From the Atlantic, an article defending the use of beta blockers as performance-enhancing drugs. An article, which, I have to say, only shores up my belief that academics need to play more sports.
Beta blockers reduce the physical effects of nervousness. The reason the North Korean shooter who has been stripped of the gold took them is that a tiny tremble can mean the difference between gold and missing the target. Elliott argues that the beta blocker simply levels the playing field*; why should people who feel more nervous lose simply because they tremble?
What Elliott doesn’t understand is that not trembling is arguably the entire physical challenge in target shooting. The mental game is important in many sports, but it’s the entirety of shooting. The pistol is not terribly heavy. One does not need the strength to throw the bullet at the target. Shooters learn to squeeze the trigger slowly, to calm their racing pulse, and remain perfectly still. The beta blocker might as well be a wooden rest given the benefit it provides.
Arguing that they’re not performance enhancing is rather like arguing that since I swim much slower than Michael Phelps, I should get to use flippers. Or an outboard motor. Or that steroids are okay, because why should a weightlifter with a good work ethic lose out just because he can’t build muscle?**
The beta blockers only look innocuous because Elliot doesn’t understand the game.
Update: And this is just weird, on rereading.
In a sport like basketball, where a player’s performance in public under pressure is critical to the game, taking a drug that improves public performance under pressure would feel like cheating. So the question for pistol shooting is this: should we reward the shooter who can hit the target most accurately, or the one who can hit it most accurately under pressure in public?
Now that makes no sense at all. It would be cheating to take a beta blocker in basketball to reduce the effect of pressure, but not in a sport that is 90% mental.
*Not clear, from the article. It seems like people who don’t feel nervous, but are nevertheless steadied, gain a performance advantage, too. His argument seemed to depend on distinguishing eliminating nervousness (bad) from eliminating the effects of nervousness (permissible.)
**If we want to allow doping, that’s a separate issue. It’s just that there’s no principled way to distinguish between banning steroids and permitting beta blockers. And we’re certainly not going to claim that steroids have no enhancing effect, because even a philosopher can understand the performance effects of being stronger.
20 comments
August 21, 2008 at 8:38 am
blueollie
Now all we need is brain steroids because, well, compared to John Nash and Bill Thurston (Fields Medalist) I am a complete idiot. :)
August 21, 2008 at 9:11 am
ben wolfson
Anything that’s that creates a challenge in the performance of the task of a sport can be coöpted by it and made part of that sport; if public pressure is newly a factor, then those who deal with that pressure better will (rightly) be the winners.
Target shooting is one of those sports whose nonsporting origins are not too difficult to imagine, and I bet in those circumstances, you’d be likely to feel some amount of pressure, too.
August 21, 2008 at 9:15 am
21 August 2008: still no VP news… « blueollie
[…] what’s fair; what isn’t. A nice take on things by a historian (e. g., is it ok to take drugs to steady your hands so you can shoot better in a […]
August 21, 2008 at 9:20 am
Neddy Merrill
Haha, “a historian.”
August 21, 2008 at 9:25 am
ben wolfson
I can hear the envy in that mockery, Merrill.
August 21, 2008 at 9:52 am
Neddy Merrill
Dana, I read the article hoping that it wasn’t as dumb as you make it sound, but in fact it’s just as dumb, maybe more so. I would think that “I can do it in practice, but not in game conditions” is just as much a sad-but-so-what thing as “I have the will to train, just not the timing/muscle-mass capacity/whatever.” Why, if I weren’t in this chair…Butcha are, Blanche, butcha are.
August 21, 2008 at 10:36 am
PorJ
Nerves are a crucial aspect of any sport; its why sport psychology has developed to the extent it has over the years. Not to be too trite, but its what set apart Reggie Jackson from, say, Gil Hodges or Dave Winfield in the World Series. Learning to “stay cool” is key for any elite athlete – remember Joe Montana in the huddle with under 2 minutes left in the Super Bowl – trailing the Bengals – joking with his teammates – “Hey, isn’t that John Candy over there?” Here’s some video of a great rower named Xeno Mueller (Gold, 1996; Atlanta, Silver, 2000 Sydney) narrating what it feels like to win a gold medal in world-record pace. Its a good look in at an elite athlete’s mindset – notice how he remembers feeling “dizzy” at the start line and anxious for the race to start (no doubt the others did too). The real question is what an athlete does with those nerves – whether they can be subdued and laser-focus attained, or whether they are going to effect performance.
August 21, 2008 at 10:43 am
Neddy Merrill
Nice link, PorJ.
In musical contexts people are sometimes suspicious of beta-blockers because the nervous energy they can block can be channeled in constructive ways in the performance. The problem is that you don’t know if the nerves will give you phenomenal focus or the shakes until it’s too late.
August 21, 2008 at 11:51 am
dana
The real question is what an athlete does with those nerves – whether they can be subdued and laser-focus attained, or whether they are going to effect performance.
Exactly. It’s more pronounced in shooting, but this is true of every sport. (Off the top of my Olympic-obsessed head: balance beam in gymnastics, landing anything in figure skating and diving, false starts in track and swimming….) Nerves — and dealing with them — are part of the game in any sport. It’s just not true that the gold medalist wins because she is the only one that doesn’t feel pressure.
August 21, 2008 at 11:53 am
ari
I taught a section at Brown in which Xeno Mueller was a student. Considering that he was already the best rower in the world, he was a remarkably good student. And he scared the crap out of me.
August 21, 2008 at 12:53 pm
Ahistoricality
And he scared the crap out of me.
Did he bring oars to class and wave them menacingly?
August 21, 2008 at 1:07 pm
ari
No, he was just very big and talked like the Terminator. Actually, he was a genuinely nice kid: if not humble, certainly not self-obsessed; if not brilliant, very attentive and hard-working; if not reassuring, certainly not oar-wavy.
August 21, 2008 at 1:12 pm
Vance Maverick
Do you know why he has a name suggesting “Stranger”? It’s not common in Switzerland…rather as if his parents had intended him to be a “man without a country”.
August 21, 2008 at 1:20 pm
ari
I always wondered about that. Really. But I was never gutsy enough to ask him. Plus, I’m not in a position to say to people, “Hey, you have a funny name.” Glass houses and all that.
August 21, 2008 at 1:21 pm
Vance Maverick
Huh? You have a funny name?
August 21, 2008 at 1:31 pm
ari
Fair point, freak.
August 21, 2008 at 1:40 pm
Vance Maverick
His name might be a variant spelling of Zeno — which is not uncommon in Italy (for San Zeno, patriarch of Verona, not the ancient Greek).
August 21, 2008 at 4:38 pm
PorJ
About the name, and the bizarre Xeno Muller backstory – listen to his commentary on the second video linked to above. He really is a man without a country – born Swiss, lived in Germany and France and came to America for college. Everywhere he went – he says – people thought he talked funny. Then there was the problem on the gold medal stand: he didn’t know what Swiss people did, so he put his hand on his heart – something he learned in America (he was told later the Swiss don’t do this). The video is amazing for a bunch of reasons, but particularly towards the end where discusses his father watching him win the gold from “somewhere” just as he’s shown crossing the line.
Appropos of how Muller ended up at Brown, there was a period of time when the EARC Eastern Sprints contained half of the world’s best oarsmen. I remember Penn having the Australian national stern pair, Muller in the Brown boat, and, Northeastern being basically the Yugoslavian national team (that’s how long ago this is). And most of the American national team was there, too. This was back when the EARC was much smaller, and I’m too removed from rowing to know if this is still basically true.
August 21, 2008 at 10:22 pm
andrew
Oddly, the big doping story of these Olympics so far is about horses.
August 21, 2008 at 10:25 pm
ari
They can’t shoot straight without beta blockers, andrew. Any fool knows this.