Sport, Technology and the Body

The Nature of Performance

Tara Magdalinski

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780415378772
• eBook ISBN: 9781134182244
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

What is the nature of athletic performance? This book offers an answer to this fascinating question by considering the relationship between sport, technology and the body. Specifically, it examines cultural resistance to the enhancement of athletes and explores the ways in which performance technologies complicate and confound our conception of the sporting body.

The book addresses concerns about the technological "invasion" of the "natural" body to investigate expectations that athletic performances reflect nothing more than the actual capacity of the untainted athlete. By examining a series of case studies, including Paralympic sprinter Oscar Pistorius, Fastskin swimsuits, hypoxic chambers and an array of illicit substances and methods, the book distinguishes between internal and external technologies to highlight the ways that performance enhancement, and public reaction to it, can be read.

Sport, Technology and the Body offers a powerful challenge to conventional views of athletic performance that stand authenticity against artifice, integrity against corruption, and athletic purity against technological intrusion. It is essential reading for all serious students of the sociology, culture or ethics of sport.

1 Introduction

Sport, the body and performance technology

In 1995, Zoe Warwick committed suicide. A dedicated bodybuilder and former European champion, a career of abusing steroids had culminated in the disintegration of her once flawless body. The medications pumped into her to keep her alive could not prevent system after system from shutting down, and, unable to cope with the pain, she took her own life. In 1988, Ben Johnson was celebrated as the fastest human being to propel his body down a one hundred-metre track. He then became the most infamous drug cheat in the history of modern sport, testing positive to stanozolol. In 2000, after trialling a ‘fastskin’ for Adidas, Ian Thorpe announced to a press conference that the new full-length swimsuit certainly ‘optimised’ his performance but carefully pointed out that it did not ‘enhance’ it. A body destroyed, a world record negated, and a performance improved; each reveals the difficult relationship between the ‘natural’ body and technology to be central to contemporary constructions of elite sport.

Modern sport is a paradox. On the one hand, the quest for outstanding performances, encapsulated in the Olympic motto of Citius, Altius, Fortius, requires increasing scientific intrusion into the sporting body. Athletes, coaches and sports scientists rigorously search for techniques, supplements or modifications that will deliver the elusive ‘edge’, whilst the public crave world records each time an athlete steps onto the track, dives into the pool or tumbles across the mat. The promised commercial benefits that accompany international sporting success mean securing the slightest of advantages over a competitor is paramount. Not only the momentary glory of a gold medal, but financial security and a post-sport career rest on the split second or fraction of a centimetre found in a biomechanically adjusted gait or a nutritionally superior diet. Yet, modifying the body through physical culture is not confined to the elite athlete. Even casual participants are encouraged to submit their bodies to the tyranny of exercise equipment. A brief wander through a local fitness centre reveals a profusion of machinery and an excess of programmes to adjust a body’s size, shape or capacity. At home, the latest dietary fads blare out from the television set or gaze up from the pages of glossy magazines. Pedometers, heart monitors and iPods, which accompany even the most lay of athletes on their daily constitutionals, are further evidence of the increasingly technologised exercising body. In the twenty-first century, exercise and sport are not simply amusing diversions but are conducted with the expectation of physical modification and augmentation achieved through discipline, hard work and, in many ways, the body’s capitulation to the rigours of the machine.

The sports performance industry has grown exponentially over the latter part of the twentieth century for both recreational participants and professional athletes. It is now not uncommon to find physiologists, biomecha-nists and psychologists amongst a growing cadre of support personnel for elite athletes. Olympic, representative and professional teams travel with almost as many auxiliary staff as they do team members, and these adjuncts poke, prod, test and taunt the athletic body, trying to nudge it closer towards its limits, encouraged by the glittering prize just beyond their grasp. The athletic body itself is no longer worked on in its entirety, but, in a gesture towards the Cartesian body, is dissected into smaller and smaller pieces with each scientific discipline that emerges. Teams of specialists are assigned to these bits of the body, which are then honed until they increase their capacity and realise their potential. As such, sporting bodies are externally and internally crafted into a form that will both visually and functionally fulfil their athletic roles and expectations.

Whilst sports science has flourished in recent decades, for many, the single-minded pursuit of achievement rests uneasily on the traditional foundations of modern sport. Popularly predicated on notions of ‘fair play’, physical rejuvenation and a balance between body and mind, sport is thought to be an activity performed as an antidote to the rational modern world. It is constructed as more than mere physical activity and is believed to embody a philosophy that offers participants the opportunity to learn positive and desirable characteristics that can be adapted to ‘real life’ (Shields and Bredemeier 1995). For this reason, athletes are supposed to exemplify qualities that include honesty, patience, diligence, hard work, dedication, integrity and sacrifice, for which they are admired by the public and regarded as role models for the young. In essence, the sporting experience, regardless whether at the elite, junior or casual level, is thought to reflect a ‘spirit’ that privileges participation over winning, friendship over competition, and, for many, the value of sporting performance lies not in the quantitative result but in its qualitative meanings (Loland 2002; Voy 1991). The Olympic movement’s ‘Celebrate Humanity’ advertisements, the Canadian‘Spirit of Sport’ campaign and a range of similarly devised international programmes confirm that, although modern sport may seem to be on a wayward path, the philosophical and ethical precepts remain the ideological basis, even essence, of the sporting experience.

The discord between elite achievement sport and the traditional model of physical recreations as character building, or between the ‘essence’ or ‘spirit’ of sport (Møller 2003), is evident in concerns about increased technologisation. As sport is supposed to generate desirable human qualities and restore the healthy body, the scientific-based incursion of technology into the sports realm seems to threaten these fundamental principles. Rather than being a naturalistic activity that allows for freedom of movement and the bodily expression of physical potential, under the shadow of technology sport becomes a highly disciplined, rationalised endeavour that rewards performances for their measurable outcomes rather than any kind of inherent virtues. In response, administrators, athletes and the public alike try to promote sport’s ‘intrinsic’ worth by reclaiming it as an authentic activity that is impervious to the damaging effects of technology, reflected in a range of proclamations and statements that privilege, even sanctify, the ideology of natural sport over its technological assault.

The perception that the meaning, value or spirit of sport is diminished by the presence of technology is, of course, only reasonable if sport and technology are juxtaposed against one another, where the former represents a natural activity in which the human body is the central concern, and the latter is an artificial product that corrupts the body. Such a binary construction relies on a broader cultural ‘technophobia’ that contends ‘natural’ products and methods to be superior to anything created by the human hand (Barilan and Weintraub 2001). The interaction between technology and human subjects in these hierarchies reveals a shifting relationship between nature, the body and technology, in which fears about the meaning and future of humanity have long been manifest. Whilst technology may now be accepted as an indispensable part of contemporary life, it is not all too long ago that the emergence of industrial technologies was accompanied by fears that the intrusion of, and a reliance on, technology would materially alter our conception of humanity (Stern 1998).

From working bodies coupled with machines through to genetic engineering, the ease with which bodies can be manipulated, as well as the emergence of organic/inorganic hybrids, has threatened to obscure clear boundaries between human and technology. With the recent publication of the map of the human genome, a decades-long endeavour that has opened up countless opportunities for a range of gene therapies, there have been renewed misgivings about our ability to manipulate or even design bodies. Fears about an emerging Frankensteinian world, where body parts are reduced to interchangeable commodities, are revived when news reports show mice growing transplantable human ears on their backs, and the revival of eugenicist tendencies is presaged when babies can be selected by desirable physical characteristic or even sexual orientation. It seems we prefer to regard technology as an adjunct to our daily lives, a tool, rather than an end in and of itself, one that identifies and confirms difference, rather than one that imperils the very conception of who we are as a species. This is particularly apparent within the context of contemporary sport where authorities are rushing to ensure that genetic therapies cannot be employed for athletic gain (Miah 2004), confirming that artifice and authenticity are categorically juxtaposed in an activity that is represented as a natural expression of humanity designed to refresh the working body and renew the dispirited soul.

Yet, the conflicted relationship between sport and technology is far more complex than casual analyses might suggest, and it would certainly be naïve to regard, or even to prefer, sport and technology to be independent categories with little overlap. Modern sport is itself a thoroughly technological product that first emerged during an era of escalating scientific, industrial and technological advances. With the development of mechanised production processes, the informality of rural games was abandoned as the pressures of the time clock and other industrial techniques influenced the structure and conduct of physical activity. These emergent leisure pursuits came to closely mirror the new regulation of time, space and the body. Sport has thus been complicit in the regulation and surveillance of the body and has contributed to the creation of docile bodies (Foucault 1977). Participants are taught to start and stop at the sound of a whistle, remain within the strict confines of the pitch and play in specialised positions, each member of a team working together like cogs in a machine, just like the new factory regimes to which working bodies had been subjugated. The technological innovations in the workplace and on the sportsfield were symptomatic of both an increasingly regulated life and the physical and emotional alienation that resulted from industrial labour (Shilling 2005). The codification of modern sports replicated, in essence, the mechanised and rule-bound structure of the workplace and, rather than embodying freedom, was explicitly a ‘prison of measured time’ (Brohm 1978).

By the late nineteenth century, many leisure activities incorporated new mechanised forms and, rather than offering the promised escape from work, served to demystify industrial technology, ‘redefining that source of stress as a means for pleasure’ (de la Peña 2003: 87). Carolyn de la Peña (2003) notes how early amusement parks, such as Coney Island, converted the technology of the workplace into technologies of leisure, whilst the application of machines to the relaxing body, even within ‘natural’ settings, was thought to be healthful and rejuvenating. Similarly, new transport technologies allowed urban dwellers to recreate in wilderness or seaside precincts at the same time that these technologies were themselves transformed into sporting pursuits. Clearly, technology has been seamlessly incorporated into many aspects of sport without generating anxiety.

Despite the uneasiness it may provoke, technology is firmly embedded in contemporary sport. The production of improved equipment, such as larger tennis racquets, more flexible poles for vaulting, sprung floors in gymnastics, synthetic tracks or fields for athletics or team sports, and aerodynamic skis, as well as clothing that variously decreases drag, removes sweat or regulates body temperature, has relied on complex innovation in engineering and product and material design. Technological advances have also been instrumental in improving the safety of many sports. The development of sophisticated helmets, mouthguards and padding, for example, has ensured the health and well-being of participants. There is some evidence to suggest, however, that such complex protective equipment may have actually led to greater rates and degrees of injuries, as athletes feel more invincible and thus are prepared to take more risks or even may use their safety equipment as weapons on the sportsfield (Stoner and Keating 1993). Furthermore, the disciplinary regulation of time and space results from the application of technology to physical activity, and even the locations where sport is played are the consequence of the deliberate technological modification or reproduction of the landscape. Whilst technology is clearly central to the organisation and conduct of modern sport, perhaps the most explicit expression of the sport/technology nexus lies within exercise science, where the development of body technologies is designed to produce improved performances (Pronger 2002).

Modern sport emerged in an era where scientific enquiry into the body had lost its heretical connotations, and where the triumph of reason during the Enlightenment had ushered in new rational paradigms that were increasingly employed to map the human organism. The body was reconceived as a legitimate object of study, and new scientific disciplines tried to identify, categorise and determine its properties. The development of complex production processes influenced scientific representations of the body, which was increasingly conceived in the mechanistic terms of the new industrial landscape. Bodies were thought to be fixed entities that, like machines, could be improved upon to elicit a greater level of efficiency.

Establishing the limits of human capacity was part of a broader nineteenth-century concern with measuring and recording all kinds of bodies, particularly those encountered through various colonising missions (Gould 1981), and it was not until later in the nineteenth century that scientists began to conceive of bodies as a kind of ‘raw material’ that could be manipulated and enhanced through human intervention (de la Peña 2003). The idea that the body could be stretched beyond what existed challenged the notion of fixed, ‘natural limits’ (Hoberman 1992: 9), and as physical capacity was no longer thought to be predetermined, the body was reconceived as malleable and responsive to external stressors. Yet, these scientific advances were not initially applied to sport to improve athletic performances, for, although it was growing in popularity and significance, sport was not the global industry it is today, and applying scientific research to the small sector of the population who indulged in athletic pursuits was not a high priority for scientists. Furthermore, the dominant amateur philosophy at the time eschewed behaviours that took sport too seriously, and so, as was to become evident across the twentieth century, a rigorous scientific preparation of athletes conflicted with the gentlemanly approach to physical recreations.

It was not until the early twentieth century that the discipline of exercise science gradually emerged in its own right to chart the exercising body, using a range of biochemical and physical subdisciplines to predict and augment athletes’ physical performances (Hoberman 1992). Stretching biological limits and increasing physiological capacities thus became a legitimate scientific pursuit, and the exercising body provided the ideal site where these new theories could be tested. Since the Second World War, there has been a significant ‘paradigm shift’ in the way that scientific results have been applied to training techniques, resulting in impressive performances and previously unimagined achievements (Beamish and Ritchie 2005).

Despite its critical appeal to both coaches and athletes, the intrusive presence of technology has provoked anxiety that the spirit of sport, the nature of performance and humanity itself are being irreparably harmed. Yet, given that chemical concoctions, radical training techniques and innumerable advances have been ingested, followed or applied to generate a greater physical output from the exercising body, it is clear that the notion of performance enhancement per se is not the issue, indeed, the single-minded pursuit of athletic glory is revered amongst the sports-loving public. In reality, the manner in which athletes augment their performance remains of greatest concern (Gardner 1989). For many, sporting performances are only considered of value if they represent an expression of a body’s natural capacity and are the visible result of hard work, discipline and sacrifice (Reid 1998). Technological enhancements, by contrast, are typically rejected as ‘shortcuts’ that negate the need for toil and commitment, suggesting that, within sport, choosing what is regarded as a ‘passive’ means to an end does not engender as much respect as the hearty physical exertion that generates a good sweat. Physiological changes in the body thus have to be ‘earned’, so technologies such as hypoxic chambers in which athletes might simply sit or sleep are thought to violate the spirit of sport because there is no requirement to do anything to receive its benefits (Levine 2006). This is certainly not to suggest there is a simple Orwellian dichotomy in sport whereby ‘nature is good’ and ‘technology is bad’. There are, indeed, many technologies that are wholeheartedly embraced by the sports fraternity, particularly those that are required as part of the actual activity itself. Without cycles or stopwatches, for example, the Tour de France would be reduced to a lengthy foot race; dispensing with yachts or surfboards would leave competitors treading water in the ocean; or prohibiting racquets, bats, clubs and balls would find tennis players, baseballers and golfers standing around, essentially unoccupied and perhaps more than a little confused.

Although some technologies find a comfortable place in sport, those that are categorically rejected as inappropriately intrusive include any that threaten to fundamentally alter the body and its capacity. Despite the emerging belief in the malleability of biological capacity, bodies nevertheless are subject to the basic laws of physics, such that, regardless of their preparation, a sprinter will never be able to complete one hundred metres in no time at all. Thus, increasingly smaller performance increments have exerted additional pressure on coaches, administrators and, above all, exercise scientists to discover methods or elixirs that will generate a winning margin. Nevertheless, the concept of ‘performance enhancement’ is marginalised within sport, conjuring up images of steroid-fuelled, Amazonian women with deep voices, facial hair and bulging muscles, or freakish bodybuilders, furtively injecting veterinary drugs into their thighs. Suspected drug abusers are exposed in the sports media even before their guilt is determined, whilst confirmed dopers are paraded publicly as monstrous warnings to those who dare transgress acceptable bodily limits (Magdalinski and Brooks 2002). Using illicit technologies to provide an ‘unfair advantage’, for many, represents the antithesis of all that is considered meaningful about organised physical activity, and conceiving elite performance as nothing more than the consequence of extreme technological intervention is similarly unthinkable. As such, training methods, supplements and other applications are targeted for particular criticism if they are determined to be an ‘unnatural’ or ‘artificial’ way of enhancing performance. Not only do these substances personify the extremes of technological intrusion, they are believed to negate sport’s basic ‘natural’ or ‘human’ tenets. In fact, there appears to be almost no greater evil in sport than to supplement the body artificially in the pursuit of victory, despite the fact that the competitive structure of sport unashamedly compels competitors to consider any and every means possible to secure their victory. ‘Performance enhancement’, particularly chemical intervention, is rejected unreservedly, for it represents the inevitable consequence of the uneasy relationship between sport and technology.

Despite an ostensibly clear distinction between accepted technologies and those determined to be ‘performance enhancing’, the line between the two is ever shifting and there is remarkably little consistency in determining which innovations acceptably assist the body and which are considered thoroughly inappropriate. Numerous scientifically designed supplements and techniques are deemed to be legitimate means to realise biological potential, which, for many, suggests that the decision to ban particular technologies appears somewhat arbitrary. The list of banned substances is amended regularly as new substances are included and, at times, others are removed. Prohibited substances vary between sports; sports science textbooks not even a decade old recommend techniques that have been subsequently discredited; and coaches and athletes who once experimented with substances and training methods often become the most vocal supporters of sport’s own ‘war on drugs’. Whilst administrators blithely dream of the day when sport will be ‘drug-free’, none clarify that they are only working towards liberating sport from banned, not all, chemical interventions. Elite sporting bodies, it seems, still require a plethora of legal enhancements to perform at the levels expected of them.

Although the complex reasons why some technologies are disqualified and others are permitted in sport have been discussed at length, these tend to fall into one of two broad categories: morality and health (Miah 2006; Noakes 2004; Schneider and Butcher 2000; Gardner 1989). On the one hand, performance-enhancing technologies are banned because they are thought to provide an unfair advantage to those utilising them; on the other, they are proscribed because of an assumed risk to the health and well-being of the athlete. What is pertinent about these justifications is that whilst ‘health’ and ‘morality’ seem to be disparate reasons for regulating performance technologies in sport, both crucially reveal entrenched concerns about not just the nature of sport, but about nature in sport. Despite a never-ending thirst for new records and an elite sport culture that adheres to the tenet of Citius, Altius, Fortius, in the twenty-first century much of the anxiety about illicit performance enhancement centres on fears that an athlete and her/his authentic, natural performance are being irreparably disrupted, and potentially harmed, by artificial, external means. This assumes, of course, that sport represents a natural endeavour in the first place and that the athletic body similarly exists in a pure, unblemished state. Such assumptions about the nature of sport and about nature in sport must be interrogated to appreciate how particular performance technologies signify the uncomfortable dissolution of boundaries between nature and technology.

Whilst it is certainly true that many have studied the complex relationship between technology and the body in relation to sport (Miah 2004; Hoberman 1992), what has been missing is a careful analysis of the nature of performance, which considers in detail the relationship between nature, the body, sport and technology. As such, this volume offers an insight into the cultural significance of performance technologies and their place within traditional ideologies of sport to identify the impact these have on not just the athlete’s body but on their performance. ‘Performance technologies’ is a collective term that encompasses a range of mechanical and chemical interventions designed to alter the body and improve the physical performance of an athlete. These include equipment, dietary and physical manipulations, drugs, supplements and other substances, as well as training methods and techniques. The main focus is, however, on illicit performance enhancement such as drugs, blood doping and other prohibited substances and methods, to determine the ways that technology and the body intersect within a discursive construction of the nature/artifice binary. The book begins by analysing the significance of nature for sport, the body and performance, as nature clearly represents the critical juncture where these intersect. The analysis traces the juxtaposition of nature/sport on the one hand against culture/technology on the other, each representing discrete categories that appear to come undone through the presence of illicitly enhanced athletic bodies. Further, this volume explores how this neat binary couplet is disrupted by the elite athletic body,...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgments
• List of abbreviations
• 1 Introduction: sport, the body and performance technology
• 2 The nature of sport
• 3 The nature of the body
• 4 The nature of performance
• 5 The nature of health
• 6 ‘Those girls with sideburns’: enhancing the female body
• 7 Enhancing the body from without: artificial skins and other prosthetics
• 8 Drugs, sport and Australian identity
• 9 The performance of nature at the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games
• 10 Conclusion
• Bibliography