Ethical questions require serious thought, but William Morgan, a professor emeritus of occupational science and occupational therapy, said that these questions are usually the last thing that is thought about when it comes to sports, and with the Olympics looming, now is a good time to ask those questions. 

Morgan’s remarks were part of an open event titled “Ethics, social change and the Olympics in the 21st Century” hosted Thursday as part of the class “Sports and Social Change,” in the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. During the 80-minute event, Morgan discussed ethical questions surrounding the Olympics and the sports industry in general.

Ethical questions, as Morgan said, include the use of performance-enhancing drugs, the organizational issues of hosting the Olympic games in Los Angeles, “sportswashing” and more.

Morgan said the public will likely witness heightened police surveillance ahead of the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics and Paralympics. He said it means increased policing and surveillance may be used to push out unhoused people. 

“They don’t like people to see homeless people. They don’t want them to see poor people. They don’t want them to see dilapidated, run-down quarters,” Morgan said. “As we get close [to the Olympics], there’s gonna be lots of surveillance, lots of police, and they’re going to interject [the] freedoms … [of] people they don’t want to be around, and they’ll evict people as well.”

Morgan said this approach would not be substantive in actually solving the city’s homeless problem. Julianna Kirschner, part-time lecturer of communication and one of the professors teaching the class, said the approach boils down to moving unhoused people away from the cameras.

In 1984, the last time Los Angeles hosted the Olympics, the city launched sweeps of unhoused people in South Central ahead of the 1984 Games. At the time, a police captain told the Los Angeles Times that the efforts were in order to “sanitize the area.”

Morgan also talked about concerns related to hosting the Olympics including the fact that host cities’ costs often exceed their budgets, meaning the city will have to pick between long-term goals and preparing the city. While Los Angeles is blessed with many existing stadiums, he said, many other host cities throughout history have struggled with building sufficient athletic infrastructure for the Olympics.

“These are all ethical questions … that I hope the sponsors asked before they decided to host the Games. But I’m betting most of them didn’t,” Morgan said. “I’m betting that when it comes to surveillance, their question about that was, ‘How much is it going to cost?,’ not whether we should be doing it and why.”

Morgan said how people define what separates a performance-enhancing drug from medicine in the sports context is also a topic of ethical concern. He said the line between the two are too blurred that it’s hard to make persuasive arguments on either side.

“The great German playwright Bertolt Brecht once said ‘Great sport begins where good health ends,’” Morgan said. “There’s a lot of overuse injuries.”

In practice, Morgan said different countries have different views and laws regulating the accessibility of different medicines and drugs, which further complicates the issue. He raised the example of muscle relaxants, saying they’re easily accessible over the counter in Mexico but restricted in the United States. 

“As soon as something is available and safe for medical treatment, you can sure as hell guarantee that someone’s going to say, ‘I wonder if I could use that to enhance my health and my well-being,’” Morgan said. “It’s almost inevitable [that] these kinds of questions are going to happen, and in sport, it’s a foregone conclusion that that’s going to happen.”

Morgan said there are major ethical concerns around athlete health, especially in the current sports-industry landscape, where team doctors are hired by organizations rather than working independently. He said this creates a conflict of interest, as doctors may prioritize the team’s success over the athlete’s well-being, leading to mistrust and potentially harmful decisions. 

To illustrate the issue, Morgan recounted his experience meeting with former Dallas Cowboys wide receiver Peter Gent at a conference.

“[Gent] was drinking alcohol non-stop and popping pills non-stop. He was in constant pain, and what he explained to me was: during the game … he ruptured his spleen, and he told me the most important thing for [a] professional athlete who suffers a serious injury [is to] make sure the ambulance gets to the hospital before the team doctors do,” Morgan said.

Kirschner said she organized the class-turned-event because she wanted students to think about applied examples of the issues they learned in class from an expert. Karyn Loveman, an attendee of the event, said Morgan was lively and knowledgeable. She said events like this provide a great format for university classes.

“This [event] is a great format, especially having someone of [Morgan’s] caliber,” Loveman said. “Sometimes you want a different approach to teaching besides having the professor stand up there and do PowerPoint and open your books the standard, traditional way.”