Doping in Sport

It seems to me that we miss the facts, when we get all upset about doping in sports. The reason - the only reason - for this is that there is pressure on the professional sport participants to win - at all costs, by whatever means it takes. Fairness is not a factor. We'd like to believe that it exists - we feel it ought to - but it has not, for centuries, probably millennia.
The reason? Simply this: that all sports are, in a sense, ritualized warfare. They exist to channel into safe areas the rivalry between me and my neighbour. Who is better? (Does it really matter?) So we try to see who is faster on foot, who has the better eyesight, the steadier hand, who is stronger.
I and my friends, my village mates, my countrymen, set out to prove we are better than those others - in all sorts of team sports. All the various team games - football (soccer), hockey in its forms, polo, and the variants on rugby football - all are stylized battles, with rules more or less agreed upon between the combatants. We see this most clearly in the older forms, such as the Irish sport of Hurling - surely the development of an ancestor of all the others - particularly when the contest takes place over an open stretch of ground, with no preparation.

So - if winning is important, and players are otherwise equally matched, then what I eat or drink, what I take in, becomes more important in giving me that extra edge, to ensure that I win.
As sport becomes more professionalized, and we become vicarious players, just watching, we feel that our side must win - but we can do nothing to ensure that - other than deserting it, if it fails. How do we desert? Simply, by not going to our own games (and the more of them that come to us on television, the easier this is to do), by not paying to support our team. This, in turn, puts pressure on both the players and managers to win at all costs - and some will try anything: brawling, to maim other players, and so overwhelm the "enemy", stealing players, or bribing them to throw games, taking drugs to enhance our performance.
We, as spectators, find ourselves shocked - even though what WE do has contributed to this. We are prepared only to pay for wins - yet become upset when these wins are found to be improperly achieved (at least by what we fondly believe are the rules).

I think this is the reason I've become less and less interested in professional sports. The ethos of win at all costs simply ruins proper sport. It's not fun any more - it's business, and the win becomes, if not destructive (in which case it IS war) more and more a fake - staged for the financial benefit of the players, as much as anything.