A week prior to the time of writing, the secretariat of the IWF-Masters Weightlifting Federation published the most recent list of banned athletes as a result of doping tests from the 2019 IWF Pan Am Masters Championship in Orlando and World Masters Championship Montreal. Naturally, as I had fielded a team at both of those events, I was interested to see whether these sanctions resulted in some of my athletes getting bumped up in their podium spots. It did not. However, four fellow Canadians from different teams did move up their podium positions, including my own coach’s coach, Ed Fergusson, who now has a silver medal in the M80 89kg category.

This announcement drove me to a moment of reflection. My goal with this article is not to revisit the same grounds that others have already tread before me on this subject. Matt Foreman, for instance, wrote extensively on PED use in our sport in the Catalyst Athletics article section, this journal, and even has a book on it. Instead, I want to offer a perspective that I have not yet seen articulated in this debate. It is one that shifts the focus and blame from individual athletes to offer a sociological explanation for the incentive structures in which our social environment foists upon them. This is not to justify or excuse athletes who use PEDs, but it’s to validate why they feel the need to, and maybe get us closer to actually solving the problem after running in circles for decades.

You don’t have to have been in our sport for a long time to know that doping has been an endemic problem regardless of ages, genders, weight classes, and even skill levels. I once competed against someone who was caught doping at a provincial level meet, which is something I had difficulty wrapping my head around then. Why would someone assume such high risks for what seems to be such a low-stake competition? I could rationalize it happening at the world championship or Olympic level, but here, the costs just didn’t seem commensurate with the rewards.

The answer then came to me when I watched Michael Phelps’ recently released HBO documentary on the mental health struggles of Olympic athletes. While it does not touch on the subject of doping, it does beg the question, “where is the pressure to perform on our athletes coming from?” They seem so willing to risk it all to win, often at the cost of their mental health and even their lives. I submit to you that the answer lies in that same risk-reward calculus, and how our social environment skews our risk tolerance. It’s those same internalized pressures that drive athletes to take PEDs. It’s not only a problem our sport faces, but can be similarly applied to other sports, and even other areas of life where people are compelled to cheat to get ahead and win at all costs. I argue that instead of focusing on what is it about each individual athletes that drives them to use PEDs, let’s examine our society’s internalized values of the Protestant Work Ethic.

When I first moved to the Canada, I discovered a peculiar phenomenon: people are more reticent to discuss their income levels than their sex lives. It was later, when I became a social scientist, that I learned this is a by-product of the so called Protestant Work Ethic, so deeply ingrained in our society. This, ultimately, creates the social environment that pushes athletes dope.

The Protestant Work Ethic basically says what makes a person virtuous is not that they do good and work hard, but that only virtuous people do good and work hard. So to show that we have worth, we have to have to have something to show for it; if we fail, it is because we lack virtue. So of course, under these circumstances, athletes have to externally signal their athletic performance as a proxy for their internal virtue. I’m not saying that athletes who take PEDs should not be punished or otherwise held responsible, but let’s recognize that after all, our society set the metric for their value as human beings.

This type of external signaling of virtue leads to a further problem, a common cognitive bias we all suffer from—counterfactual thinking. In other words, it’s the “what would have happened if…” or “I would be happier if…” statements we say to ourselves. Now that we have all of these incredibly accomplished individuals in front of us, we are very bad at picking a good referent point to which to compare our own achievements because we always default to extremes. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard athletes say, “yeah I PR’d my lift today, but a 12 year old Chinese girl somewhere is snatching this right now.” This cognitive bias drives us to always compare up, and not down, because comparing up further signals our virtue within this framework of the Protestant Work Ethic, and only serves to compound the problem.   

So when you take this into consideration, it significantly changes the risk-reward calculus that athletes make when they consider doping. The reward is not just the gold medal, the podium finish, it’s our society’s pre-designated metric for value and virtue as a human being. What’s a higher stake than that for social animals such as ourselves? Especially when we keep valorizing win-at-all cost attitudes and place winners on pedestals in our society. For those individuals with higher levels of risk tolerance, this is perhaps what tips them over the precipice.

When athletes are caught, we are in uproar. We label them as cheaters, and we demand they be held accountable and made an example of; we even celebrate their public falls from grace. We never stop to consider, maybe the same pressures that drives Olympic medalists to commit suicide are the same pressures that drives them to take PEDs. We love winners, but only if they win a specific way. We don’t really want to know about the cheating. We are righteously indignant when our voluntary suspension of belief that the playing field was level and fair are shattered.

If we are honest with ourselves about to clean up doping in weightlifting or even sports in general, we need to look in the mirror and summon the moral courage to confront what it might mean when we earnestly accept that performance outcomes are not all contingent on hard work and talent, and acknowledge the role that privilege plays. When athletes are caught, it shatters our illusion that hard work is the one and only path for success. There are many exogenous factors at play that often trump hard work. It doesn’t have to be drugs, it could be socio-economic class, race, or gender. But it’s just easier to blame the athlete and the drugs than to confront all of those other complex social issues. In other words, our anger towards the athlete stems from our unwillingness to confront what we’ve always known to be true—hard work doesn’t always get us places, or even signal that we’re good people. That is the catch-22 of the Protestant Work Ethic.

I started this article with a story about Masters Weightlifting, and I want to bring it around full circle. When I took my athlete Whitney (a fellow Catalyst Athletics certified coach) to her first international competition at the 2019 Pan Am Masters Championship in Orlando, she said to me that she is just happy to have qualified and made it to this level. If she leaves with any medal at all it would be a blessing. She ended up silver in the snatch, bronze in the clean and jerk, and bronze overall. She narrowly missed the silver medal position. She was not upset, just the opposite. She was ecstatic, streaming tears of joy in fact. Why? Because Whitney had a good referent point and she did not engage with counterfactual thinking. She didn’t simulate some alternate scenario where she could have done better and finished higher on the podium. More importantly, she knew she didn’t need to signal externally to anyone her virtue and work ethic. I even remember saying to her before the competition that  although she didn’t need to win to have fun, but winning is always fun. I was wrong to say that to her, and I am glad that she showed and taught me better. She is more free from the Protestant Work Ethic than I am. Let’s all be more like Whitney.

If COVID-19 has taught as anything about the nature of work, it’s that we’ve gotten it all wrong about that is actually essential for our society and who gets to participate. So what do we do with this realization? I recently wrote that we all need to take a step back and figure out who we are, rather than what we are so that we can be better people before we decide to be better athletes. Perhaps then, we can build a better and more equitable world. Perhaps then, we can develop a different work ethic, that doesn’t incentivize our win-at-all cost mentality. And perhaps then, we can have the fair and drug-free sport we’ve been talking about all this time.