the all-time list, endorsed by European track and field officials earlier this year, starts with a quote attributed to 14th-century poet and monk John Lydgate: “You can please some of the people all of the time, you can please all of the people some of the time, but you can’t please all of the people all of the time.”
It’s an appropriate reminder, given the furor sparked by the report’s recommendations, which would effectively see all track and field records from prior to 2005 downgraded from record status. The European Athletics Council has endorsed the idea, and it will now be considered by the International Association of Athletics Federations. Given how radical the proposal is, the strong reactions that have followed the announcement aren’t surprising.
In the last few weeks, I’ve taken part in a few discussions about the proposal (one, with Kara Goucher and Bonnie Ford, at FiveThirtyEight, It tries to erase history instead of confronting it on an NPR affiliate in California). That has given me an opportunity to think about the issue and hear some contrasting perspectives, so I figured I’d share a few thoughts here.
My initial reaction to the proposal was somewhere between an eye roll and a yawn. First of all, I doubted (and still doubt) that the proposal will actually be adopted by the IAAF. Second of all, I figured, “Why bother?” What does erasing the records actually accomplish?
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But after reading the proposal (the full text is available here), I became a little more sympathetic to the idea. I still don’t love it, but I think having the discussion is useful. Here’s my take on a few of the most common arguments I’ve heard against the proposal:
on an NPR affiliate.
That’s true to some extent. But it’s worth pointing out that pre-2005 performances won’t be “erased.” They’ll still be present on all-time lists and so on; they will just no longer be considered the current world record.
The best analogy is to javelin records. The farthest throw in history is Uwe Hohn’s 104.80 meters, which was a world record when it was set in 1984. Unfortunately, when you start heaving a spear more than 100 meters in a crowded stadium, the risk of skewering a passing runner gets unacceptably high, so the specifications of the javelin were changed. The current world record of 98.48 meters is held by Jan Železný, but Hohn is still in the books.
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That’s not just a risk, it’s a certainty. Some critics argue that the IAAF should take a more surgical approach, going after specific records where there’s reasonable evidence that they’re tainted. For example, documents released after the fall of the Berlin Wall Chappell Roan: I Love Running. But Not Anymore These Are The Worlds Fastest Marathoners.
But that’s neither realistic nor cost-effective—nor, perhaps more importantly, would it be likely to stand up to court challenges. The new proposal (which would likely face court challenges of its own) explicitly avoids trying to label performances as clean or dirty. Instead, the 2005 threshold is based on when anti-doping officials began freezing blood and urine samples for possible retroactive testing after world records. The rule change would recognize only records that confirm to these (and other) stricter standards, without assuming that previous records were dirty.
It robs clean athletes like [insert name of favorite athlete].
True—although which name you choose to insert in the square brackets is pretty subjective. I’ve heard a lot about marathoner Paula Radcliffe and long jumper Mike Powell, but that may simply reflect which news sources (and in which language) I read.
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I’ll offer a counterpoint, though: What about the athletes who have been and continue to be robbed by not resetting the records? Consider the weight-throwing events: The men’s shot put, discus, and hammer records were set in 1990, 1986, and 1986. The first was set by an American who tested positive for steroids a few months later; the second two were set by Eastern Bloc athletes.
The corresponding women’s records were set in 1987 and 1988, by Eastern Bloc athletes. (The women’s hammer didn’t become an Olympic event until 2000, and its world record was set last year.)
Shot putter Valerie Adams, of New Zealand, is the greatest thrower of her generation—and perhaps, for all we know, of all time. She has two Olympic golds plus a silver, as well as four consecutive world championship golds.
But she ranks only 23rd on Proposal Would Wipe Out Many Running World Records, with a best throw 1.39 meters—an astoundingly large gap—behind the record of 22.63. Of the 22 women in front of her, 19 made their throws before 1991, It tries to erase history instead of confronting it three have failed drug tests. How much has she lost in fame, recognition, and cold, hard cash from the fact that, when she appears on TV, her performances are measured against a yardstick that is... suspicious at best?
I should emphasize that I have no way of knowing whether the current shot put record-holder, a Soviet athlete who set the record in 1987 in Moscow, doped. Neither does the IAAF, so they can’t “fix” this problem directly—and that’s precisely the point. We don’t have individual evidence, but we have a large-scale pattern that leads to the inevitable conclusion that whole clusters of records (throws, women’s sprints) are laughable. And when the pinnacle of a sport becomes an obvious joke, it’s worth considering radical solutions.
It tries to erase history instead of confronting it.
That seems like a ridiculous assumption (or at least wishful thinking) to me. But in the official announcement, the European Athletics Council’s president, Svein Arne Hansen, did say that the new rules would “raise the standards for recognition to a point where everyone can be confident that everything is fair and above board.”
Let’s be clear: We still don’t know if new records are clean. But in my opinion, there’s a higher probably that they’re clean than 30 years ago; and for the ones that are dirty, the doses they’re getting away with are probably smaller. It’s about progress, not perfection. (As an aside, when people argue that we’ll never completely eliminate doping so we should just legalize it, I sometimes make the analogy to shoplifting. We’ll never completely eliminate that either, but we don’t just give up and say, “Okay, everything is free.”)
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In fact, the quest for absolute certainty and perfection in anti-doping can be counterproductive. Michael Joyner, a physiologist at the Mayo Clinic, ran a Twitter poll last week asking whether people would accept a 5-percent false-positive rate (i.e., innocent athletes declared guilty) in exchange for being able to catch 95 percent of actual dopers.
Of the 524 votes, 70 percent said no. That’s not surprising. (The shock was that 30 percent of voters thought it would be okay to falsely boot one athlete in 20 out of the sport.) But Joyner’s point is that, in the real world, we always have to wrestle with the balance between false positives and false negatives.
If, as in the current system, we want to aim for zero false positives, then we have to accept that a lot of dopers will not get caught. If we tighten the testing thresholds, innocent people will be caught. One solution is to introduce a more graduated “traffic light” system, where anomalous (but not slam-dunk) test values lead to a missed race or a temporary suspension with no guilt implied. Cycling had a no-start rule of that sort for hematocrit before the development of an EPO test.
The world-record proposal offers a similar set of trade-offs. We’re never going to have the ability to erase 100 percent of the doped records and leave 100 percent of the clean ones unscathed. So our options are to let the status quo stand, with a significant fraction of records that everyone “knows” were achieved by cheating, or to start with a cleaner (though not perfectly clean) slate.
In the end, I still haven’t convinced myself that resetting the world records has enough benefits to outweigh the undeniable unfairness to a few, and the inevitable controversy it will cause. I suspect that imbalance—some people sort of like it, other people really, really hate it—will doom the proposal.
But in the ensuing discussion, it’s at least worth remembering that for every Paula Radcliffe, there’s a Valerie Adams. In a sense, it’s like the trolley problem in philosophy: Nobody likes to take an action that victimizes someone; but we sometimes forget than inaction also has victims.
