That professional ice hockey players seek to enhance their performance by consuming all sorts of substances hardly qualifies as news. Performance enhancement is, after all, an inalienable aspect of modern sport, including ice hockey.<\/p>\n
That a Swedish player tested positive for a banned stimulant in this month\u2019s Olympic winter games is an equally trivial occurrence. Or, to be more precise, it ought to have been a minor story that nobody would have cared to remember the following day.<\/p>\n
Owing to the idiosyncrasies of sport journalists, the significance of the laboratory finding was immediately blown out of proportion. While some observers professed to believe that the \u2018drug scandal\u2019 had brought \u2018shame\u2019 on Swedish ice hockey or \u2018damaged\u2019 the country\u2019s reputation, others sought to discover \u2018conspiracies\u2019 against Sweden in general and the \u2018allergic\u2019 athlete in particular. (He claimed to have treated his allergy with a classic performance-enhancing substance.)<\/p>\n
Inevitably, the media fury obfuscated the real lesson of the pseudoephedrine incident, a lesson that may well anticipate a new and better era so far as athletes\u2019 human rights are concerned.<\/p>\n
In a truly remarkable development, a number of prominent players sided with their disqualified colleague. They pointed out that the use of the so-called doping stimulant didn’t violate the National (i.e. North-American) Hockey League’s \u2018Program for Performance Enhancing Substances\u2019, the only drug program that they actually swear by. Indeed, since \u2018every player\u2019 had at least occasionally resorted to pseudoephedrine, what was the Olympic fuss all about?<\/p>\n
It was also reported that \u2018four or five\u2019 other members of the Swedish ice hockey team had prepared themselves for the games in a similar manner. No doubt their opponents had kept identical substances in their medical bag to stay alert on Sochi\u2019s subtropical shores.<\/p>\n
The point is, then, that today\u2019s professional athletes observe an ethical code of their own, a code that appears to be irreconcilable with the World Anti-Doping Code or any other invention imposed from above.<\/p>\n
In that sense the \u2018disgraced\u2019 Swede inadvertently made a tremendous contribution towards an athlete-centered sport ethics. His troublesome urine sample triggered a debate that ultimately exposed the fallacy that \u2018the athletes themselves\u2019 demand for draconian control measures and lifetime bans for \u2018cheaters\u2019.<\/p>\n
Ice hockey players and other athletes are perfectly capable of formulating their own professional ethics. Whether they would end up accepting this or that medical treatment or training method is none of our business. We wouldn\u2019t wish athletes to interfere with our professional ethics, would we?<\/p>\n
Does their opinion matter to the powers-that-be? Is anybody listening to their genuine voice? Are athletes still not supposed to think aloud?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
That professional ice hockey players seek to enhance their performance by consuming all sorts of substances hardly qualifies as news. Performance enhancement is, after all, an inalienable aspect of modern sport, including ice hockey. That a Swedish player tested positive for a banned stimulant in this month\u2019s Olympic winter games is an equally trivial occurrence. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-978","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-okategoriserade"},"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2JbBl-fM","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/idrottsforum.org\/forumbloggen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/978","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/idrottsforum.org\/forumbloggen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/idrottsforum.org\/forumbloggen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/idrottsforum.org\/forumbloggen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/idrottsforum.org\/forumbloggen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=978"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/idrottsforum.org\/forumbloggen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/978\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/idrottsforum.org\/forumbloggen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=978"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/idrottsforum.org\/forumbloggen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=978"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/idrottsforum.org\/forumbloggen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=978"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}