In most human activity we accept what is often called “the performance principle): the better, the better so to speak. It’s better to run a hundred metres in nine seconds than in ten. There is no good reason to exclude drugs which enhance performance from this principle and for the most part we don’t exclude them. Millions of old people take drugs in order to carry on doing the things they do; I take naproxen in order to play tennis better, for instance. Millions of young people take drugs – especially steroids – in order to be more muscular and attractive. If there were a drug for judgement would you not want the prime minister (and the chancellor) to take it? Or a surgeon a drug for precision? And so on.

But elite sport has always set its face against performance enhancing drugs and on its behalf the World Anti-Doping Agency enforces regulations against the use of thousands of substances falling into fourteen broad categories, but mostly concerned with improving strength or stamina. The tone with which these regulations are justified is usually semi-hysterical. Lord Coe says anyone who takes drugs or signs up for the 2026 Enhanced Games where there will be no enforcement of anti-drugs is a “moron”. Almost everyone in any kind of sporting administrative position say, “There is no place for any kind of drugs in sport”. It’s OK to use altitude training and ice baths and to ruin children’s lives with hours of intense training to try to get them to elite standard, but it’s never OK to use chemicals. As an enthusiast for a concept of sport which is essentially amateur I find this odd. If you want to be a gentleman, be a gentleman, but if you want to be a gladiator why pretend?

The case against doping regulations is a strong one that is usually ignored. The enforcement mechanism is extraordinarily crude. First it involves strict liability which means that you do not have to intend to enhance. That means that what actually happens is that the innocent are often caught while the guilty are sufficiently well organised to get away with it. What is more a banned substance is a banned substance and “guilt” pays no attention to relevance let alone to intention. The skier Alain Baxter lost an Olympic medal to a cold cure and the late, great Shane Warne lost a year of his cricket career to a slimming agent. In neither case would the banned substance have helped them perform.

Would you want to watch an enhanced games in which athletes are sponsored by drug companies? I’ve raised the question before and it seems very divisive. Better and fairer, some would say, to watch a competition where everybody’s had the chance to enhance as opposed to most of the Olympic sport we’ve seen in the last seventy years where some have and some haven’t. In fact doping isn’t so much a threat to “sport” as to certain bio-mechanical sports which are important in the Olympics. In cricket and football, for example, success requires multiple skills both mental and physical and doping is only ever going to be a marginal issue. Would it really be so bad if players enhanced their stamina? One notes that nobody ever banned Lionel Messi – or wanted to? – for his parents’ use of growth hormone. The enhanced games next year are only swimming, sprinting and weightlifting and I shall certainly be curious to see the levels of performance, though in my view none of these constitutes a serious effort at entertainment.

For the record I note that when I have argued against drug regulation in the past I have received substantial support from philosophers, lawyers and medical doctors, but none from people active in sport. They wouldn’t dare.

Lincoln Allison November 2025

(An edited version of this article was published in The Daily Telegraph in November 2025.)