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Swedish Athletes Back GPS Implants to Combat Drug Use
paulraps writes "Swedish athletes Carolina Klüft and Stefan Holm have proposed a radical technological measure to stop top level competitors from taking performance-enhancing drugs. Klüft and Holm, reigning Olympic champions in the heptathlon and high-jump events, argue that competitors at the highest level should either have computer chips implanted into their skin or GPS transmitters attached to their training bags so that the authorities can keep tabs on them at all times."
Man, when are those stupid Scientists going to come up with a technological substitute for honor?
-Peter
Sport truely is dead if that is what is required to keep it even somewhat honest. It is fairly obvious that level of competition is nowhere close to being honest anyways.
The phrase "more better" is acceptable English. suck it grammar Nazis
GPS-style monitoring is just silly, there are many ways to continue doping in spite of being monitored in that fashion. It won't be effective unless the device could detect and monitor levels of dope in the bloodstream, in real time.
This is a really bad idea. This is where it starts - with Star athletes. Then people wonder about dangerous criminals (ie after they have completed their sentences). Then it moves to children (to keep them safe). Very soon it no longer is a 'choice'. You can't keep your job without it. And eventually it becomes mandated by law. When some private company knows where you are 24/7 it's certain that if the government wants to know, it will easily be able to find out (especially now due to the patriot act). Imagine - no more cops using radar to give out tickets. They can do it from a central computer.
Then the chip might be able to monitor a bit more about you. What level of hormone x or y, diseases or how oxygenated your blood is. They could figure out your mood. What's next? Perhaps a feedback loop. If hormone x is too high get the chip to release an electric signal. You insurance company might drop you if they don't like your lifestyle as measured by the chip. Child custody dispute...go look at the data from the chip. Then I am betting some people who remove their chips be criminalized for doing so.
Beyond or the legal uses will be the illegal ones. People hacking into the database to plan the perfect robbery or the perfect blackmailing.. Or the FBI abusing its powers to snoop anyway.
The worst part about it is that it is so unnecessary. Some athletes do drugs. Big deal. They are hurting themselves. Perhaps hurting professional sports. Are we going to sacrifice personal liberty to ensure the integrity of professional sports. And please don't give me 'its for the children'. If we followed that excuse every time we would end up with a police state and no freedom.
after Athletes
Kids in school?
People in prisons?
Any one who does not vote the way the TPTB want them to.
Cops?
People in the army?
Compare the modern cheating athletes to good old Babe.
He made all his home runs, etc. while drinking and whoring, and looking like a fat pig.
Most of his home runs had to have been made while he was dealing with a massive hang over.
Now Barry Bonds has to lower the pitcher's mound, shoot up, and use mechanical assists to score as much as Babe.
Put an asterisk next to Barry's name and move on.
What a stupid, stupid idea.
Current Oly athletes (and prospects) need to keep WADA abreasts of *where* they are in advance so WADA officials can show up from time to time to get a random test done.
So let us not take technology lessons from 'jocks,' k?
The question a human being needs to ask is whether the glory and rewards of competing fairly in a sport is worth the special treatment as a caged animal. You could argue that even now professional athletes are not owners of themselves and their image, but this would seal the deal wouldn't it?
Obvious point first: knowing where someone is doesn't tell you what they're doing. They could be watching TV in their basement, or they could be watching TV while getting a blood transfusion. And so on. (And the training bags? Easy enough to have someone else transport them around while the owner is elsewhere.)
And using such a technique could open up vulnerabilities, as in "Hmmm.... Johann is not in his assigned room in the team dorm at the Pan-Am Games, so this would be a good time to plant the syringes there." I'm sure some creative thought will reveal other possibilities.
More generally though -- and I speak as someone who's competed at the national level and served on my sport's national board of directors -- everyone (including the IOC) knows that there's no way to stop anyone from doping if they're sufficiently careful and sufficiently clever. The tests just can't keep up with newly-developed methods, and the boundaries between legitimate medications (e.g., anti-sting kits for those who risk anaphylactic shock if stung by an insect) and performance-enhancing drugs are often blurred.
The best clues are often available to coaches and other team staff, who have detailed performance data on all athletes and should be able to spot anomalies. However, they don't have much motivation to share these observations -- with anyone. Which is why one of the things that needs to happen is that the governing bodies for each sport need to emphasize doping detection by coaches as much (or possibly more) as they do results production...and that means "put it in their contracts".
And those of us who watch sports need to do something as well: we need to lose our winning-is-everything, second-place-means-losing mentality. (That includes the media, by the way.) That attitude fuels a number of unpleasant trends in sports, not just doping. We need to keep in mind that the reason athletes go to events like the Olympics is not to win -- but to participate. When we show the same respect and admiration for the effort of the last-place finisher in the 10K, or the basketball team that loses by 50, or the skier who falls, as we do for the gold medal winners, then we'll have done our part to remove part of the motivation/temptation that drives doping.
I'm sorry, but from human emotion? Other than some quick modern redefinition, the idea of "honour" was mostly what it is on WoW. I can think of at least one time and place off the top of my head, where they actually had honour points for killing enemies. Ok, not everyone was that organized, but mostly it was about warfare and your duty to go die for your king, just because kings are so awesome and have a divine right.
So, I'm sorry, but exactly which fundamental human emotion was at work there? Do we have that fundamental an instinct to kill each other? Or what?
It and the closely related notion of "chivalry" was also warped to fit the current interests of the rich and powerful, and included such quirks as:
- while you were supposed to afford chivalry and honour to the enemy nobles and knights, because they could be ransomed for good money, it was perfectly ok to kill prisoners if they're pesants and mercenary. (Before Agincourt, for example, Henry V told his troops that while the nobles would be captured and held for ransome, everyone else damn better fight for their lives. And just to illustrate that he _was_ right, when the French managed to capture the undefended English baggage train, they did kill the unarmed attendants and page boys, mostly children.)
- same about your fucking _own_ troops, if they're of low birth. (E.g., at Crecy, the French knights rode over their own Genoese crossbowmen mercenaries, who were retreating after taking heavy losses from the English crossbowmen. Apparently precisely _because_ of such a fucked up idea of honour: the knights were apparently disgusted that the mercenary cowards wouldn't stand there and die gladly for the king.)
- but it's ok to kill the captured nobles too, if you can't hold on to them or it's otherwise too inconvenient. (E.g., Henry V at Agincourt again.)
- and those rules of chivalry only applied if you weren't outnumbered or something (See, the Black Prince.)
- and while chest-thumping about honour and chivalry in battle, it was ok to loot the peasants' grain for your troops and horses along your way. Both enemy peasants and your own.
- the same knights who'd be all chivalrous to other knights, had no problem with beating their wives _literally_ senseless. (There are "manuals" for knights who recommended exactly that. Oh, and at least one recommended breaking the wife's nose, so other guys won't find her pretty while you're away.)
Etc, etc, etc.
And just so I'm not so euro-centric, the Japanese atrocities in WW2 were almost all motivated by a fucked-up feudal idea of "honour" too.
The massacre of Nanking, for example, was because the oh-so-honourable Japanese warriors were disgusted at the idea that an enemy soldier would do something as dishonourable as throwing away their uniform and hiding among the civilians instead of surrendering. So, you know, going on a rape and massacre rampage was the proper way to punish that dishonour.
Or their atrocious treatment of prisoners was motivated, or at least rationalized, by some fucked up idea that a properly honourable warrior dies, but never surrenders. So obviously the enemies that surrendered were so dishonoured, as to not even qualify as humans any more.
To make things funny, some of those exaggerated ideas of Samurai honour and valour, stemmed from an era where Japan had no wars for hundreds of years. So they wrote a lot about being fearless and stuff, without having actually seen a battlefield in their lives, and knowing that they probably never will. And each author tried to sound even more completely fearless than the previous generation... on paper.
Etc.
So, heh, human emotion? The history of "honour" is just a codified justification for being an arsehole. It was part indoctrination so some dolts would go die for you, and part rationalization of why you're an arsehole and it's good to be one. The only good aspects of it, were the ones where you stood to make a personal gain. E.g., yeah, you were supposed to be honourable and hospitable with captured nobles, because they could be ransomed, but that didn't extend to anyone who couldn't be ransomed.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Talk about "community" and whatnot, is good and fine, but it never was that much of a "collectivist" thing since... oh, the early stone age or so. It was some self-appointed leaders and there were the guys who served them. Whether as formalized as slavery or serfdom, or just tribal shamans/chieftains/etc exploiting everyone else, the difference isn't that massive.
Whether you lived or died, or whether you were a nobody, very rarely had to do with what everyone else really thought. It had to do with what said noble/chieftain/shaman told them to think.
And you rarely had a choice about pledging to such a leader. You were pledged de facto or even de jure by just being born there. You were held to notions of duty, honour, obedience to your liege (or tribal equivalent) whether you wanted it or not.
And if you wanted to move up the social pyramid at all, it invariably required some such pledge too. If you moved to (or even were born into) the warrior class, you'd have to pledge your life to the warlord. If you moved to the city, you pledged your life and sword arm to whatever demagogue weaseled his way into being "community leader" there. Etc.
I'm sorry, but in any modern interpretation, a pledge under duress would be considered null and void from the start. If your choices are between (A) pledge, and (B) die one way or another, that's blackmail. And honour was invariably twisted into just pretending to be totally devoted to whoever blackmailed you there.
And, yeah, sometimes it was disguised as duty "to the community", "to the country", "to God", and other such fine double-speak. Guess what? It invariably meant doing what that leader wanted done. It rarely had anything to do with the desires or aspirations of any other individual in that community.
So the medieval version isn't that far off from what it meant in ancient times too. In fact, it was just a continuation. In ancient Greece or Rome you'd be just as automatically pledged to be a soldier of whatever tyrant ruled your city state, and judged "honourable" or "dishonourable" by whether you bought a shield and spear and joined in their silly wars. That is, if you were born high enough to qualify as such. If not, it was your duty to stay and work the fields like a good slave.
In Rome, since you mention antiquity... well, go look the Cursus Honorum up some day. It was just a codified way to gain any political power, and started with ten years of military duty. (Although nepotism was considered normal, so a lot just followed a general relative around as an aide.) That's ancient age, you know.
If using the expression "fucked up" a couple of times offends you so much, I wonder... can you even manage to watch a movie, what with all that cursing and stuff?
Well, yes, bingo. We need more scholarship and less... uninformed idealists trying to rewrite human history to fit their utopian ideals. The fact is, history isn't nice at all. And I don't see what's to gain by pretending that it was a rose-tinted time with honourable warriors, rosy-cheeked peasants, and prosperous healthy craftsmen, all shiny-happy collectivist and honest too.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Anyone who signs up to this no longer counts as a human being in my estimation. I rather hope that sport ends up doing this and it puts so many people off it that it becomes history.
Even today the whole dope testing for 'performance enhancing' drugs thing makes sport a huge joke. When you cannot take a headache pill but can perform pissed out of your head it has rather become a performing dog show.
Maybe we should keep athletes in a designated building where we can monitor them 24/7 with specially trained enforcement staff to prevent them taking drugs. Oh sorry we already have that, its called prison and the place is rife with smack and charlie.
No, sorry, the drug creators will always be one step ahead of the authorities and almost all individual sports events will be won by cheats in future. The only thing keeping the whole charade going is the money made by the advertisers off the back of the activity. They have to keep the illusion that sport is drug free so they wont become tainted by the sordidness of the whole thing.
Maybe we should start allowing the use of some performance enhancing drugs (we already do that to some extent by allowing them to eat any kind of food - at least we don't specify the number of calories they are allowed to take on board each day unlike motor racing where you only get a certain amount of fuel) Certain drugs which have been shown to be relatively safe should be legalized and the trick would be for the athlete to find the right combination of the different things to get the best performance.
Hopefully if they are already doped up to the eyeballs there wont be any incentive to test some wonder drug made in a dirty sink by a backstreet criminal organization. I feel sorry for athletes and what the progress of our society has done to them. Sadly they have become history, like so many other things that I used to enjoy in my life before progress and the safety brigade banned and outlawed them.
This is all part of an insidious trend that is taking away most of the fun in life. I hope to be dead before the safety lobby enforce computer controlled vehicles. I'm betting that some of you reading this, will one day, remember fondly your youth where you were allowed to drive a car yourself.
Athletics is history, move on folks, nothing to see here.
Facts are history now plebs have politics for religion on social media.
There is so much money in professional sports that there is an inherent incentive to use sophisticated performance-enhancing drugs that non-professional competitors would not be able to afford. After all, if someone is not doping themselves, they will have a huge disadvantage and will therefore not attract sponsor money. They might not even make it into professional sports due to lacking performance.
The solution is simple: Kill professional sports, or allow doping. Since doping is harmful to the athletes on the long term, we should kill professional sports.
Disclaimer: I think professional sports is a travesty. Grow the hell up, nobody should make their livelihood doing unproductive play. (No, standup comedians do not fall under this category, neither to artists. The arts as a whole contribute positively to society, while watching sports is empty entertainment)
Stop the brainwash
The GPS units the athletes would be required to carry with them at _all_ times would by themselves not stop the athlete from taking any forbidden substances. However, and this is something few commentators seem to realise, the units would make it possible for the anti-doping agencies to find any athlete at all times, thereby making the athletes subject to random drug test no matter where they are or if they try hiding or not. With a GPS unit on their person that transmits it's own position to relevant authorities no athlete would be safe from drug test at any time. Obviously, if this is to work, there must be a heavy penalty for not being close to your personal GPS reciever/transmitter or the obvious way to cheat would be to leave the unit at home while you visit the doping factory/clinic... One further point: Carolina Klüft has suggested the 'chip under the skin' solution as well as the 'key ring in the bag' version, but she is completely aware of the fact that the 'chip under the skin' is taking things to their extreme.
Sitting for 8 hours a day isn't conductive to continued health either, but I don't see anyone trying to make office work illegal.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.