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http://www.newsday.com/opinion/oped/feldman-playing-to-lose-is-
Playing to lose is smart, not an Olympic scandal
Published: August 9, 2012 9:03 PM
By NOAH FELDMAN, Bloomberg News
Olympic athletes want to win -- we all know that. So why are they being
disqualified for trying to lose? After the badminton scandal that marred the
early days of the games, the latest athlete to be kicked out was Algerian
middle-distance runner Taoufik Makhloufi, who walked off the course in an
800 meters semifinal on Aug. 6.
Makhloufi got lucky. After an appeal, the International Association of
Athletics Federations accepted the doubtful excuse that he was feeling
injured, and reinstated him. The next day, Makhloufi won the gold medal in
the 1,500 meters by almost three-quarters of a second.
That was not the performance of an injured man. Makhloufi hadn't wanted to
run the 800 at all. For some reason, his team had left him in it. Clearly,
Makhloufi knew his chances of winning gold in the 1,500 could be harmed by
running the 800, which he had little chance to win. He was acting rationally
in giving up. For that matter, so were the Chinese, Indonesian and South
Korean badminton players who tried to throw early-round matches for a better
draw in subsequent tournament rounds. So was the Japanese women's soccer
team, which benched all but four starters and played for a tie against South
Africa to avoid having to travel to Scotland for its next match.
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Why, exactly, do we have the instinct that acting rationally to win violates
the "Olympic spirit"? The rules of the International Association of
Athletics Federations, which governs Makhloufi's races, demand that athletes
"compete honestly with bona fide effort" or face mandatory elimination from
future events in the same competition. The badminton rules are roughly the
same.
Of course, all the athletes in question were putting in a bona fide effort
to win gold medals. They just believed that the best way to do it was to
focus themselves on the main event and put themselves in the best possible
position for it. That path took them through a less than fully competitive
effort in earlier matches or races. There was nothing inherently dishonest
about their efforts, except that the rules require them to lie if they want
to have the best possible chance of winning.
One possibility -- the one the Olympic authorities would no doubt like us to
embrace -- is that competitors should go all out at all times, treating
each moment of competition as sacred. After all, the Olympics have their
origins in ancient religious ritual, and today sport can seem very much like
a secular faith, complete with rituals like sacred flame and a solemn
Olympic oath.
The problem with this ideal is that it does not match reality. We see
strategic competition all the time in sports, including the Olympics -- and
ordinarily, it does not bother us much, if at all. We compliment the
intelligence of runners and swimmers who pace themselves in preliminary
heats, rather than expending all of their energies. We accept the
intentional walk in baseball as part of the game, even though it represents
the opposite of bona fide competition between pitcher and batter.
We even accept that professional basketball and football teams will play
their scrubs and accept near-certain defeat once they have made the playoffs
-- not just to protect against injury, but sometimes even to get a better
playoff draw by losing.
Perhaps it could be argued that the badminton players, at least, violated
the spirit of the tournament, which was designed so that the qualifiers from
the initial pool would then compete in the next round according to a
predetermined set of rankings.
Yet it was the tournament's design that created the incentive for the teams
to lose. In essence, the matches that the players were attempting to throw
were exhibitions: All the teams involved had already qualified for the next
round.
Indeed, it could be argued that Makhloufi's tanking (if that's what it was)
was worse than that of the badminton players. At least they were easing up
within the context of the same tournament they sought to win. The runner, by
contrast, was throwing one event to have a better chance of winning an
entirely different one.
The persistence of strategic competition despite the rules against it
suggests another reason that the Olympic Games condemn the practice: the
entertainment value. The Olympics are a big business, and organizers want
the spectators to get their money's worth. London Olympics chairman
Sebastian Coe inadvertently revealed this motive when he commented after the
badminton scandal, "Who wants to sit through something like that?"
By this logic, there is nothing sacrosanct about Olympic effort except that
the spectators have paid good money to watch it while the networks and the
sponsors have paid vast sums to show it. Far from embodying the aspiration
to pure sport, the athletes are entertainers. As entertainers, they owe
their responsibility not to ultimate victory but to putting on a good show
at any moment when a paying customer might be watching.
Once the underlying economic motive emerges, it's easy to see that there is
a conflict between our interests as consumers and the athletes' as producers
of value. From the athletes' perspective, ultimate victory really is the
goal. Not only do they want victory for its own sake, but their future
earning capacity depends on winning gold. A runner such as Makhloufi can
expect his appearance fees to go up significantly if he is an Olympic
champion. We, on the other hand, want to be treated constantly to the
spectacle of total effort -- of the kind we might never use ourselves in our
own strategy-suffused lives.
Noah Feldman, a law professor at Harvard University and the author of "
Scorpions: The Battles and Triumphs of FDR's Great Supreme Court Justices,"
is a Bloomberg View columnist. The opinions expressed are his own. Email
Feldman at n**********[email protected]. | t******f
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