Juicing the GOAT: How We Understand Steroid Use and Legacy
Lance Armstrong (photo via Wolfgang Rattay/Reuters)I watched the Lance Armstrong documentary recently with my brother, and I came out of it mostly thinking one thing; Lance Armstrong was an incredible cyclist. He was also a seemingly arrogant and rude person who was willing to threaten others who he felt might reveal his steroid use to the public. Despite those things, I still came away from that movie thinking that he was probably the greatest cyclist who ever lived. I will admit that I’m not too well versed in the history of cycling, but the man won seven Tour de France titles in a row, does much more need to be said? While it is obviously true that Lance was doping during all of his Tour de France victories, so were virtually all the other top competitors for the Tour. That doesn’t make what Lance did right, but I think it does make the point that in a world without doping, Lance would still be a dominant cyclist. So if you’re trying to understand who was the greatest cyclist ever, I would say that based on cycling talent and accomplishments alone, Lance is the GOAT (greatest of all time) of cycling. That brings me to the main topic of this article, which is how steroid use should affect the legacy of a player, and more specifically, whether someone should be in the consideration for GOAT of their sport if they used steroids.
The conversation around doping and legacy has started up again recently due to the fact that Barry Bonds was not voted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in the last year of his eligibility. Bonds is a 7-time MVP and the all-time home run king, yet due to the widespread assumption that Bonds used steroids, he will not get the chance to be memorialzed in Cooperstown. To me, even taking the allegations surrounding Bonds and PEDs to be true, he is still the greatest or one of the greatest players ever to play. He has won more than 2x the amount of MVPs compared to the next closest guy, so I’m not sure much more of an argument needs to be made. The process of selecting the GOAT of a sport is a subjective one, each person is allowed to have their own criteria. This means that if someone wants to add “has never doped” as part of the criteria for the GOAT, I think that’s totally fair. If someone wanted to make the argument that Bonds, who has been accused of domestic abuse, isn’t the type of person who the Hall of Fame should be honoring, I think that would be a totally fair argument as well. However, this iteration of the Hall of Fame, as pointed out by Bill Pennington in a New York Times article from 2013, has “a membership that already includes multiple virulent racists, drunks, [and] cheats.” So with a Baseball Hall of Fame that is based purely on accomplishments in baseball, I don’t see how Barry Bonds isn’t in there.
Barry Bonds during his time in San Francisco. (photo via USATODAY)Another sport where the conversation around the GOAT is muddled by steroid usage is in MMA. Those in consideration for GOAT status include Georges St-Pierre, Demetrious “Mighty Mouse” Johnson, Khabib Nurmagamedov, Fedor Emelianenko, as well as Anderson Silva and Jon Jones, both of whom have failed drug tests in the past. If steroid usage wasn’t part of the conversation, then I think Jon Jones would clearly be considered the GOAT by almost everyone. He was the youngest ever UFC champion who went on to break the record for most title fight victories ever, and he has never really lost a fight. Unfortunately for Jones, we do live in a world where doping is a thing and he participated in it, meaning his legacy will always have to be viewed through that lens. I would still say that he is the greatest martial artist to ever live, but I understand why someone would refuse to take Jon Jones into consideration and choose someone like GSP or Mighty Mouse instead.
Ideally, doping wouldn’t be an issue in sports, and conversations around who should be the GOAT could center solely around talent and accomplishments. However, since doping is obviously something that athletes at the highest level participate in and reap benefits from, we have to take that into consideration when evaluating their legacy. Some may say that having a failed a drug test is a dealbreaker to be in consideration for the GOAT, and while I think that is entirely fair, when it comes to sports such as cycling where doping was so widespread, I don’t think you can turn your back on everyone who used steroids. To evaluate these people’s legacies, the task then becomes to try and understand how these athletes would perform on a level playing field, in a world without doping. While this may be impossible to do, I do think that those who have used steroids still deserve to have their legacies evaluated and celebrated, even if their accomplishments will always have an asterisk next to them.