Leave a beautiful corpse?

SportsLetter, over the years, has observed the persistence of journalists’ infatuation with the so-called Goldman surveys on drug use by elite athletes.  Year after year as journalists write about performance enhancing drug use at any level from the Olympic Games to high school sports, sooner or later someone will drag out Bob Goldman’s old surveys from the 1980s and early 1990s, present them as if they were scientific studies and then suggest that most elite athletes are dying to win through doping. 

It happened again in a January 20, 2010 New York Times blog by Gretchen Reynolds who wrote, “There’s a well-known survey in sports, known as the Goldman Dilemma. For it, a researcher, Bob Goldman, began asking elite athletes in the 1980s whether they would take a drug that guaranteed them a gold medal but would also kill them within five years. More than half of the athletes said yes. When he repeated the survey biannually for the next decade, the results were always the same. About half of the athletes were quite ready to take the bargain.”

What’s wrong with this?  Well, several things are.  As SportsLetter wrote a decade ago after contacting Goldman about his research, the findings came from the informal questioning of athletes with whom Goldman came in contact.  Subsequent surveys involved smaller samples than the first one.  The Goldman surveys did not employ accepted statistical sampling practices.  The findings were not peer reviewed, nor were they ever published in a scientific journal. 

SportsLetter also noted that the work of Penn State’s Charles Yesalis, who himself has questioned athletes about the risks of doping and authored several works about anabolic steroids, cast doubt on the Goldman findings.

But, even if the sampling and vetting of the Goldman surveys met the highest scientific standards, the fundamental premise would still be flawed because no athlete interviewed by Goldman really believed that he or she would be dead within five years.  This is a hypothetical question, a fantasy question.  None of the athletes was confronting the certainty of death in the near future.  There may have been a lot of bravado among those whom Goldman questioned, but none of them was entering into a genuine bargain that guaranteed death.

Let’s say that 20 gold-medal winners from the 2006 Torino Olympic dropped dead tomorrow, and it could be publically and conclusively proven that their deaths resulted from bargain they all made in 2005 to take drugs, win medals and die young.  Now imagine that a Tony Soprano-like character approaches a new group of elite athletes and offers them the same bargain with the ironclad promise that the death clause will be strictly enforced.  Think you’d get a 50%-plus positive response?  SportsLetter would bet the farm that you would not.

Comments

[Eric Pinckert]

Way to hit the nail on the head, SportsLetter! The space between the hypothetical and actual makes all the difference here. Keep up the Woodward and Bernstein muckraking.

[George Shirley]

I can even understand that the 1% of 1% of elite athletes may benifit from something like this, or atleast think they do. The worst thing to come out of this though, is the effect it has on parents and youth athletes that begin to believe the only way for them to make it at that level is to get involved in these types of practices.