Ethics on sports (En)

The Korean Olympic soccer team had won the bronze medal in this year's London Games. Despite the criticism on the political message that one player displayed immediately after defeating Japan 2-0 in the third place game of the tournament, the significance to the young players' winning a medal in the Olympics offers them something far beyond the mere honor in the sports scene     the exemption from the compulsory military service. Whether the exemption was applied to this case or not, I don't know, but it is not hard to imagine that the youngsters should be happy enough to avoid wasting two years of their youth. This should work as a strong incentive for them willing to win by taking any chance.

This year was another year of affluence in sports scandals, nevertheless, or as expected, since it was the Olympics year. Lance Armstrong being purged from the land of pro-cycling, Penn State child sex abuse, intentional losing in the Olympic badminton games, NHL strike, and so forth and so on. In my class at University of Chicago Booth School of Business, there also was a discussion about why doping is illegal, what is the difference between injecting EPO, the innate hormone that increases the number of your red blood cells naturally, and wearing a lightest sports shoes designed on the cutting edge science? This cannot be explained as easy as anybody thinks. One important explanation might be that doping harms the player's health in an unnatural way. But what about the NFL players getting their brains permanently damaged from the myriads of hard hits during their carrier? There is a statistically significant increase in the frequency of causing symptoms and even killing themselves in their later days, if not earlier, like Junior Seau who passed away also this year. NFL is not going to die anytime soon because of the reason that it consists a health risk by nature. Then why can we argue that doping is illegal merely by the fact that it is causing harm to your overall health?

In Japan, there were two major issues this year in Judo. One of the issues was that for the first time in the Olympic history since Judo was officially included in 1964, the men's team was not able to win a single gold medal, which was allegedly due to the inability of the Japanese team to adjust to the Global standards of this sport (this is a universal tendency of the Japanese). The other issue was one of the most disgusting scandals in the Judo history, which the two time gold medal winner Masato Uchishiba was being arrested for sexual assault to teenage girl who was one of his apprentices. The arrest itself took place at the end of last year, but the truth about the entire story revealed mostly during the year, and the general public became aware of how the once hero of the nation got corrupted behind his glory. The prosecutors claimed at the court yesterday that he go to jail for five years.

My question will be, is there any chance for Uchishiba, so strong and already contributed to the Judo community which the sport is the national art of Japan, being exempt at least for this time from being punished? His offerings to the country is already huge, while there are two million welfare recipients in Japan who are simply parasites to the economy weakening it everyday. This question will gain more contrast by comparing it with the Korean soccer players passing duty for winning the bronze only once, and also with the fact that the Men's Judo failed way far behind Uchishiba's level, by simply considering that the activities of the Judo community are heavily subsidized by the Japanese tax payers money. At least, they should start thinking about what incentives must most motivate the athletes that will lead to the recovery to the once glorious days.

Sports being so commercialized and nationalized, the trade-off between increasing performance and sacrificing welfare is almost reaching to a so-called in economics the cost-quality frontier     a position that you cannot increase your quality, in this case performance, without increasing the  cost, which is the ethical considerations in this case. The consensus on the utility function of sports ethics is yet to be established.