Pushing Limits, Crossing Lines: Doping, Pressure and the Morality of Performance

Doping scandals in sports often spotlight the athlete—but what about the coaches, sponsors, and systems that silently endorse the chase for results? From competitive cycling to corporate boardrooms, performance expert Alexander Hutchison shines a light on how pressure for results can lead individuals and institutions to quietly bend the rules. He unpacks the complex dynamics behind doping and challenges us to rethink how we define fairness, success, and accountability in competitive environments

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
The topics and opinions express in the following show are
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(00:20):
choosing W FOURCY Radio.

Speaker 2 (00:28):
What's working on Purpose? Anyway? Each week we ponder the
answer to this question. People ache for meaning and purpose
at work, to contribute their talents passionately and know their
lives really matter. They crave being part of an organization
that inspires them and helps them grow into realizing their
highest potential. Business can be such a force for good
in the world, elevating humanity. In our program, we provide

(00:51):
guidance and inspiration to help usher in this world we
all want Working on Purpose. Now, here's your host, doctor
Elise Cortez.

Speaker 3 (01:05):
Welcome back to the Working on Purpose program, which has
been brought to you with passion and pride since February
of twenty fifteen. Thanks for tuning again this week. Great
to have you. I'm your host, doctor Elie Cortes. If
we've not met before, you don't know me. I'm a
workforce advisor, organizational psychologist, management consultant, logo therapist, speaker and author.
My team and I at gusta Now help companies to
enliven and fortify their operations by building a dynamic, high

(01:27):
per performance culture, inspirational leadership, and nurturing managers that are
activated by meaning and purpose. Many organizations are not aware
of just how critical it is to invest in developing
their leaders and managers not just for their own affectiveness,
but also to avoid burnout and keep them fulfilled. And
also that they can also measure and monitor the purpose
experience in their organization to keep it working as an

(01:47):
operational imperative. It's amazing stuff. You'll learn more about how
we can work together at Eliscortes dot com my personal
site orgustodashnow dot com. Getting into today's program, we have
what is Doctor Alexander Hutchison. He's a fitness and wellness
expert based in Dallas. He is an athlete and coach
and he Urgest, PhD. In exercise physiology. Professionally, he serves

(02:10):
as editor in chief of Current Protocols, a leading journal
in the life sciences, and he's the author of four
different books. They are Exercise Ain't Enough Hit Honey, The HASDA,
The Swim Prescription, and the one we're talking about today
in Defensive Doping. He also has out an unfair advantage
in sports, the Body Matters. Doctor Hutchinson is passionate about

(02:31):
making complex scientific concepts accessible and engaging for his students, athletes,
and readers. We're talking today about some of his ideas
from his book and Defensive Doping, and will situate why
athletes are motivated to take performance enhancing drugs, how use is,
how their use is handled in and penalized across various sports,

(02:52):
Then how they play out in academia and music, and
finally how they drive to direct the draftic perform and
achieve high results underlies performance issues and ethical matters in
business today. Very very interesting threads here today. He joined
today from Salt Lake City, where he's traveling for business.
Doctor Hudgerson A. Harty, Welcome to Working on Purpose.

Speaker 4 (03:13):
Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to
be here.

Speaker 3 (03:16):
Yeah, I'm delighted that you come on. And then I
want to share the story of how we met. And
this is a book that, of course we'll be talking
about in defense of doping. So, ladies and gents, both
of us live here in the Dallas area and we
look close to this amazing perk and body of water
called White Rock Lake. And we were out running on
a Tuesday, as I often do, and he was mining
his own business at the water fountain, and I think

(03:38):
I probably said something to him, and he of course
engaged me in conversation. He said something about his work,
you know, being a publisher and an editor and where
he worked, and I said, oh my gosh, I have
so many people, so many guests on my podcast, you know,
who published through you. And he said I should come
on your podcast as well. So that is how we met.
And I have got to tell you, Alexander, I really

(04:01):
really was rocked by your book. It is a damn
good book, and I'm convinced of your case. And so
let's take it, Brianna Usher and our listeners and viewers
into I think a really, really needy and really important
topic that I think is not understood at all. But
let's first do this, just because my listeners and viewers

(04:21):
haven't met you yet or read your book the way
that I have. If you could just describe a little
bit your early career as a professor as a coach,
and I know you credit your sports for teaching you
lessons about teamwork and merit and resilience and the acceptance
of failure as a prerequisite for success, which I think
is astounding and pretty profound. So if you could just
kind of sketch a bit so people understand the path

(04:42):
you've taken to get to where you are now.

Speaker 4 (04:44):
Sure, So, I was a collegiate swimmer at the University
of Sound in Tacoma, Washington. I got a significant scholarship
to go there, quite a full ride, but enough that
it made it so I could leave Houston and go
up to the Pacific Northwest in the early nineties. We
won two national titles my last two years that I
was there, and then I continued some for another two
or three years thereafter. Eventually, well, I knew when I

(05:07):
was in college that one of the things that I
would like to be was a college home coach, and
I was told over and over again, if you want
to do that, you're going to have to get a
master's degree. So in ninety nine I went back to
school to get my master's degree, and that's really where
I started to see. You know, Lance Armstrong in particular,
took over the Twitter frances that particular year, and it
wasn't until several years later, when I was doing my

(05:28):
PAHD that I became convinced that he was doping. But
in that transition, I was a lot like most of
the fans who were out there, who at the time
were in complete disbelief that he could ever do such
a thing, and then was just like them when I
wanted him banned forever. But then over time, when you

(05:49):
get a chance to compete in some other sports Olympic weightlifting,
boxing in particular was one that I did for quite
some time, that I got beat up a lot. I
mean you just do when boxing, and just also just
getting older in sports. You know, as I started to
puach my fortieth birthday, which was eleven years ago, you
start to get these nagging injuries. And one of the
things that really helps or cortisone injections and some other

(06:11):
drugs that you can take just to get you back
on the field. So a lot of the judgments that
I had about doping has been absolutely awful, and cheating
in a shortcut and all these things. As you start
to educate yourself within your PhD program exercise physiology, you
get one sense of it in terms of science, but
then on the other end of it you get the
sense of some amount of empathy in terms of what

(06:32):
it means, particularly if that is your profession and not
just a hobby that you're doing. On the side, a
lot of the folks who are in sports are not multimillionaires.
They have mortgaged their entire lives to be in that
particular sport, and if the nagging injury comes along, they're
left with a choice of doing something that could be
considered unethical or hanging it up for the day. And

(06:55):
if it's a once every four year opportunity to go
to the Olympics, I'm not sure how many people would
actually honestly that I was a professor for a number
of years at three different institutions and was very happy
in that role. My wife always paid more money than
I did, and so her job took us from San Antonio,
where I was a department chair and associate professor to Dallas,
and I spent one last semester at NT, but that

(07:18):
commute was brutal, and I did not like the demotion
down to assistant professor again. So I took a job
in publishing, doing stuff that I've been doing for free
for many years, and now I worked for Wiley, and
I have for the last three and a half years,
and as you said, i'm editor in chief of Current Protocols.
So it's been a progressive, long journey up to this point.
And most of my initial work was just delineating the

(07:42):
science of sports for people to understand in a way
that was more palatable than if you were to read
a sign strum. But then you know, I also I
wanted to do something that's necessarily easier for the sake
of it, but because I had these thoughts. So that's
why In Defensive Doping came out. And then my most
recent book, An Unfair Advantage, which is about the science

(08:02):
or trans women and sport, and it is not a
book about bigotry or hatred or anything like that at all.
But I invite everybody to read the books and let
me know what you think.

Speaker 3 (08:13):
Well, Alexander, like I said, you really really got smacked me.
I was one of those people. I'm sitting on the
sidelines judging about the whole drugging thing, and you really
did enroll me into your central thesis of your book.
So let's talk about why you wrote the book and
what it is you're trying to convey.

Speaker 4 (08:33):
Sure, so it's important that people who are sports fans
have a sense as to what these drugs are, what
they do, why people take them, and what are the
potential motivations behind cheating. You know, it's only cheating because
the people who run the sports say it is. If

(08:55):
those rules change tomorrow, then it won't be cheating anymore.
You know, a number of these different drug us and
practices have been around for many, many years, and they
were not made illegal until relatively recently within the history
of sports. Now, the one that I focused on the
most in the book and just in general is road cycling.
So the Twitter Fronts just finished Sunday. I watch it

(09:15):
religiously every single year. But that particular sport has a long,
dark history of doping that dates all the way back
to the very first Twitter Fronts in nineteen oh three.
Back then, people would take these horrible concoctions. They would
take heroin, they would take opium, they would take mostly
brandy and wine would be that the lower end things.

(09:36):
But they would take stryccht nine, something that we typically
associate with being a poison because it's remarkable stimulator of
muscle contractions. So imagine that you want to win so
badly that you were willing to drink what is poison
in order to actually have an opportunity to win. So
that gives you a sense. It's to the mindset of
people who are competing in these particular races, and when

(09:58):
you think of their alternatives, and know, pre World War
One France, there weren't a lot. You could try this
and make a fortune and and establish yourself and your
family for years to come, or you can go work
in a foundry or a factory or a farm and
and you know, basically have a subsistence existence. For some people,
they're fine with that. For others, no, they want more,

(10:19):
and they're willing to do just about whatever it takes
to get to that next level, particularly if it's only
about doing something to their own bodies, because that's their
choice to do obviously. So the reason for writing the
book is is you know, hearing these same tropes time
and time again, taking steroids is a shortcut, that's that
is a complete misconception, if anything, taking taking steroids is

(10:44):
the long way to go because it allows you to
train harder and longer than you could if you didn't
take them. So you're not just sitting on the couch
with two beers and injecting yourself with testosterone and then
becoming a star athlete. You have to obviously do the
training that comes along with it, and you can do
more training if you do these particular drugs, and that's

(11:04):
the primary reason that people take these things. So hearing
that time and time again, you wanted to just say, well,
wait a minute, let me let me just explain a
few things to you, and then you add into that
and I'm sure we'll talk about this in a minute.
When you really look at society, the vast majority of us,
maybe not all, but the vast majority of us are
taking some drug as a pharmaceutical or an illicit drug

(11:24):
that's serving the purpose to enhance our performance in something
in our lives. And when you think of it that way,
then a lot of this comes down to a level
of hypocrisy that people just can't reconcile if they're unless
they're being truly honest with themselves.

Speaker 3 (11:40):
So beautifully explained, and that's another thing that I really
liked by Book one. It is damn well written, of course,
and it's also very entertaining. I am not a sports
not Alexander. I don't watch sports. I don't follow sports.
I'm lucky if I know what season goes with the
right sport, honestly, I am, but I got I learned
so much about sports and how you taught. You taught

(12:02):
about the different sports and how drugs are used in
them and also punished with them within them, which is really, really,
really interesting. And I think what's also interesting too is
I appreciate your empathy to understand these humans and why
they're taking these drugs, and you help us understand, which
we'll leave throughout this conversation that part of the problem
in all this whole thing is that the only person

(12:24):
that's held accountable for the use of these drugs is
the athlete, not the owner organizations that own the clubs,
or the sponsors or whatever. The only one that gets
punished is the athlete. So that accountability needs to be
really examined, and I want to make sure that that
is heard by you listeners and viewers. This is such

(12:44):
an important part of your point.

Speaker 4 (12:47):
That's correct. So when we look at that, and I'll
give you we can go to the toor of fronts.
But let me go over to baseball real quick. In
nineteen ninety four, there was a work stoppage that led
to the cancelation of the World Series for that year,
and when they finally came back several games into the
ninety five season, attendance was way down because the baseball

(13:08):
had thoroughly upset the fan base, who was not interested
in hearing about an argument between millionaires and billionaires. They
just wanted to see the great American pastime and attendant
stayed down until nineteen ninety eight, and that was the
summer that Mark McGuire and Sammusosa had this home run
race to try to beat Roger Morris's record of sixty
one home runs. Now, it's remarkably unusual to have two

(13:32):
different athletes at the same time going for the same record,
and in nineteen ninety eight, actually there were three because
the Quen Griffy Junior started off the season pretty hot,
although he faded away about midway through. But you have
these two athletes that are in the same division with
two very old teams, the Cubs for Sammussa and the
Saint Louis Cardinals for Mark McGuire, same division, and you

(13:55):
know they're going tit for tat back and forth, you know,
getting close to breaking this record, and then it comes
down to basically a four game where it was a
three game series in Saint Louis between the Cubs and
the Cardinals that you could not script this any better.
And then finally, obviously Mark McGuire broke the record, but

(14:15):
then the race wasn't even over. It continued on to
the end of the season because there were still seventeen
games left and then they ended up at seventy and
sixty six home runs with McGuire and so so respectively.
And in addition to that, you had you had Roger
Marris's family that was at that final game where the
record was finally broken. They were all brought out under
the field to celebrate in kind with the rest of

(14:37):
the people who were present. So it was this amazing
crescendo of sports lore that happened in this one go
and that it really saved baseball. It truly did, and
then five years later we have congressional hearings, and then
again in two thousand and five, in two thousand and
three and five that basically just tore all of that

(14:57):
and threw it under the bus and ruined it forever. Now,
there's no possible way that the administration of Baseball didn't know.
Whether Bud Seeley wants to admit it or not, that's
a different story. There's no way that they should have
not possibly known. It's not possible. If anything, you can
look at the number of home runs that were being hit,
and it was significantly higher than it had ever been before.

(15:18):
So there's one thing. And then the simplest thing of
all is just to look at the players themselves. Now,
Sammy Suis has started his career as a string being
and then he exploded into this massive person. Mark McGraw
was always a big boy, but not like he turned
out to be later in his career when he was juiced.
So all you had to do was just pass the
simple eye test to see that and know for sure

(15:39):
that something is not quite right here. And the claim
for Major League Baseball is we had no idea because
no one ever told us. Everybody and their dog knew
about this, and these two were obviously not the only
folks who were doing it. But the point being that
under these circumstances, the fans were somewhat upset. For whatever reason,

(15:59):
Congress decided that they had to protect the children from
the potential of using steroids, which I get into in
the book, And so they had these hearings, and then
we had all these players who were basically banned for
life and will never be in the Baseball Players Hall
of Fame. And for what I mean, what exactly I mean?
So you took these guys who you should have known

(16:20):
Wick Nudge Nudge were taking steroids. You look the other
way as they saved your bacon and the entirety of
the sport of baseball. And then as soon as the
minute came that you had to do something to save
your own skin. I'm talking about baseball, they just tossed
them out with the garbage. This has happened time and
time again. The same thing happened with Lance Armstrong and
the Tour de Fronts in nineteen ninety eight, the same

(16:41):
year that Sei Sosi mark where we're doing their thing.
We had the Fastina scandal in the Tour de France,
which was effectively the Fastina team was the number one
team in the world at the time, and one of
their workers, one of their messuses, was pulled over at
the French Belgian border a typical traffic check. His vehicle
was chocolate blocked, full of steroids and other illegal drugs

(17:04):
that were purchased illegally and we're going to be used,
obviously by the team. So the Fastina team was pulled out,
several of the teams pulled out. The tour almost canceled
that particular year, and so you're looking at this and
they called that, you know, the Race of Misery or
whatever I think it was actually called. The next year
is when Lance Armstrong shows up coming back from his
testicular cancer, almost dies and here he comes and he

(17:26):
wins the Tour de Fronts out of nowhere. So this
was called the Race of Redemption, and he saved the
Tour de Fronts. It may have continued on, but it
certainly would not be the event that it is today.

Speaker 3 (17:37):
Yeah, I again, go ahead, go ahead, We got to
take a quick break here. But I love your passion.
And by the way, ladies and gents. It shows up
in the book just like that. It's just the same
voice in the books. So you're do love reading this.
Hold that thought right back. I'm your host, Doctor Release Cortes.
We were on the air with doctor Alexander Hutchison. He's
a fitness and wellness expert based in Dallas who is

(17:59):
also an ounce lead and a coach. Professionally, he serves
as editor in chief of Current Protocols, a leading journal
in the life sciences. We've been talking about the motivations
behind why professional athletes are motivated to take performance enhancing
drugs and some of the accountability and issues related to it.
After the roy We're going to talk a little bit
about how drug use shows up and is punished in

(18:20):
different sports. We'll be right back.

Speaker 2 (18:37):
Doctor Elise Cortez is a management consultant specializing in meaning
and purpose. An inspirational speaker and author, she helps companies
visioneer for a greater purpose among stakeholders and develop purpose
inspired leadership and meaning infused cultures that elevate fulfillment, performance,
and commitment within the workforce. To learn more, or to
invite at least to speak to your organization, please visit

(18:58):
her at a lease Corte dot com. Let's talk about
how to get your employees working on purpose. This is
working on Purpose with doctor Elise Cortes. To reach our
program today or to open a conversation with Elise, send
an email to Elise Alisee at Elisecortes dot com. Now

(19:22):
back to working on Purpose.

Speaker 3 (19:29):
Thanks for staying with us, and welcome back to working
on Purpose. I'm your host, doctor Release Cortes, as I'm
dedicated to help them create a world where organizations thrive
because their people thrive. They're led by inspirational leaders that
help them find and contribute their greatness. And we do
business at Betters in the world. I keep researching and
writing my own books, so one of the least one
that came out is called The Great Revitalization. How activity
median purpose can radically enliven your business and order to

(19:52):
help leaders understand today's discerning and diverse workforce. What do
they want from you to give their best performance? Engage
our talents, and then I provide twenty two best projectses
you can fold into your operations to provide that for them.
You can find my books on Amazon or my personal
site at least courtest dot com if you are just
now tuning in. My guest is Alexander Hutchison, PhD, author

(20:14):
of four books Exercise Ain't Enough, Hit Honey, the HASDA,
the Swim Prescription in Defense of doping, and an unfair
advantaged in Sports, The Body Matters. So you were situating
before we went on break. Of course, you know how
baseball was saved by the two baseball players Sosa and Maguire,
And then of course how Armstrong is really credited to

(20:36):
really saving and advancing and greatly popularizing cycling. Before we
get into a little bit more about how drug use
shows up in these different sports. One thing I want
to bring home that you've been saying that we haven't
said it outright yet, and I think it's important to
say you say in the book. The take home message
just that sports are anything but inherently fair because they

(20:58):
are created by and for humans who are innately wired
to be unfair. The negative impact that money has on
sports far outweighs any potential threat posed by performance enhancing drugs,
in my opinion, is one of the biggest motivations to dope.
So we have the money piece, ladies and gents, is
really important to get your head around here. Did you
want to say anything else about we're going to talk about,

(21:21):
you know, of course cycling first here, Did you want
to say anything else about what you're situating about the
tour before we go on and talk more about cycling, just.

Speaker 4 (21:29):
At one point that you know, obviously Armstrong has been
banned for life. It is since the time that he
came forward on OPRAH to talk about is doping, which
was twenty ten or actually twenty twelve. There's been a
number of other cycles who are contemporary to Lance Armstrong
who has since come forward and explained that they too
have doped. They have not been banned for life. So

(21:50):
it was basically judged that it was so egregious what
he did. And I do think the things that he
did to cover up his misgivings or his mis behavior
were awful, but I don't think that it was justifiable
to actually kick him out of forever. So for the
seven years that he won the tour to fronts, there's nothing,
there's no one listed as the winner because they know

(22:11):
that they can't elevate anyone up to that position who
wasn't doping to so again it's that sense of unfairness
with the way that the rules are adjudicated that I
find most offensive.

Speaker 3 (22:23):
So what's also fascinating to me is one you go
through and explain all the different kinds of drugs that
are used in sports to enhance performance, which is also
just fascinating, but then also how they're used differently by
the different sports. Like, for example, I learned, if I
have this right, that in cycling a lot of the
drugs are used for recovery purposes because it's such an

(22:44):
acutely endurance sport, right. And the other thing that I
want to situate around that too, that as we talk
about how drug use is different in each of these sports,
is you do situate in the book how part of
the contribution to maybe people drugging or doping as much
as they are is that the organizers are making the
course is extremely difficult. And yes, that means that more

(23:06):
you get more viewers on TV watching it. You know.
Then the climbs are interesting. You talk about the increased
climb scores that are going up that cake. What's going on?
So say a little bit about how drugs show up,
what's the motivation to use drugs in cycling? And how
people are punished for using them.

Speaker 4 (23:23):
So initially the reason to use drugs was not necessarily
to write faster. The original sort of frants, there were
like five or six stages, and they would go for
twenty four to forty eight hours and then they would
stop at the next place. They were about three hundred
miles long each as they would go, so they're rinning
through the day, they're riding through the night on gravel tracks.

(23:46):
Fans are throwing out tax and nails to puncture their
wheels so that they can help their the athlete that
they would prefer to win. I mean, it's a crazy
thing to think about when you're thinking about this. So
if you have athletes that are taking large quantities of
caffeine just to stay awake, they're drinking brandy so that
they can stave off the pain. When amphetamines became available

(24:08):
in the late thirties and after the World War Two,
that would be the drug of choice that's still stuck
around for a very long time. In the sixties and seventies,
and you would switch over to corticosteroids. So cortizone is
another one that people would take to bring down the
inflammation between stages and make you feel somewhat better, and
then eventually testosterone would show up, but you wouldn't take

(24:30):
that like you would consider like a track ethlete would
bulk up. Having a lot of muscle mass on you
is the death no for a cyclist, so they would
take really small dosage of this in the attempt to
try to recover more quickly between stages. And then finally,
the granddaddy of mal is erithropooe. This is a hormone
that we make naturally that induces the production of red

(24:51):
blood sells within our red prone marrow. You'll get this
naturally if you open an altitude. When females menstruate once
a month, at the end of their period, they have
a spike and EPO to get some of the red
bood cells back that they lost during menstruation. If you
have a big bleed or a crush insread, you will
also make EPO in large quantities. Now, what they figured
out is that you can just give yourself an injection

(25:11):
and it would elevate your red blood cells to an
enormously high level. And then you have these gigantic sprinters
who should never be in climbing up mountains fast who
or then climbing up mountains fast. So that was throughout
the entirety of the nineties and in all the time
that Lance Armstrong was writing as well. So again, what
started off as as a way to dull the pain
then very quickly evolved into a way to get an

(25:34):
edge over your competitors. And that's really where it remains today.
Is it is it's a means to an end because
everybody wants to win.

Speaker 3 (25:43):
And so the big one that is punished in cycling is.

Speaker 4 (25:45):
What Oh, there's there's tons of them that are anything
that you get, it doesn't matter what the drug is,
so there's not varying degrees of severity in terms of
the drugs. Any one of them would get you on
the band list for a specified amount of time. Most
of the time. Now it's four years for a first
defense because what they're trying to do is make you
miss at least one Olympic side. Yeah, you know, we

(26:10):
just had the female marathon runner who popped positive three
weeks ago after setting I believe a world record in
the marathon was taking a diuretic and it's a very
common one, and that is that's not a performance enhancing drug,
but that is is a masking agent, and so obviously
a diuretic makes you pee a lot more and a

(26:33):
lot more frequently. What you're trying to do when you
take a diuretic and you have other drugs in your
system is flush them out before you have to go
and drug test. So that's why folks would take a diuretic. Otherwise,
there's no possible reason why a marathon learner would want
to take a diuretic because she's dehydrate herself. It doesn't
make any sense. So that drug is not enhancing her performance,
it's hiding other drugs that will and it's still going

(26:54):
to get her a four year Bankay gotcha?

Speaker 3 (26:56):
Okay. So one of the things I thought was so interesting.
You've helped us understand about how cycling drugs are used
now in baseball. The name of the game is to
add muscle mass, right, so you can hit harder and
further and blast the ball out of the stadium. So
talk a little bit about the kinds of drugs that
baseball players tend to use and the ramifications of those.

Speaker 4 (27:16):
So there's going to be two primary ones, and there's
that they're going to be antabolic steroids, So anabolism means
that you're adding stuff to your body, okay, and catabolism
means you're breaking it down. And the combination of the
two of those is your metabolids. So anabolic steroids allow
you to accrete or add on muscle mass. And what
that does is you know, with the swing of the bat,

(27:36):
you're generating more power than you would if you had
smaller muscles. The ball is going to travel further. And
so what you'll hear from people who are not so
much in the nose let's they'll say, well, you know,
it doesn't help the person's reaction time. It's still baseball.
They still have to hit the ball, no question. But
the ball that would have been caught at the warning
track before steroids now it leaves the stadium entirely after steroids.

(27:59):
So obviously there's that part. The other drug that they
will take most frequently is human growth hormone. Now, just
like it sounds, that is a drug that allows you
to add additional mass. But we're not so much in
the muscle into things. Where you see that working is
with the connective tissues. So what I'm talking about there
are tendons which attach muscle to bone and ligaments which

(28:22):
attach to bones together at the joint. Okay, those tissues
have very poor blood flow to them, so when they
get injured, they don't get they don't heal up very quickly.
That most of the time, when one of those gets injured,
it's going to be surgery. So what you see with
steroids is that they make the muscles big fast, and

(28:42):
when the muscles get that big that quickly, they put
an enormous strain on the tendons and ligaments that just
can't keep up, and so you see ruptured tendons all
the time. So HGH does help those connective tissues actually
increase in size and become bigger and stronger. So oftentimes
athletes will take these in conjunctions to to at least

(29:04):
to eliminate the severity of potential injuries down the line.
And a lot of athletes will take it after they've
been injured to try to heal up quicker.

Speaker 3 (29:13):
Just it's fascinating, and that question we've now illustrated why
they're so motivated to do that. Now, then let's talk
about tennis. Your example of the twenty twenty two French Open,
when Nadal was an obvious discomfort, and you talked about
how he was able they numbed his foot for what

(29:34):
two weeks or whatever for him to be able to.

Speaker 4 (29:36):
Put basically the whole fortnite yep.

Speaker 3 (29:38):
And why and so you were put forth in book,
why was he Why didn't he get in trouble for that?
Why was that permisial? It's not the same thing in tennis, it's.

Speaker 4 (29:47):
Not so each of the different sports that's the signatory
of the World Anti Doping Agency has some level of
leeway in terms of what they will and will not
publish and what they will and will not allow. There
was no confirmation that Rafael and Aldhal took cortizone, but
no one ever denied it either, So that was one
of the problems I had. The other issue is that

(30:07):
basically he got a lighting cane injection right into the
nerve that is a pain sensor only, so it was
not his muscle stimulating nerve. So he could still obviously
move that foot all over the places he needed to.
But imagine trying to run. If you've ever watched the
French Open, it's played on clay, and so these athletes
that are usually baseline athletes, they run one side they

(30:29):
put their legs their feet planted on the ground and
they slide. They run the other way, put their feet
ground on the slide. So it puts an enormous strain
on the feet in the ankles. And I can't imagine
trying to run. Now I'm not rafaeld at all, but
I can't imagine running, sprinting, stopping, sliding and trying to
hit a tennis ball with my foot completely numb, so
much so that I can't feel it at all, as
though you're getting like a root canal and you can't

(30:51):
speak correctly. And when we're talking about the three primary
rules for why it is that we ban particular substances
or practices, one of them is that it's potentially harmful
to the athlete. Well, I can't think of anything more
potentially harmful than having a completely numb foot for two
straight weeks. But if that's what Nadal wanted to do,

(31:11):
if that was a risk that he was willing to take,
that's none. I'm a business and I don't think it's
a nay of Tennis's business either, So they allowed him
to go forth with it. The point being what's good
for the goose is good for the Gander. If he's
going to be able allowed to do that for two
straight weeks in order to win his twenty fourth major,
and I believe it was his fourteenth French Open, then
why can't cyclists take an injection of courtiz OOnt if

(31:34):
they've had a major fall and they want to get
back on the bike the next day? And I know
the answer already, I'm being rhetorical, but the point being
that if this is going to be something that we're
going to look at is being an apples taples comparison.
All the sports should be treated the same.

Speaker 3 (31:47):
Yeah, Alexander, I love your passion. I have learned so
much from you. Let's grab our last break. I'm your host,
doctor Rodie Cortes. We were on air with doctor Alexander Hutchinson.
He's a fitness and wellness expert based in Dallas. Was
also an athlete and coach. H well professionally serves as
editor in chief of Current Protocols, a leading journal in
the life sciences. We've been talking about how drug use

(32:07):
is motivated for use in the various sports and how
they're allowed or penalized. After the break, we're going to
get into how drugs and other means of enhancing performance
show up in academia, music, in the business world. We'll
be right back.

Speaker 2 (32:38):
Doctor Elise Court has as a management consultant specializing in
meaning and purpose. An inspirational speaker and author, she helps
companies visioneer for a greater purpose among stakeholders and develop
purpose inspired leadership and meaning infused cultures that elevate fulfillment,
performance and commitment within the workforce. To learn more or
to invite a lease to speak to your organization, please

(32:59):
visit her at Elise Cortes dot com. Let's talk about
how to get your employees working on purpose. This is
Working on Purpose with doctor Elise Cortes. To reach our
program today or to open a conversation with Elise, send
an email to Elise A. L i Se at Elisecortes

(33:21):
dot com. Now back to working on Purpose.

Speaker 3 (33:29):
Thanks for chaining with us, and welcome back to working
on Purpose. I'm your host, Doctor release Cortes. As you
know by now, this program is dedicated to empowering and
inspiring you along your journey to realize more of your potential.
If you want to learn more about how we can
work together and learn about how the Gusto Academy for
leaders and individuals on various journeys alike. Make your way
to gustosh now dot com and go to the training

(33:49):
tap if you are just now joining us. My guest
is Alexander Hutchinson, PhD, author of four books Exercise Ain't Enough, Hit, Honey, Damasda,
The swimscris Rption in Defensive Doping, and also the latest
one and Unfair Advantage in Sports The Body Matters. So
in the last conversation talking about how drug use is
motivated in the various sports, I found it really fascinated

(34:11):
to have you start sharing how you started to first
notice it showing up in the classroom when you were teaching.
So let's talk a little bit about that.

Speaker 4 (34:19):
Sure. Sure, So this was my second to last year
of teaching, so this would have been abound twenty nineteen.
I had before we had a big exam. I would
always have a review session for anybody to show up
and ask questions that they still didn't understand about the
topics that we were going over. And at this one
particular session, and it most often the people who showed

(34:43):
up were all my amb students. It was never my
APP and D students. Whoever showed up to these things again,
so you have your highly motivated kids who were there.
And so one of my kids shows up and before
we get started, pops out a prescription bottle, gives it
a quick shape, pops it open, and takes a quick
pill and then starts motioning around to everybody else in
the class way, what are you doing just give out prescriptions?

(35:03):
And then you know, it turns out that it was
not Riddling but the other ADHD. I'm sorry adderall, and
so I you know, I started asking around, you know,
who all takes adderall? In here? There was about fifteen
of my students there and all but two raise their hand,
and so I asked him, why do you do that?
And you know, you guys don't obviously don't have ADHD

(35:23):
if if you're taking it from someone else. And I
asked the student who actually had the bottle, do you
have a prescription? Now? I just brought off my roommate.
He doesn't take his anymore, be still refills and me
he sells them. Okay, So I mean, there's lots of
unpack here. And so it turned out that, I mean,
it just helped them all focus, but beyond just helping
them focus in the classroom. It would help them focus

(35:45):
when they were playing sports, it would help them. It
would give them more confidence when they were in interchanges
with the opposite sex or even the same section. Some
of my game lesbian students had the same story as well.
When they would go to a party, that would be
their drugged choice because if even more comfortab to speak
to people. I never knew any of this and no
idea whatsoever. So I've had I've got six classes that

(36:07):
particular semester. I did a little impromptu survey. Don't identify yourself,
just tell me have you ever taken Riddlin or I'm
sorry again at all? Yep, do you have a prescription?
And those are the only two questions basically, And I
was shocked to see that it was a huge number
that came back. In terms of the percentage, it was

(36:28):
well over fifty percent. It was a huge number, all
of them taking it without a prescription. That is a
performance enhancing drug. When I went to speak to some
one of my other professors, my colleagues are like, well,
I don't know, you're going to do better. It was like, well,
I'm not really looking to do anything about it. I'm
just surprised that this is actually happening. That then extended to,
you know, having conversations with some of my mine and

(36:49):
my wife's friends about just that, and they would come
up and say, well, I do the same thing. Particularly,
this was an accountant to what I was speaking. When
tax season rolls around, I need additional focus. I just
take adderall and my doctor prescribes it to me for
a couple of weeks and then I don't feel it
anymore than the next time around to do it again.
And I said, we were talking about this in relation

(37:10):
to doping, and she kept insisting, yeah, but that's different
because that's in sports. That's cheating, Like, well, how is this.
I know it's not cheating per se, but it's still
a performance enhancing drug. And with that particular person, there
was no getting through that that she was not going
to see it that particular way.

Speaker 3 (37:27):
Yeah, and that's why I think this is such an
important thing to talk about. It's like, all, there's other
horrible people in the world doing these terrible things, but
not me. You know, I'm not part of the problem.
But actually you really are part of the problem. So
let's do this. Let's talk about first musicians and then
we're going to move more into the business world and
even the case that about the individual at the birthday party,
but I was astounded. I certainly go to the Dill

(37:50):
Symphony and you talk about musicians, you know, they compete
for their positions, just like football players do. And you
then situated, you know, concert violinists and a co concert
violinist situate, you know how much the discrepancy is in
their pay. So thinking about how that would motivate someone
to be able to want to take performance enhancing drugs
to compete for that position. Can you kind of situate that,

(38:12):
you know the music piece here with.

Speaker 4 (38:16):
So this was I was watching World News tonight sometime
and this particular story came up about symphony musicians who
take beta blockers. A beta blocker is a drug that
blocks the eerinergic perceptors throughout our body, but particularly on
our heart. So if you get into a fight or
flight situation, which is where you're just nervous and you

(38:38):
get it sweaty and your heart starts to pound, that's
performance anxiety is what they call that. You want to
take something like xanax because then it makes you kind
of loopy. You can't perform. But you take a beta
blocker and it makes it so that your heart does
not beat as fast, which is one thing, but just
as importantly, it doesn't beat as hard, so it makes
it so you can have nice, steady hands, whatever your

(38:58):
instrumental choice is. So there is a national organization that
is dedicated to symphonic musicians and they regularly will send
out surveys about different topics. In this case, they sent
out a survey questionnaire specifically about taking beta blockers, and
of the people who return the survey, and it was

(39:18):
a significant number, upwards of seventy five percent had admitted
that they took beta blockers, and around forty five percent
of the total number who took it or took the
survey stated that they thought that it had an impact
on their performance. So that is a performance enhancing drug.
It is absolutely no different than what an athlete would do,

(39:39):
with the exception being that when you and I go
to see the symphony, we don't necessarily, I'd say most
of us do not at all have emotional investment in
what's about this transpire on the stage like we do
if we go to a sporting event. So it's much
easier for me to build to buy way into a
particular athlete as being here, and then to be let

(40:00):
down and disappointed in finding out that that person was
not all that I thought they were going to be
or not going to be the same thing situation as
far as symphony musicians are concerned. But to your point,
it is competitive. It is even more competitive to get
one of these spots on a big symphony because there's
only a handful of them than it is to get

(40:21):
a spot in an NFL football team. The total number
of people who are coming out of college who have
a music performance degree is way bigger than the total
number of potentially eligible draftees into the NFL, and so
you have tight competition for a very very small number
of spots. And the average shelf life of a symphony
musician is much longer than the average shelf life of

(40:44):
ANFL player, which is two or three years max. So
the turnovers and is great. So when these things come up,
obviously they want to compete for it, and they do
get a big difference in terms of how much they
get paid, for sure, but there's also just the prestige
of being the first chair in the first section that's
a big deal.

Speaker 3 (41:01):
Yeah, Okay, so I think you made a strong case
for you know, the motivation for taking performance enhancing drugs
in various places. Now let's finish this conversation and bring
it into the world of business. If you could just
quickly touch on the case with Margo. She was talking.
You were talking about, you know, the stuff from tennis
that was going on, and she started talking about how

(41:22):
she takes something and she was up for this big
promotion with which came with the substantial bonus and you know,
a big raise, et cetera. So you are engaging with
her own conversation and saying, but hey, it's the same thing.
So sheared a little bit more that case, what was
she taking She was taking.

Speaker 4 (41:39):
It at all, because it's just she was the tax
accountant who was one of a clear certain number of
these big accounts.

Speaker 3 (41:48):
Okay, she was saying, to get them right.

Speaker 4 (41:50):
And so I was asking all these questions myself because
I never knew how accountants worked or how they were judged.
But there's obviously you can get the a big tax
bill through for a particular corporation or individual and also
avoid getting audited. That's a big, big thing. So there's
there's a lot of pressure to perform as there isn't

(42:12):
any business, you know, enterprise. And in this case, she
was up for a promotion against three other people, and
she laid out very clearly what it was that she
was willing to do. She has a particular moral, ethical,
and potential danger to her body threshold that she's willing
to put up with in order to do her job
at the highest level that she can potentially perform, and

(42:34):
no more than that. But that's probably higher than what
other people would do.

Speaker 3 (42:39):
Uh.

Speaker 4 (42:39):
And then it's also well, it's not illegal because her
doctor is actually giving her a prescription, but for the
other people who are doing this without a prescription, it
is illegal. So there there these things that we talk
about with morals and ethics. They're always very pliable and
they're always relative to the individual themselves. So one thing
that we have to think about that's the exact same

(43:00):
between a CEO and a Lance Armstrong, is that these
people mentally are not like everybody else. Everybody else has
a threshold in terms of how much they're willing to
do as a workaholic or not, and most people are
not willing to go there. But folks have an absolute
drive to get to the next level, to climb the

(43:23):
next mountain, whether it is in business space or whether
it is in competition. They want that challenge to be met,
and they want to get over the top. And whatever
it is that they have to do within reason, they
have their own reasonable limits they're going to do, and
they're not particularly interested in listening to what the average
American thinks about their choices in terms of what they

(43:44):
will or will not do to get to the next level.
That is the primary place that I see that there
is a congruence between the things that you teach in
terms of, you know, business and the things that I'm
talking about here in terms of sports, because if the
sports is.

Speaker 3 (43:59):
Business, yeah, in the game of life. Yeah, So let's
do this. Let's just talk about a couple of some
of the notable scandals that have happened in business that
really are related to what we've been talking about here.
It's a drive to perform, it's a derive to succeed,
you know, and the monetary part of it is huge.
You know. We could always you know, start with the

(44:19):
Wells Fargo you know, Fike account scandal that happened in
what was it twenty sixteen. That's I'm surprised a lot
of people don't know about that. But if you could
say a little bit about what you know about that
and how it's related to this topic of really doing
something at all costs to be able to push and succeed.

Speaker 4 (44:36):
Obviously, so you have individuals and wills Fargo who are
giving bonuses to underlings who are opening up as many
accounts as they possibly can. They're getting rewarded for how
many accounts they're opening up. Yeah, when they run out
of people, because obviously you turn to your best friend
and then her friend and then her friend, and then
you go to family, and you keep you keep adding,
you know, your your book. But then there's no one

(44:56):
else to sign up. So then they started to people
who are already customers for products that they did not
ask for and never signed up for themselves. So in
doing so, they're getting these little charges to their account
that they don't even know over there because they never
opened these accounts themselves. And then the person who opened
the account is getting a bonus off that. Now, from
what I read about this, the upper management never explicitly

(45:20):
told them to do so, but had to have known
it was happening and just look the other way, because
if their people are performing well, then they're also going
to get looked upon with a beautiful light because these
are my managees and they're performing at a very high level,
which means I'm a great manager. And then that's going
to obviously provide a bonus to that particular person, and

(45:42):
it feeds up the chain all the way to the top.
So you know, go ahead.

Speaker 3 (45:48):
I was just going to say, I just wanted to situate,
you know, because I did a little bit of research
on this. The outcome was there was over three billion
dollars in fines that Wells Barbo had to pay. They
fired a lot of their employees and destroyed the public trust,
and the CEO resigned. So there are definitely some consequences
to this.

Speaker 4 (46:04):
There are there are.

Speaker 3 (46:07):
To say about that.

Speaker 4 (46:08):
I was just going to say, you don't know if
any of the individuals who had their money taken got
it all back, right, I'd say a good chunk of
them did, but it's just not possible to actually know,
especially if they got disgusted and just left, then they're
never going to get that money back obviously, because they're
not going to be there to ask for it. But again,
those same ideas are presents in sports because sports is

(46:29):
just a microcosm of life.

Speaker 3 (46:30):
Yeah, exactly as quickly as we can. I just want
to situate a few more. There was the Voltswagen admission
scandal in twenty fifteen, which I was captivated by. So
that's where they literally installed software on over eleven million
cars worldwide to cheat the emission rates, and the vehicles
actually appeared environmental compliant, but they actually admitted up to

(46:51):
forty times more X whatever that is in real world conditions.
And I remember that extremely well. So that's definitely that
drive you succeed at all costs and similar kind of
thread right here, any comment on that that case.

Speaker 4 (47:06):
Right, So, I mean that one was even more pernicious
because what they did was they implanted a software within
the car that when you go to get your your
vehicle hooked up, they'll actually plug something into the computer
and then they'll stick another thing and the tailpipe to
measure the gases that are coming out. Well, the software
package in the Volkswagen told the actual machine that's reading

(47:27):
the gas pipe, you're not really reading that's coming out.
You're reading this clean stuff instead, and so this went
on for years and years and years until some really
good technicians figured this can't possibly be right, this doesn't
make any sense, and then you were able to figure
it out. But you know that that skirted the law
of dozens of different countries in terms of their environmental policies. Uh,

(47:47):
and it costs Volkswagen enormous amounts of money. And then
and then how much how much of of your your
brand loyalty has been lost because of this?

Speaker 3 (47:58):
Yeah? Huge? And then, just very briefly, just because this
has been in the news just recently, Dorano's blood testing
scandle of twenty fifteen. You know, that's where the founder,
Elizabeth Holmes, falsely claimed that the Durando's technology could perform
hundreds of tests on a single drop of blood. Of
course it never worked, so she's gone through that, the

(48:19):
criminal charges, their company dissolution, very high profile trial resulting
in Holmess convictions. And that's been was also really interesting
any comment on that.

Speaker 4 (48:29):
Case that that is the one that I see because
we got a very up close and personal look at Elizabeth,
You've got a sensus to what the pathology is of
these particular individuals her idea was fascinating and she really
wished it would work.

Speaker 3 (48:46):
Yeah, but it never was.

Speaker 4 (48:47):
Going to And instead of taking the time to actually
sit there and test it and figure out that this
isn't probably going to work with to go a different angle,
just pull bar. I'm just going to put my blanders on.
Eventually this is going to work. We're going to fake
it or make it. Even though everybody around her is
telling you this is never going to possibly work, it
can't possibly work. They just kept on going and defunding
their investors over and over and over again. And then

(49:08):
when it came time to pay the piper, she made
these what I feel were quite ridiculous claim is that
was the other person within the corporation who was she
was in a romantic relationship with him and he was
physically abusing her and making her do this stuff. But
they had tons and tons of evidence that that wasn't
the case.

Speaker 3 (49:23):
Yeah. I so wish we had more time, Alexander. This
has been just a fascinating, riven conversation. I'm so grateful.
I literally ran into it. White Rock Lake. You said, yes,
you came on. Thank you for being on working on purpose.
It's an amazing conversation with you.

Speaker 4 (49:37):
I can't thank you enough for having me, and I
hope there's another opportunity for us to talk in the future.

Speaker 3 (49:41):
Oh you can run, but you can hide, and I'm
pretty fast. Listeners and viewers I who want to learn
more about doctor Alexander Hutchinson's book or his books or
his work, you can find him first on LinkedIn, just
as his name Alexander Hutchison, so it's Alexander and then
Hutchison is spelled Hutchiso in. You can also find him

(50:02):
on Amazon under the listed authors as well, along with
all of his books. Last week, if you missed the
live show, you can always catch it be recorded podcast.
We were on air with Carlos Hoyas. He's a fellow
Forbes Council coach with me who lives and works in
Brazil doing business in Portuguese, Spanish and English, and we
talked about the role of self leadership and building dynamic

(50:22):
teams and creating us strong corporate culture, and we embrace
throughout the conversation how leadership first and foremost is an
inside job. Next week, we'll be on air with Davin
Salvagno talking about his new book Thieves of purpose, overcoming
the twelve mindsets robbing you of your potential. See you then,
and remember work as one of the best adventures and
means of realizing your potential and making the impact. With

(50:43):
Craig and he can give us opportunity to do business
in a way that betters the world. So let's work
on Purpose.

Speaker 2 (50:52):
We hope you've enjoyed this week's program. Be sure to
tune into Working on Purpose featuring your host, doctor Elise Cortes,
each week on W foury. Together we'll create a world
where business operates conscientiously. Leadership inspires and passion performance and
employees are fulfilled in work that provides the meaning and
purpose they crave. See you there, Let's work on Purpose.