When Sport Crosses the Line (ft. James Witts, Author of DOPE)
5/6/20261 hr 3 min
What separates the athlete who cheats from the one who doesn't? And is the answer as simple as character — or is something else going on entirely?
This week, Damian sits down with sports journalist James Witts, author of Dope, a book that goes deep into the culture surrounding elite sport and the forces that push athletes across the line.
They get into the Enhanced Games arriving in Las Vegas, the staggering gap between how many athletes self-report doping versus how many ever test positive, and why doping in a contact sport like boxing is a fundamentally different moral question to doping on a bike.
Jake and Damian also bring in archive clips from legends Usain Bolt and Michael Johnson — two athletes who faced the question head-on, and answered it differently. Plus: your questions from the comments, what Jake and Damian have been watching and reading this week.
Dope by James Witts is out now.
Listen to full episodes:
Usain Bolt https://pod.fo/e/279623
Michael Johnson https://pod.fo/e/254ca8
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Clips
Transcript preview
First 90 secondsJake Humphrey· Host0:00
[upbeat music] Damian.
Damian Hughes· Host0:02
Jake.
Jake Humphrey· Host0:03
Well, here we go with another episode of High Performance, and this month, it's the Enhanced Games. And so we thought we would have a bit of a conversation about, I guess, doping in sport, but with the umbrella view of what happens in life, where you start out in your career, regardless of whether it's sport or something else, with a really, kind of, fixed set of rules that you want to operate by, and then what happens to your moral compass as your career progresses that means those things get impacted. And we've got a really cool guest we're about to hear from, right?
Damian Hughes· Host0:34
Yeah. So you used the phrase there, Jake, the moral compass. I think that's really what this, this episode is about, about how, how do you keep your moral compass pointing to a true north in a world that will constantly try and take you off course. And I was lucky enough to speak to James Witts. He's a, he's a brilliant journalist that's written a book that comes out called Dope, and it's about the culture that surrounds elite sport, where young athletes often get tempted to look for shortcuts, look for hacks, look for a quick route to the top that gets them onto that podium. But it also involves injecting or imbibing different substances that are illegal, and I wanted to talk around, how can you keep your moral compass true.
Jake Humphrey· Host1:18
Great. Well, we'll hear from James in just a couple of moments, but I think how about we start the episode by delving into some of the previous guests who've joined us who have had a clear moral compass, but actually it's impacted their careers.