Doping should not currently be considered a rules violation in women's athletics

It would be great if athletes 'fessed up when caught. But more than ever, World Athletics is demanding that women resort to pharmaceuticals if they want to keep up

My unkind words about the journalistic handling of Shelby Houlihan’s suspension may suggest that I view doping, not bad reporting, as the real bête noire, with a dollop of bitterness allotted to the Nike Bowerman Track Club thanks to the maddening ease with which Houlihan’s tears and silly story, along with the somber Instagram utterances of her allies, swayed the running media in her favor.

Such is not the case. When the media swallow and spread misinformation or suppresses facts, that’s always a problem. And when the culprits are no-account fanboys and fangirls pretending to be discerning professionals despite not even disguising their biases, that makes the resulting distortion of public perception harder to take. No scenario exists that excuses a carnival of lying by people who are supposed to be reporting facts, including stories most Americans don’t know or care about.

So, it bears mentioning that I don’t view and have never viewed doping by professional athletes, ipso facto, as a sign of extreme moral failure or even as corrupt behavior in context. Yes, as long as an official, published list of banned substances is maintained—and while millions of dollars are spent to prop up the existence of WADA and national anti-doping agencies worldwide—then the sport has an obligation to catch and punish dopers, if only to present the illusion of an honest effort.

But on the women’s side, simple rules notwithstanding, I don’t see why anyone would truly feel discouraged from doing it except for health reasons, and no top-class distance runner with a flair for deliberative thought believes what she’s doing is without health risks and consequences anyway.

This is the women’s 5,000 meters at the Van Damme Brussels Diamond League meet last week. It was quite a race. The four leaders are rounding the final curve 8:40 into the video.

Francine Niyonsaba, who won a silver medal in the women’s 800 meters at the 2016 Olympics, should feel deep and unique satisfaction after every track victory. Not because DSD athletes face special and often frat-house caliber scrutiny and criticism, but because World Athletics enacted a policy in 2019 that virtually ensured the continuation of DSD controversies at the top level of athletics—provided runners like Niyonsaba were willing to defy an order amounting to “Take meds that will mess with your testes, bitches” and switch distances instead.

Niyonsaba was willing to switch. After doubling in the 5,000 meters and 10,000 meters in Tokyo, where Niyonsaba ran well and tough while enduring a disqualification in the shorter event, the Burundian has been on a post-Olympics tear. (I won’t get into this today, but Alison Wade deserves not a shout-out, and maybe not even credit, but at least a nod for including comments in that same newsletter about Houlihan’s wobbly “What went in my mouth and when” tales.)

It’s unfair it is to have people who have the bodies of men in every way applicable to sports in women’s races. The division over this, after you scrape away the surface chatter, doesn’t really center at this point on whether DSD athletes have a significant advantage. What those who support their inclusion in women’s races are really pushing for is So what, it’s not her fault.

In other words, while a few observers out there are still immune to the fact that “intersex” translates to “has testes that produce normal male levels of testosterone” in every one of these controversy-driven stories, within the industry, Wade et al. understand that the basic facts have outed, as they inevitably do, and that the fight now has to focus, or maybe re-focus, on the idea that “natural levels of testosterone” can be transmogrified into “free pass.”

One problem with that line of reasoning, such as it is, is that doping is a strict liability offense. That is, in the end, it doesn’t matter how those very high levels of testosterone enter the systems of DSD athletes. In their case, it was through a wholly unexpected pubertal cascade, something most intersex people don’t foresee, would never invite, and presents a battery of devastating life challenges and consequences.

But it’s still not fair for someone who is essentially a solid D-III male NCAA runner, an athlete about 88 to 90 percent as good as the best men in the world, to be out there, not even in need of a sports bra and slaughtering these goddamned women.

I'm trying to find a problem with this heuristic:

• DSD people are, anatomically and physiologically or at least for sports purposes, men. 

• When DSD athletes were banned from the 400, 800, 1,500 and mile in 2019, some people were happy, others were unhappy.

  Those who disliked the policy either don't believe, in effect, that men have an advantage over women, making them ignorant, or they want DSD athletes to be able to compete against women despite having an unfair advantage, making them vandals and arsonists of the sport, mostly white women with college degrees. None of these people count as legitimate supporters of top-level running, and besides, they lie all the time. So we* can jettison their opinions as, for policymaking purposes, weightless.

• That leaves those who were satisfied with the decision. My question for this group:
  
  "Do DSD athletes only have an unfair advantage over women in the narrow distance range specified by World Athletics?”

  I’m confident that the extreme bozos have been weeded out of scheme by the time this question arises in the heuristic. I can’t imagine anyone with a platform making the claim “Men don't have an advantage over women in the sprints and the long distances, just in races lasting about one to four minutes” without Steve Magness immediately being deluged with requests for reasoned, fair, and altogether noncommittal tweets.

Shelby Houlihan is, or was, a 1,500-meter runner, and the whole reason she's probably finished in the sport is because androgens were found in her system. But she could have regularly injected herself with Deca-Durabolin instead, every day until she was speaking in a soulful Barry White baritone, and never come close the serum testosterone levels unintentionally (but knowingly) enjoyed by her DSD colleagues—and more importantly, the various advantages of that testosterone that were conferred irreversibly at puberty.

Since most people reading this presumably agree that World Athletics screwed up in 2019 by not enacting a sweeping policy restricting all women’s track and field events to people with two X-chromosomes, and that they had to have known its hand would be forced again sooner rather than later, perhaps we* can expect World Athletics to move again and ban all DSD athletes from women's track and field.

But until and unless that happens, consider the landscape world-class women suddenly see before them. It’s not just that Niyonsaba and other DSD athletes are having an enormous and still-rising effect on their own chances of success. It’s commentators being all but forced to jabber on as if Niyonsaba is just some half-miler who heroically transformed herself into a distance star against all odds. And the reason they have to do this is because the entire media is not merely yelling “Let DSD athletes run as women!” but portraying all other arguments as arising from especially rapacious conservative politicians, those who aren’t science-literate (my runaway favorite), or other flavors of human troglodyte. And as I’ve mentioned repeatedly, the same media voices and outlets who pride themselves on personally interacting with and sucking up to women like Jenny Simpson and Emma Coburn pride themselves even more energetically on agitating fiercely against the core interest of professional female runners—often at the same time.

By the way, if you’re wondering how it’s possible to be a completely incompetent journalist who hears and sees nothing but praise even as her work becomes more widely and loudly slammed, Erin Strout has just provided a classic example: Despite being the proud owner of a blue Twitter checkmark, she has made her tweets private, blaming this on harassment but with the obvious goal of preventing potential hecklers on and off Twitter from even seeing her bursts of cranial flatulence. Assuming she’s even getting unwarranted flak—and since she’s a snowflake, she calls everything that isn’t praise harassment—none of it is coming from me, as I haven’t used Twitter in weeks.

So, one day after I point out that Strout can’t resist blocking dissenters, she goes even further than that. A journalist who lies her ass off, gets pissy at everything, and hides from critics in a bidirectional way is not an asset to any editorial enterprise, but if these are the kind of people entrepreneurial geniuses like Robin Thurston want, he can have them.

Outlets like Runner’s World, Outside Online, and Women’s Running could agree to run editorials by people cheerleading for science and fairness in athletics, to balance the ones by bimbos screaming for radical, empty-headed social reforms. But apparently, the folks operating these outlets, some of whom are named Robin Thurston, are either terrified of what that would do to their bottom line or organically committed to seriously insane positions. (It helps to keep in mind that “inclusivity” isn’t a meaningful concept in top-level sports—in fact, the whole intent of picking the best people in the world at certain things in certain categories is the precise opposite. If the integrity of those categories is dissolved, then so is the enterprise around it. But I think I may be meandering anew.)

Maybe World Athletics will act soon in the manner it will eventually have to anyway and exclude intersex athletes from women’s track and field, perhaps even happen before the 2022 World Championships. But we* can see how this is going to go on the other side: As someone’s natural rights being taken away after she was able to enjoy them only briefly, rather than as an unfair situation being brought around toward fairness in a bungling way.

Wade writes:

Watching their performances, I can’t help but wonder how much success intersex athletes can have before it’s deemed too much and World Athletics changes its rules again. 

Well, that’s not at all how it’s supposed to work. You don’t enact bad policies with obvious flaws in the hope that no one will exploit those flaws to the point where subjective opinion forces a policy reversal. Unless you’re Ezra Klein, in which case you agitate for that kind of stupidity as a career strategy.

But it’s not Wade’s fault that World Athletics bitched this one up, either. And until it’s fixed, I can’t imagine why any world-class female distance runner wouldn’t try to get away with doping if she already has the personal ethics in place to go that route. (I’ve known athletes, very good ones, who were perfectly eager to cheat at their respective sports, but refused to go near anything anabolic or even blood-boosting because they were terrified of consequences ranging from raisin-nuts to thromboembolic strokes.)

If that sounds dumb, once more time, this is what women runners are seeing:

Niyonsaba gets to run without T restrictions, and look at the results.
If my T levels are found to be high, the media eats me alive and I’m done.
Women runners are writing about how wonderful all of this is.
I publicly object, and I’m the villain.
Why the hell did I train for ten years just to find myself here?

That’ll wrap it up for now, but this allows for a clean transition into a post about doping itself. There is clearly a corner-cutting bonanza afoot within both men’s and women’s running already—it’s not as if the incentives just shot from some low level to enormous for women, after all—and I’m certain it’s worse than the average cynic already thinks, domestically as well as internationally.