We can’t seem to hear enough about Lance Armstrong and the doping scandal that has exposed a pervasive system of performance enhancing drugs within the cycling community. Doping was found at all levels of the sport and the findings have seen Armstrong stripped of his Tour de France titles. He’s lost major sponsorship deals and international cycling has been tainted. Why has so much media attention, much of it beyond the arenas of sport and public health, been focused on this story? In the rush to either condemn or excuse so-called cheating, have we missed the big picture?
Long before the internet, Eftpos and celebrity dog trainers, I worked as a DJ. I was not particularly employable at the time and working as a DJ was far preferable to waiting tables because there was no small talk required, no prams to dodge and you didn’t have to have good gross motor skills.
The criteria for the position were simple. You spent your life obsessively hunting new music, practicing mixes and hauling crates of vinyl around, you played music people wanted to hear and dance to and you took cocaine. You took cocaine not just because everyone else did and you wanted to fit in, you took it because it kept you awake and focused and standing up for hours and hours on end, night after night. It wasn’t optional and it wasn’t mandatory, it just was. If you didn’t have any or had other financial priorities, whoever was working the bar made sure you got some. Nobody saw it as cheating, but almost no one seemed to be able to work without it.
Cheating and attempts to enhance performance go hand in hand with a single-minded focus on outcome. The clearer our desire for a specific result, the more likely we are to take shortcuts to get there. And the more we see outcomes as related purely to personal effort, the more likely we are to blame individuals for failing to meet our own high standards.
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