Start Date: April 23, 2023
If you are of a certain age you may remember that Olympic swimming had for some time been dominated by Americans and Australians. Then in the 1970’s East German female swimmers showed up on the scene looking like amazons on steroids. Because they were. For years their coaches gave them, probably with no choice, chemicals that created extraordinary muscle development, and may now be the reason for some cancer deaths. They were able to dominate or at least force their competitors to train much harder. They were cheating.
In the 1990’s a number of American baseball players, male adults, knowingly and intentionally took banned steroids to increase their endurance and ability to push through pain in training. It was sad as there were some seemingly heroic records being set by Barry Bonds, Mark Maguire, and Sammy Sosa. They gave us so much joy until we learned their bodies of iron were standing on feet of clay.
The NFL also has had issues with players using human growth hormones (HGH).
Eventually sports developed testing protocols in an effort to exclude competitors taking unfair advantage and potentially suffering long term health effects. As a consequence the Russian Federation has been subject to significant bans for extensive use of performance enhancing drugs (PEDs). One female figure skater lost her Olympic gold for testing positive for a heart medication. At 15 it is hard to ascribe her fully responsible. Children are objects of many forms of abuse. A young gymnast from Romania lost her gold medal for taking an over-the-counter (OTC) cold medicine. She wasn’t trying to cheat. In fact a stimulant would, if anything, harm performance on the balance beam. No one believed there was malevolent intent or that it helped her. But it violated the rules and her accomplishment was negated.
The all-time example of cheating gone mad must be Lance Armstrong. He was a cult hero for the ages. He had suffered through terribly debilitating and nearly fatal cancer. That is truth. Then he returned to the extreme endurance sport of competitive long distance cycling and won 7 Tour-de-France titles. He was a societal rock star. He had a foundation called “Livestrong”, also a real entity, to help patients fighting cancer. People were seen everywhere wearing ‘Livestrong” bracelets.
Yet over the years there were increasingly loud whispers about cheating. He was adamant. He said he was the most tested athlete in the history of sport and never caught. He even sued people who accused him [1]. He must have believed in the theory that “the best offense is a good defense.” It worked for a long time. But in the end he was caught blood doping. His titles and records were gone. His endorsements were cancelled. He was sued. Worst of all his charity was tainted.
In the same era as Mr. Armstrong’s Tour de France titles there was a less famous cheating scandal in amateur sports that foreshadowed future events. It did not involve hormones, steroids, or drugs. It was an athlete who misrepresented his identity to make use of physical superiority to compete with an unfair advantage. His name is Danny Almonte.
Danny was a Dominican immigrant who played Little League baseball in NYC. In 2001 he pitched a no-hitter. His team went to the Little League World Series. He received a great deal of attention. Maybe too much attention. You see Little League is for children between 10 and 12. Danny was 14.
Your biological gender is defined at the instant of your conception. Your age is defined by the date of your birth. You may be a few weeks late or a couple of months early but the date on your birth certificate will define when you can drive, vote, and drink. People with great illusions like to say that “50 is the new 30.” It is true that aging is very subjective, both at the early and late stages of life. During adolescence, when children develop at vastly different rates, the physical attributes of children the same age can vary extremely. I have seen 13 year olds who could fit in at a bar and 12 year olds who looked 9.
So Danny Almonte’s coach and father decided that “14 was the new 12.” The satire site BabylonBee captured our current identity issue with a piece titled “Man Identifying as 6-Year-Old Crushes Game-Winning Homer in Tee-Ball Championship”
But they have rules for good reasons, both to avoid unfair advantage and to minimize athletes getting injured by being overmanned.
The Little League situation became very complex with accusations of racism and anti-immigrant sentiment, or that the well-to-do teams resented the success of a team from a poor neighborhood. But eventually it all unravelled. False birth certificates, identities swapped with a younger bother, the revelation that the boy hadn’t attended school for a year. He had a body with more muscle development and bone density than could be expected of the other players. So his team’s records for the entire season were eliminated and new rules were put in place to require stricter verification of competitors ages.
But a year or so of adolescence is a much more subtle variation than that of the physical distinctions of adult gender. If you have any doubts, DOT Secretary Pete Buttigieg stated that crash test dummies are sexist because they have the body conformations of men and not of women, suggesting that there are such things as men and women, and that they are physically different. Adult gender distinctions include differences in bone density, muscle mass, rib cage size, lung capacity, hemoglobin, height, and shoulder span.
If there were no meaningful differences between men and women the gender based sports would never have been developed in the first place. Women would be as likely to succeed as men in co-ed sports. But that is not the case. Men such as Will Thomas who ranked at roughly 500th in swimming suddenly become a record setting national champion when he checked the box labeled “F”. Similarly with men in female weightlifting competitions. In Australia a man won a woman’s golf tournament [2]. Yet where are the cases of women competing as men and not just winning but improving their rankings astronomically?
The tragic absurdity is that if a female athlete were to resort to blood doping or steroids, to obtain a tiny fraction of the benefits that men get from having the natural advantage of a lifetime of difference, she would be disqualified for cheating for using a performance enhancing substance. You just can’t make this up.
Along the way girls are suffering significant injuries. A north Carolina high school volleyball player was spiked by a man playing for the opposing girls team. She suffered head and neck injuries. She still struggles with the effects of her injuries, including impaired vision, partial paralysis on the right side of her body, unremitting headaches, anxiety and depression [3]. More recently a female field hockey player was injured when a male on the opposing women’s team struck her with a shot in the face, causing loss of teeth and facial injuries requiring hospitalization [4].
It doesn’t take much inductive reasoning to see where this will go. The University of Pennsylvania didn’t go gaga for Will Thompson claiming female status out of compassion and insight. They did it because they wanted to win. Ivy League colleges rarely have national sports champions, unless perhaps it is in fencing. The school wants to win. So the coach is pressured. The coach pressures the team members. Eventually every women’s swim, volleyball, track, hockey, and soccer team will want a guy on the team. Then if everyone has one, it will be two, and onward and so on until women’s sports are nothing but men’s sports for guys who couldn’t succeed as males. Athletics will consist of the men’s varsity team and the and men’s junior varsity. Girls will not participate as there will be no place for them and no hope for them. No teams, no comraderie, no championships, no scholarships. I confess I wonder about the psychological status of males who find it satisfying to beat girls. There must be some self esteem issues.
Had we never had women’s sports there would be no Serena Williams, the greatest tennis player of all time. She wouldn’t have made it out of Compton if she had to play the men. No Megan Rapinoe, who claims that women objecting to trans competition are whiners. Yet her women’s national soccer team once played young high school boys and lost [5]. Will she be turning in all of her medals and endorsements? We would have had no Annika Sorenstam in golf. No Bonnie Blair in speed skating. No Lindsay Von in skiing or “FloJo”, Florence Griffith Joyner, in track. This makes it even more a betrayal that very few retired female athletes will speak out in defense of their sport. They have their trophies and medals and seem more interested in retaining their pop culture credits than saving women’s sports for the future.
So what of Lance? He had testicular cancer that had spread to his brain, lung, and abdomen
[6]. He had two surgeries. His testicles and part of his brain were removed. He was subjected to intense chemotherapy and fought bravely to recover. This is surely more debilitating than anything the ”identify-as-female” men out on the track have experienced. It is a miracle that he is even alive and able to ride a bike around the park, much less an elite competitive race, with or without doping. He was asking the impossible of his body.
By contrast there is “Tiffany” Thomas. Tiffany is a 46 year old male who took up cycling at 40. Despite competing against some younger and more experienced females, Tiffany recently (March 2023) won a a women’s cycling event in New York City [7].
Imagine how a drug-free 30 year old Lance Armstrong would have fared in woman’s cycling. Had he simply considered competing as a female he would would have won every women’s competition, Olympics, and perhaps dominated other sports as well. Who knows what health issues he suffers from what he did to his body. If only he’d considered cheating by just lowering the bar instead of by elevating himself unnaturally. He must be kicking himself?
REFERENCES
[1] Weiss, Debra Cassen,“Was Lance Armstrong a lawsuit bully? Cyclist admits major flaw”, ABAJOURNAL, January 18, 2023, https://www.abajournal.com/news/article/lance_armstrong_admits_to_lawsuit_bullying
[2] Thompson, Scott, “Transgender female golfer Breanna Gill wins women’s tournament in Australia”, April 6, 2023, https://www.foxnews.com/sports/transgender-female-golfer-breanna-gill-wins-womens-tournament-australia
[3] Steinbuch, Yaron, “Injured North Carolina volleyball player urges transgender ban for female sports teams in schools”, April 21, 2023, https://nypost.com/2023/04/21/nc-volleyball-player-urges-transgender-ban-for-schools-female-sports/
[4] Morik, Ryan, “Massachusetts superintendent calls for change after male sends female to hospital in field hockey game”, November 3, 2023, www.foxnews.com/sports/massachusetts-superintendent-calls-change-after-male-sends-female-hospital-field-hockey-game
[5] Gonzalez, Roger, “FC-Dallas under 15 boys squad beat the U.S. Women’s National Team in a scrimmage”, April 4, 2017, https://www.cbssports.com/soccer/news/a-dallas-fc-under-15-boys-squad-beat-the-u-s-womens-national-team-in-a-scrimmage/
[6] https://www.medicinenet.com/testicular_cancer__cycling_and_cisplatin/views.htm
[7] Downey, Caroline, “Male Athlete Wins Women’s Cycling Race in NYC”, March 22, 2023 https://www.nationalreview.com/news/male-athlete-wins-womens-cycling-race-in-nyc/