news. We all know why some athletes use drugs. It’s simple. All athletes want to be #1, and some will break legal and moral laws to get there.

But here’s the other thing – we’re fine with the drug use as long as we don’t see it. The anger and recrimination don’t start flowing until an athlete gets caught. Why? Because a roided out athlete is far more exciting to watch than is a clean one. Consider the following scenarios:

1) Mark McGuire blasting home run after home run, crushing balls deep into the stands.

That’s exciting.

2) Lance grinding up an unimaginably steep hill in France, leaving in his wake a bunch of flailing euro-pansies.

That’s exciting.

3) Some barefoot Kenyan who’s trained on nuts and berries winning the Boston Marathon with an unspectacular time.

Boring!

So,

Fact: Pro sports is a market, and viewers are consumers.

Fact: Consumers want drugged up athletes because they’re more exciting. The athlete on dope is the Iphone, while the clean athlete is the Blackberry. And no one wants a Blackberry.

Fact: No one follows the Canadian Football League because its players don’t use drugs and are therefore boring to watch.

But my hypothesis about the sports market needs to be tested. Here’s how: we divide pro sports into two leagues, a Clean League and a Dope League. For instance, we take the National Hockey League and add a new competitor, the National Druggie Hockey League. Then we let viewers decide which one they’d rather watch. I’ll bet money that after two checks send players crashing clean through the boards, the old NHL will be toast.

Setting up new leagues would take time, however, given that existing team owners would fight tooth and nail to prevent new competition. So a better way to test my theory is to alter the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio to allow both Clean and Doped athletes to compete. Imagine this scenario:

 Clean Javelin Toss: A normal-sized guy throws his spear. It lands 200 yards down-field and the referee runs up and raises his little flag. The crowd claps.

Boring!

Doped Javelin Toss: A 5’7” American with pectoral muscles the size of trash cans grabs the javelin. He grunts and launches the spear. It rockets out of the Olympic Stadium, sails across the ocean, and nails a senior-level Al-Qaeda leader in Pakistan.

No contest. That, my friends, is exciting. And it’s the future.