Nash Equilibrium in Sports
http://https://www.netflix.com/title/80168079
http://https://www.quora.com/Do-sports-have-a-Nash-equilibrium
In May of 2018, the Olympic 1500m (109m shorter than a mile) champion, Asbel Kiprop reported positive for the use of EPO. EPO is an abbreviation for erythropoietin. Erythropoietin is an illegal sports performance enhancing drug that is used by some athletes in several sports in order to give them an unfair competitive advantage to their hardworking competitors.
In order to avoid the use of these illegal substances at the highest level of competitions, such as the Olympics or World Championships, there are several series of tests, performed over time and across multiple athletes, which are conducted by a designated world agency to ensure that these athletes are not cheating. However, there are several serious faults that occur along this agency.
The World Anti Doping Agency, otherwise known as WADA, is the assigned “drug detection” agency for major championships, such as the Olympics. In the netflix documentary, Icarus, it tells the story of a man named Bryan Fogel, who purposely injected himself with banned illegal sports performance enhancing drugs and compete in competitions undetected. Later on in the documentary, Fogel got in touch with the head of the Russian drug department for the Olympics, to which he admitted that every Russian athlete that medaled at the Olympics in the year 2008 was on some form on illegal drug program. Fogel exposed the faults of WADA and basically proved how if you want to win in major sports championships you have to dope.
I mention this to come to a very important decision in athletics. Whether to dope or not use illegal enhancing drugs? We can use a Nash Equilibrium to highlight this.
If Competitor and Competitor B both don’t use illegal sports enhancing drugs than the competition and thus result is fair. In the same way, the result is fair if both Competitor and Competitor B both use the banned substances. If Competitor A does not dope, then it is in Competitor B’s best interest to use the illegal drugs to gain an unfair advantage over its competitors. In the exact same way, it benefits Competitor A to use the banned substance if Competitor B does not dope. Thus, we can see how it is an athlete’s best interest to always use illegal sports performance enhancing drugs.
As a fellow athlete myself, even though it may benefit me to use illegal enhancing drugs, there exists a certain amount of pride in what I do that, which would never allow me to cheat. The reality of this is simple for me and a lot of other athletes: “train hard, win big.”