During the Rio Olympics, Malcolm Gladwell and Nicholas Thompson will be discussing the track-and-field events, as they did during the 2012 London Games and during the 2015 World Championships. Below is Part I. You can also now read part II, about Usain Bolt, Mo Farah, and Wayde Van Niekerk.
Nicholas Thompson**:** Hello, Malcolm! It’s a delight to be talking about Olympic track with you once more. The events start today and, as usual, I’m looking forward to watching people doing basic human things—running, jumping, throwing—in superhuman ways. And I expect Team U.S.A. to do rather well, though not nearly as well as the swimmers and gymnasts.
Malcolm Gladwell**:** I’ve actually been dreading these Olympics. I think the Games have become too big, too expensive, too logistically complicated, and too overwhelming for any one country—let alone any one city—to manage. And I’m not the only one, surely, to find it sickening that absolutely everyone is making money off these Games except the athletes. NBC will make a fortune. The hospitality and construction industries of Rio will make a fortune. And don’t get me started on the I.O.C.: the Olympic Committee members are getting a per diem of nine hundred dollars—which means that they will make more over the two weeks than ninety-nine per cent of the athletes at the Games will make during the entire year. At a certain point these spectacles cease being joyous and beautiful and start to stink. That said, I’m going to watch every single minute of the running. As in so many things, I’m a hypocrite!
N.T.****: Huh. I see your point. (Though maybe you can take solace in the fact that NBC’s ratings for the Olympics are dismal?) Still, on the scale of the world’s current injustices, the underpayment of Olympic athletes seems relatively small. And isn’t it good that the construction and hospitality industries of Brazil are making money? In any event, to me, what’s beautiful about the Olympics vastly outweighs what’s cruel. So, like you, I’m going to watch every single minute of the running, but I’m not going to feel guilty doing it.
M.G.****: Not “underpayment,” Nick. Nonpayment. And, yes, it’s a small injustice relative to, say, what’s happening in Syria. But that is precisely the kind of moral calculation that the I.O.C. fat cats are relying on to maintain the status quo. There is, in fact, a very important principle here—one that other parts of the economy—I’m looking at you, Wall Street and Silicon Valley—ought to heed. And that is, in any flourishing concern, profits ought to flow to those generating the greatest value. If millions of people find Katie Ledecky’s accomplishments so extraordinary that they tune in to the Olympics night after night, then Katie Ledecky deserves some share of that income. In a perfect world, the best athletes in the world would get together, after Rio, and announce, “We’re taking the Games back.” What would happen if Allyson Felix and Michael Phelps stood up and said, “Enough is enough!”?
N.T.****: Phelps has done O.K. His net worth before these games was about fifty-five million dollars, and it’s going to be a hell of a lot more after the way he swam this week. But your general point is totally true. U.S. Swimming apparently pays its top athletes three thousand dollars a year. And Gabby Douglas’s mother had to file for bankruptcy because of the cost of supporting her career. It’s like the exploitation in college football, where the coaches are paid in the seven figures and the athletes, who actually make the teams succeed, put their brains at risk and can’t accept a free burger. Still, we’re going to lose all of our readers if we focus on economics too long, and I don’t want to divert you into a discussion of banning college football. So let’s move to the athletes, and one of the most important to watch: Caster Semenya, the South African middle-distance star, who has what are called “intersex conditions.” She has always identified as a woman, but she has many of the physiological features of a man, including, according to a medical report in 2009 that was leaked to the press, internal testes and an exceptionally high testosterone level. Do you think she should be allowed to compete as a woman?
M.G.****: Of course not! And why do I say of course not? Because not a single track-and-field fan that I’m aware of disagrees with me. I cannot tell you how many arguments I’ve gotten into over the past two weeks about this, and I’ve been astonished at how many people fail to appreciate the athletic significance of this. Remember, this is a competitive issue, not a human-rights issue. No one is saying that Semenya isn’t a woman, a human being, and an individual deserving of our full respect.
N.T.****: This is slightly beside the point, but the controversy has led many people to say many cruel things, among them that she is not, in fact, a woman. As her father has said, “This is all very painful for us—we live by simple rules.”
M.G.****: Absolutely, Nick. There is no place for that kind of viciousness. But people need to understand that an athletic competition has to have rules; otherwise there can be no competition. David Epstein wrote a characteristically brilliant piece for Scientific American last week in which he quoted the philosopher Bernard Suits, who once described sports as “the voluntary acceptance of unnecessary obstacles.” And that’s what’s at issue here. Semenya is equipped with an extraordinary and anomalous genetic advantage. The previous policy of international track was that she could compete as a woman if she took medication to lower her testosterone to “normal” levels. That restriction has now been lifted. And so we have a situation where one woman, born with the biological equivalent of a turbocharger, is now being allowed to “compete” against the ninety-nine per cent of women who have no such advantage. The physiologist Ross Tucker had a wonderful piece on this issue recently, and it’s worth—I think—quoting from it at length:
When Semenya’s testosterone was lowered to “normal” levels, she ran in the two-minute range for the eight hundred metres, which put her comfortably among the best in the world. Now that that restriction has been lifted, she is running six seconds faster. She has gone from being very good to being, potentially, the greatest half-miler in the history of women’s running. No one will beat her in Rio. She could run the last fifty yards backward and still win. How do you think the other women in that race feel about that?
N.T.****: They’re rather pissed. I think this tweet just about sums it up.
M.G.****: Even Sebastian Coe, the head of track’s international governing body, says that the old restriction on testosterone has to be brought back. Remember—and this is a crucial point—no one is saying that Caster Semenya shouldn’t be able to compete. People are only saying that women’s athletics—as a “protected category”—requires her to have testosterone levels in line with her competitors’.
N.T.****: Still, where do you draw the line? Do we only measure testosterone? And, if we do, what about women who produce a lot of testosterone but are unable to make use of it, like the Spanish hurdler Maria José Martínez-Patiño? What about the dominant Finnish cross-country skier Eero Mäntyranta, who had a genetic mutation that gave him forty per cent more red blood cells than the average man?
M.G.****: Yes. This is the counterargument. All world-class athletes are, to some extent, genetic freaks. Usain Bolt is not normal. So why are we fussing over this particular kind of abnormality? What Tucker argues is that Semenya’s “difference” is qualitatively different from Bolt’s “difference.” What sets Bolt apart is the length of his legs and his extraordinary percentage of fast-twitch fibers and his competitive nature—and those are all differences that define the competition in the hundred. That is, the hundred metres is a contest between people of varying levels of fast-twitch muscles, competitive drive, and physiology. The performers who compete for the Best Supporting Actor Oscar represent an astonishing variety of talents, roles, and films. But you shouldn’t compete for that prize if you are outside of the category of supporting actor. Tucker’s point is that Semenya’s difference puts her outside the protected athletic category of “woman”—and that makes it unfair to the other runners if she is allowed to compete. This is an argument that makes me—and most people—profoundly uncomfortable, because in all other walks of life we do not draw these kinds of hard lines. But the Olympics is not life!
It amazes me how much those on the other side of this argument refuse to accept the logic of competition. There was an extraordinary piece in the New York Times Magazine last month by Ruth Padawer, in which Padawer ultimately attempts to deny that testosterone makes much of a difference in middle-distance running. Let me quote the offending paragraph:
I mean, where to start? Of course Semenya’s elevated levels of testosterone don’t make her as fast as a man. She’s not a man! She’s a woman. Then there’s Padawer’s argument that testosterone may only confer a one-to-three-per-cent advantage. Only one to three per cent? Suppose it’s two per cent: a two-per-cent advantage in the eight hundred metres is the difference between two minutes and 1:55.2. That’s the difference between not making the Olympic final and winning the gold. I think it was at that point that I threw the magazine across the room.
N.T.****: I don’t disagree with you; in fact, I entirely agree about Semenya. (Although, thinking about economic justice, one should note that Semenya grew up in a remote village of mud huts in South Africa.) Still, a careful analyst of the Gladwellian œuvre might find your position inconsistent. In a conversation we had a few years ago, you argued that athletes should be allowed to take testosterone supplements, at safe levels, as long as they revealed their regimens. So wouldn’t a solution consistent with that argument be that the other women should be allowed to take supplements—not that Semenya should take inhibitors?
M.G.****: I’ve changed my mind! I used to be something of a doping/natural-advantage skeptic. But the deeper I get immersed in the world of athletics—and the more seriously I take track and field—the more of a purist I’ve become. Sports is the voluntary acceptance of unnecessary obstacles. If athletes can’t accept that fact, they should try another sport—like, say, football, where getting busted for doping apparently makes not a whit of difference to coaches or fans.
N.T.****: So you now want strict doping rules? I’m delighted! And there’s no better place to start applying them than Semenya’s race. Right now, women’s middle-distance running is about as doped up as the Tour de France was in the nineteen-nineties. In 2012, Semenya won the silver in the eight hundred metres, finishing behind Mariya Savinova, a Russian who admitted to doping on a secretly recorded call. (“My coach helps to cover up the tests. There is no other way to do it. Everyone in Russia is on pharma,” she said.) The bronze-medal winner was also a Russian to whom the World Anti-Doping Agency has recommended giving a lifetime ban. If I were a woman in one of these races, I’d run as hard as I could to the finish line, no matter what place I’m in. If you move from eighth to seventh, you might actually end up getting a gold if the first six are disqualified in the next year.
M.G.****: The women’s fifteen hundred in the 2012 Olympics was worse! As of right now, about half the field has been investigated for doping schemes since then. It’s a mess!
N.T.****: I totally agree. There are real collective-action problems with doping and specific events. Once some people start to dope, then everyone in the event thinks he needs to do it, too, in order to compete. And it’s hard to break the cycle. So there you have it: the Games are a mess and the women’s distance races are a mess. But let’s end on a high note. Tell me one thing you’re excited about for the first few days. And then we’ll pick this conversation back up once the races have begun!
M.G.****: I am on the edge of my seat about the women’s hundred-metre final, on Saturday night. The great Jamaican Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce, one of the greatest female sprinters of all time, has been hobbled with a toe injury—and the upstarts are snapping at her heels.
N.T.****: I’ll be watching, too—and rooting for the great American with the most surprising name you can imagine for a sprinter in this country: English Gardner. Anyway, thank you! It’s always a pleasure to chat with you about all these things, Malcolm.
