Editorial: Games reflect the highs and the limits of chemistry

The Olympic Games spotlight the world’s top sports competitors in a dazzling array of events, and watching the dedication of these elite performers is often thrilling. In a certain way, it feels like watching the live stream of a collaboration between top-class athletes and high-achieving researchers.

Experts describe the athletics track in Paris, resplendent in purple, as the fastest the world has ever seen. It is the result of a new polymeric material developed by a team of chemists, engineers, and physicists. The advances extend to the materials used in uniforms and other equipment—the pool, the pole vault, and beyond. Although some performances last just seconds, what viewers see is the result of decades of innovation and testing.

The science we cannot see matters too, of course. The chemistry of nutrition, for instance, is reflected in the use of baking soda to buffer acidity in muscles or the discovery of the best balance of sugars to fuel performance. Every chemical reaction in the body matters when looking for an edge at the highest levels of competition.

The cumulative impact of these scientific advances is impressive. Performances are, in the Olympic spirit, higher, faster, and stronger than ever before. Social media has been inundated with memes demonstrating the laughably immense escalation of technical difficulty in sports like gymnastics over the years.

But chemistry’s place in the Games has also come under fire. That’s because, as a way to keep the field level and fair, international sporting authorities has developed rules about how competitors can use science. One key area of concern is the use of performance-enhancing drugs. Many drugs that offer benefits to people with diseases or disorders can also enhance performance and are therefore banned from competition.

On the face of it, this approach seems straightforward. And chemists have been deployed to improve testing for prohibited substances, while groups like the World Anti-Doping Agency determine what levels are appropriate and what their presence means for the competitor. The process gets complicated when an athlete claims they never used the substance that was detected. Some of those claims of innocence are probably honest, and some may not be. But there are plausible explanations for accidental exposure, including consuming meat or pharmaceuticals contaminated with levels of substances that are allowable for ordinary citizens but not athletes. And the level of minimum detection of substances is not the same at each antidoping laboratory. In fact, some labs could potentially detect contaminants that an athlete has encountered in the environment. In doping cases, policies typically put the burden of proof on an athlete for explaining how a banned substance got in their system. But in cases in which the only crime is living in a polluted world, proving innocence could be an impossible standard to meet. So the advances in science have improved detection without an assurance of justice.

What is required is not better science but better and more transparent policy. This need also became clear as people began protesting the right of multiple women to compete in boxing at the Games. Assessing the gender of athletes and separating genders for fair competition has long been a challenging issue. Sometimes chemists are called on to provide information related to the levels of testosterone in competitors’ bodies. But around the world, gender isn’t based solely on the chemical composition of blood or the chromosomes in someone’s body.

On socially complicated issues like doping or gender determinations, where decisions can penalize athletes, chemical evidence is just one factor to be considered. The real challenge is in assessing the meaning of the information we glean through chemistry.

Views expressed on this page are not necessarily those of ACS.