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Let the Games Be Doped
Hugh Pickens writes "John Tierney poses the question in the New York Times 'what if we let athletes do whatever they wanted to excel?' Before you dismiss the notion, consider what we're stuck with today — a system designed to create a level playing field, protect athletes' health and set an example for children, that fails on all counts. The journal Nature, in an editorial in the current issue, complains that 'antidoping authorities have fostered a sporting culture of suspicion, secrecy and fear' by relying on unscientifically calibrated tests, like the unreliable test for synthetic testosterone that cost Floyd Landis his 2006 Tour de France victory and even if the authorities manage to correct their tests, they can't possibly keep up with the accelerating advances in biology." Read on for more.
Hugh Pickens continues: "Bengt Kayser, the director of a sports medicine institute at the University of Geneva argues in an article that has been supported by more than 30 scholars in the British Medical Journal that legalizing doping would "encourage more sensible, informed use of drugs in amateur sport, leading to an overall decline in the rate of health problems associated with doping (pdf). In the competition between increasingly sophisticated doping — e.g. gene transfer — and antidoping technology, there will never be a clear winner. Consequently, such a futile but expensive strategy is difficult to defend.""
... we could allow mopeds in Tour de Frace :o)
East German Gymnasts?
That is reason enough.
Legalizing doping will only raise the bar to the next level. Now that everyone can be doped, some will be more doped than others. Thus we are back to the original problem, that some people are more doped than others.
If they legalize doping, they will say what? You can take 50mg of this substance. How can they make sure everyone only takes this much? It will require even more policing.
The reason for doping are purely economic ones, people like cyclists on Tour de France get many green pieces of paper with dead presidents on them. Take out the money incentive from sports and you eliminate doping.
We all know it happens so why not have a set of events that lets people do whatever they want. Maybe they will stop trying to find was of hiding it and just focus on creating a race of super men / super people.
Permitting doping in any sport is the road to that sport's ruin. And justifying the proposal on the basis that the current restrictions fail to 'think of the children' is pretty perverse-
Imagine you are the parent of a child who shows some kind of sporting talent early on- Do you encourage him, knowing that weird drug induced side-effects might overshadow his life?.... (...No, you don't)
Nope, not gonna happen, at least where rich countries are involved. Current drug tests may not be perfect, but they act as a massive break on the worst of this corrosive problem.
"Be light, stinging, insolent and melancholy"
It ends badly: http://www.hulu.com/watch/4090/saturday-night-live-weekend-update-all-drug-olympics
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
It'll just become another freak show competition. WE don't want a bunch of "The hulks" competing with each other to see which company has the better steroids mix.
In fact, by letting (and therefore FORCING) all competitors to get doped, we're just throwing our money at the big pharmas. Is that what a sports competition is about?
Have 2 classes, stock (unmodified) and top fuel (no limits or restrictions).
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
I think we should give them steroids & in the case of American Football, chainsaws as well.
There is a war going on for your mind.
.. and your average starting line will look like they've been made in Spore's Creature Creator.
Games for doped-up, junk heads. Their tongues will eventually be hanging out of their mouths at one point in time.
that what might, in some argument be a sensible behavior for a professional athlete or a full time adult amateur athlete is in no way sensible for young athletes who are essentially practicing in a very publicized hobby.
Calling open season in the upper tiers of athletics would certainly have the effect of more young folks (and hell even that guy who cares too much about company soft ball) doing more drugs, and that isn't healthy and it isn't good.
I don't believe in the criminalization of drugs myself, but for something so explicitly about the body, athletics should really not be helping sell young people on the idea of dangerous chemical recreation.
I hate the drug war, but it is important to note that our world would be a lot better without certain drugs.
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
Create an Open or Unlimited category where all manner of doping is legal and an Pure category. Let athletes decide which to participate in fans which to watch. My bet is the Pure category dies in 2-3 years from lack of interest. The Ancient Greeks would not have understood our aversion to doing whatever it takes to win.
Well, you won't have athletes with careers that span decades. Their bodies will break down well before that due to doping.
The Blaster Master Fighting for Truth, Justice, and Evil Pie since 1979
Since we cannot stop the cheaters, who are a minor population of gaming, lets just let them cheat. *rolls eyes*
Uh huh, THEN what sort of image will you be sending then?
Sorry Johnny, you cannot be a runner, you don't have the right drugs pumping through your system...
At lease IMHO, these games, much like sports, are all about seeing the human body at it's best. These are people who are supposed to train and put themselves pretty much through hell and back, but to allow doping would mean that anyone could simply pop something and instantly be equal to someone who may have worked 5 years on his strengths.
Not even if their healthy lives depend on it?
"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
Children of doping athletes have a higher incidence of deformity: http://www.smh.com.au/news/world/children-of-doping-athletes-deformed/2007/10/31/1193618974100.html The point of the olympics includes an ideal of finding out our limits, and improving them. The problem with doping is the same one with modern news: it favors the individual instance instead of favoring the system. It is not sustainable, nor durable over the long haul... and by long haul I mean multi-generational.
So is problem with doping is that people are cheating or that people are doing dangerous things?
I think the problem here is that they assume people won't cheat if safe drugs are made legal.
Unless you legalize everything, that doesn't make sense, because the incentive to cheat will still be there. It gives you a competitive advantage even if it makes your skull giant like Barry Bonds and shrinks your nads.
I dunno about the rest of you, but I'm not interested in watching athletes that are doped up. Great example for the kids, because you know that if you allow it at the professional levels, its eventually going to bleed down into high school and junior high sports.
You should join the debate club with that incredible logic you're using.
The test that cost Landis his victory and title is actually very well calibrated - he got tripped up by the amount of testosterone in his blood that is not produced by his own body, as identified by carbon-isotope markers.
That said, legalized doping will still lead to issues, as there will always be something that is unsafe and illegal to take, and which will be taken by unscrupulous athletes. Sadly, there is no way to prevent cheating, unless you simply say "no rules". And then I expect someone to show up with an aircraft carrier at a water polo game.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
FARNSWORTH: He's good, alright. But he's no Clem Johnson. And Johnson played back in the days before steroid injections were mandatory.
BENDER: Clem Johnson? That skin bag wouldn't have lasted one pitch in the old Robot Leagues! Now Wireless Joe Jackson, there was a blern hitting machine!
LEELA: Exactly! He was a machine designed to hit blerns! I mean, come on, Wireless Joe was nothing but a programmable bat on wheels.
BENDER: Oh, and I suppose Pitchomat 5000 was just a modified howitzer?
LEELA: Yep.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
I think this is all a confusion of symptoms with causes. Sure, the current standoff between doping and dopers has created a somewhat unpleasant situation, but I think it goes deeper than just the doping. The real problem, as far as I'm concerned at least, is that high level competitive sports on nearly every front exist in a culture concerned only with winning--at any cost. Doping, the lack of sportsmanlike conduct, and all the other problems in high level competition--the way I see it these things all stem from such a strong emphasis on winning over simply playing the game for its own sake. I don't think legalizing doping, or finally preventing it completely, either way, will solve the problems we see. We'll just see a new symptom of the deeper ill manifest. What really needs to change is the whole culture of sports.
My two cents anyway.
I don't think we should have less drugs in sports, I think we should make drugs mandatory. I want to see footballers stride onto the field looking like something that Rob Leifeld spanked together, overly-muscled and misshapen anatomic monstrosities. I also think that the football should be packed with semtex and have a "hot potato" timer function, putting the "death" back into "sudden death." And we should do something about working shoulder spikes into the uniforms.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Let's get real. Sport is a business, a very big one, and growing fast. The managers of the business know probably a lot about maximizing profit. If allowing doping would improve the profits, a case for it could be made. Focusing it from the point of view of the health problems of athletes is naive. You can tell the manager of a sweatshop that if he allows breaks every 4 hours of work, slave workers would have a better health, but if you don't link that to higher profits, he's just going to look blankly at you, in a so-what's-your-point way.
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
I say go for it. We could have two divisions: One for enhanced athletes and one for natural athletes. This would allow for much more entertaining sports, and the natural folks would feel no pressure to dope.
Wouldn't this encourage more athletes to harm their bodies with chemical/genetic/cybernetic enhancement?
Maybe, but only for those who want it. As it is, too many athletes are more than willing to ruin themselves. All sports carry some risk and many have been paralyzed or killed while engaging in gymnastics, football, boxing, and others.
Wouldn't the more exciting "modified" olympics esentially bury the honest, natural olympics?
The attention span and the whims of the spectators and consumers may render obsolete "Natural" athletics just as the whims of the consumers have rendered obsolete the *AA's traditional business models.
What about certain countries forcing certain athletes to be "modified" against their will for the sake of competition?
NObody will beat Japan's army of giant robot-men, and all other countries will compete as "naturals" if they want that prestige.
I say drop the 'amateur' and let them do whatever the fuck they please. Let's see what kind of horrors are wrought in the name of national pride. Hell, the history books will be doing it fifty years from now anyway-- let's get a head-start on our grandchildren.
"antidoping authorities have fostered a sporting culture of suspicion, secrecy and fear" Strikingly similar to our government.
What happens when we allow doping we get an even more skewed playing field as we get athletes who need to be rich in order to compete.
Also didnt SNL do a skit on this once...I seem to remember a guy doing the dead lift and his arms ripping off....
CS: It is all sink or swim...oh and did I mention there are sharks in that water?
'antidoping authorities have fostered a sporting culture of suspicion, secrecy and fear'
The sport frauds created this culture, not the antidoping authorities.
Allowing doping would result in numerous deaths, just like we had in the early days of blood doping.
There is an easy answer to the doping problem: force the pharmaceutical companies to add markers to doping chemicals.
Here is a pretty good analysis from game theory on what we could actually do to reduce doping. Bottom line - increased penalties.
Prediction: The real iPhone killer is going to be sex robots from Japan. Think about it.
...just like the "all amateur" Olympics.
Before:
Bob Mathias was not permitted to complete in a third Olympics in the decathlon because he had made a movie and was paid for it. The IOC determined that the movie makers paid him to make the movie because he was an athlete and therefore was now a "professional athlete".
Today:
You have countless professionals playing in Basketball, Tennis, Cycling, etc.
Before you dismiss the notion, consider what we're stuck with today -- a system designed to create a level playing field, protect athletes' health and set an example for children, that fails on all counts.
Lack of perfection is not failure.
Could it better? Yes. Will it always be an arms race? Yes. Will athletes always try and get an edge? Yes.
Using this logic to justify unlimited PEDs is like saying that since we can't stop criminals from stealing, therefore, we should just give up and let people steal whatever they want. After all, you can't stop a determined thief, so why not just let them have what they want?
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Simply legalizing a substance doesn't change its side-effects. As soon as a major sport sanctions doping, we'll see hundreds or thousands of teenagers taking substances that will irreversibly damage their health, if not outright kill them.
I think the solution is to improve the quality of testing. It may not be perfect, but it's the only way for sports to remain sports, and not contests for which nation has more money to pour into bio-engineering their athletes.
...also wouldn't understand our aversion to two muscled, oiled naked men having a tussle in the dirt.
Times change, thank Zeus.
But by all means let them fly down a hill at more than 50 mph with only lycra and 2 inches of clearance between them and pavement.
I can see your point.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
First thought that came to my mind. Should've been linked in the story description!
I say let 'em go for it. Have an "Unlimited" class of Olympic events, with half-ton, fission-powered, gene-spliced, titanium-boned monstrosities jacked up on nervous system stimulants strong enough to make Case from Neuromancer piss himself. Pole vaulting with nuclear pulse detonation boosters? Biathlon with AEGIS-guided weaponry?
We'd of course need to clear a sufficient radius around the arena so we can squash the frothing bastards' inevitable thirst for global domination by nuking the hell out of them at the "closing ceremonies".
Why stop at legalizing doping? Why not have an event exclusively devoted to doping! The person who can do the most long-term damage to their body wins!
This reminds me of a quote from Einstein on prohibition: "The prestige of government has undoubtedly been lowered considerably by the Prohibition law. For nothing is more destructive of respect for the government and the law of the land than passing laws which cannot be enforced. It is an open secret that the dangerous increase of crime in this country is closely connected with this." thoughts?
if you want to influence the kids, don't let the athletes with bodies wrecked by years of enhancements just fall off the map to shrivel and die in the corner, no, force them to continue competing. show kids what happens after the glory wears off. the problem isn't that the bad stuff is hidden up front, it's that we hide the ugly effects on the back-end.
what? that would be cruel and unusual?
damn.
Genetic manipulation will lead to swimmers born with flipper feet. Hows
the IOC gonna stop that?
LATE NEWS: they bred a monkey with a jellyfish, so my predictions aren't
so off the wall now, are they?
Now, first off, I have no opinion on whether or not Landis actually is guilty. However, considering the ramifications for him or anyone else of a positive test the proof should be beyond a reasonable doubt.
In Landis' case, he didn't just lose a race, he was banned for a significant period of time. He is a professional athlete and they took away his livelihood and destroyed his reputation.
The arbitration panel ruled 2-1 that the proof was sufficient. I think 2-1 shows that there is good reason to doubt the test.
I can make informed judgments about how much booze is good for me.
When I was 25, I couldn't (didn't).
When I was 18, I was barely able to understand what booze was.
When I was 16, I had one (1) drink with dinner sometimes with my parents, under their supervision.
"Legalizing Doping" needs to have some good controls to make sure kids and people who may really regret it later (young adults) don't get into bad situations, because face it that shit can kill you or leave you with severe complications. Unless you just want to make all that shit legal, even for 8 year old gymnasts... you end right back to "hiding doping because they can't detect it". You would get coaches and parents stretching the age limits, and now you can't just find the stuff, you have to prove the particular aged kid got it...
If "level playing field" is your argument, it fails for the same reason "no doping" fails.
You'd have people dying left and right from steroids and whatever else they could pump into their veins.
All drugs should be legalized and left to the discretion of the user. I have not and will never let the government or any governing body tell me what I can and can't put in my body. Think about it this way... If you legalized doping in sports you would be putting everyone on a level playing field. They now all have the choice of using or not and the decision about their perfomance is wholey up to them. It's called personal/professional responsiblity and not trusting anyone to have it will result in none being displayed. Look at our grand old US of A. Down the tubes because of a lack of personal responsibilty to society and our country.
Just think of it as evolution in action. Plus how else are you going to get free lab rats for human enhancement technologies? Let the gene and drug doping flow, then we can just cherry pick the ones that stand the test of time and use em on real people.
Only socially constructive use for professional athletes i can think of, anyway ...
/joking
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Michael Shermer, a competitive cyclist and "Skeptic" columnist for Scientific American wrote an article called The Doping Dilemma on this very subject. It examines the doping issue using gaming theory to analyze the costs and payoffs of doping and suggests ways to make doping never pay off.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
So if you allow athletes to use whatever drugs they can find to make them perform well NOW, regardless of any future health problems, how many will accept early death in exchange for short-term glory? I'm guessing quite a lot of them. Young people, which most athletes are, aren't the best at thinking long term. How different is this different than the old Roman gladiators? Ok, they were slaves. Should we allow fights to the death as sport so long as the contestants aren't forced into it? Will most people be able to enjoy sports if watching them reminds them of a terrible price the athletes are paying in health and longevity? The drug tests may not catch all drugs well, but I would guess that in general the more impact a drug makes on performance, the easier it is to catch. Also the drugs with the most dangerous side effects are probably easier to catch too simply because of those side effects. So the drug testing can't prevent all cheating, but it does help limit the damage done by them.
I often don't like the choices people make, but I like the fact that people make choices. That's why I'm a conservative.
Every parent of a child also wants a fair, healthy playing environment for their children. It is from this environment that all our athletes spring. Of those who compete into adulthood, the overwhelming majority want to compete naturally. They want neither the expense, nor the risk of physical harm, associated with doping. They still want a fair playing field. It is grossly unfair to subject those competitor-athletes to a doped playing field. So, I vote for the clean playing field to protect the athletes who do not want to dope. It may be imprecise and it may be difficult, but it is the only hope of giving natural athletes a fair chance.
The idea of a doper league is stupid. You could NEVER have a doper league without heavy regulation. You'd be having Team Merck vs. Team Amgen vs. Team Roche vs. Team Genetix. The pressures on the doper athletes to push the envelope would be intense: Take pharma-X or go back to working at McDonalds . . .. Teams would become drug laboratories and athletes would become guinea pigs. The doper athlete cheaters of today would not like that--they want to cheat against a field that is generally natural--they certainly don't want to cheat against a field that is pushing dope right to the ragged edge of death or glory.
We shouldn't let journalists dope either. Case in point: this article.
The doping problem exists because winning is too important. As Vince said "Winning isn't everything; it's the only thing." If the outcomes of contests didn't matter in the minds of players, coaches, sponsors, or spectators, there would be no doping or cheating of any kind. Of course, there wouldn't be much organized sport, either.
My other machine is a lever.
Is John Tierney too young to remember the steroid doping scandal that plagued the Russians? They had female athletes pumped up with steroids and testosterone to the point where they ended up getting sex changes and living their lives as men. That is a very serious result of doping, and is one of the reasons we check for drug use in the first place.
I'm assuming John is in his early twenties at best.
just like their idea of economics and business : "let everyone do as they please in business, put no controls" and then rely on god's "invisible hand" to set the market straight. total bullcrap.
so you let people dope like idiots. and someone took an overload of dope, and made the world record for 100 m men's straight 7 seconds. and then 10 seconds later dropped dead. WHAT is going to happen ?
did the athlete break the record, or DOPE broke it ?
what POSSIBLE meaning left in testing human body's limits then ?
taking dope or artificial aid is not 'improving oneself'. its ARTIFICIAL.
its still like the republican view of economics - stupid because it says 'because rules and regulations cant keep up, lets ditch them'.
curiously, the SAME people who defend this never accepts to let go of rules and regulations in other social aspects of life. why not just let go of all rules and regulations, and let mob justice, and circumstantial evidence decide what is right and what is wrong ?
noooo sir. just as we continually develop and make our social rules better for the standards of modern times to get an incomparable level of civilization compared to 10.000 BC conditions, we need to put rules and regulations and improve them as needed in all aspects of life. sports is no exception. if you let everything go, mayhem ensues.
and there is no 'invisible' hand. its a fairy tale.
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Honestly, I have. Not because I want kids to use drugs of any kind, I'm totally against it, but simply so that it's "fair". You would hope kids that want to take care of themselves would avoid the route to the Olympics then (just like anybody with a will to live without cauliflower ears avoids MMA sports). And then all the crazies can use drugs, cybernetic enhancements, and time travel to their hearts contents to go 1 mph faster in a sprint.
I really like watching the olympics, but I just hate the cheaters.
Oh yeah, turn it into the mutant freak games. Great idea lol. There would be so many roid rage incidents, they'd just change every single event in the TV-Guide to boxing cuz that's what you're gonna see. A way better idea is to just restrict it to non-physical events like video games where steroids wouldn't help. Stimulants that help reaction time are WAY easier to test for so no amphetamine pwoered Halo matches here (and FFS double shot and other glitches = disqualifaction!)
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
The appeal of sporting events like the Olympics is the idea of the dedication of regular people pushing themselves to extreme personal discipline. I respect athletes who get up at 5:30 am every morning to run or swim for 4 hours.
I don't respect someone who's doped themselves up to take a short cut; anymore that I do someone who pays off a ref. No one with impeccable discipline should be forced to compete with a cheater willing to destroy his body or mind.
BTW, this is what the recent Congressional hearings on steroids use were trying to warn us about. We now have kids in middle school pumping themselves up with steroids in order to secure positions on high school teams. The testimony from stars like Clemens was supposed to be bait to get people to pay attention, but the media couldn't see past the glittering lights of pro athletes to the testimony from the medical community.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Personally, I think it'd be pretty cool to have a set of "olympic" games where drugs and unorthodox practices are perfectly valid.
I would imagine that instead of athletes, we would have teams of people working together to monitor every aspect of the main competing athlete to ensure maximum performance and ability. Similar to how Formula 1 isn't necessarily about who's the best driver, but about who has the best tactics, the best training, the best team. Except it'll be interesting.
Better yet, make them take part in ALL games like a real tournament, so it's not so much "this guy is the best guy in the world at this ONE event" but more "this team outdid the other teams overall in the events thrown at them". That alone would mandate they be very careful about which drugs they actually decide to use. Increased strength? Great! But you'll be fucked when it comes to gymnastics because you're not familiar enough with your body's massive changes.
Obviously, there'd have to be limits on how far they can push themselves and how much they can pump themselves up, purely for health and safety reasons, but then it's a risk they'd have to take, just like any motorsport driver might not come out of the car alive if they crash, or how a boxer might end up with brain damage should they receive a hard enough blow.
Shit happens, it's all part of the risks involved.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
Hell Fscking No
This story ran in the same day as one about the future of information and ethics - Basically what information and research should be pursued and what may, just by nature be ethically or morally hard to bear. As an athlete and a proud one I say no.
At what point does it become ok to then implant electrodes and or perform on stimulants. There are things that Air Force pilots use that I would not give to a gorilla. If it is chemicals then it is not a sport we are humans
This is my knee jerk reaction But I honor the human condition
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First, I read all three articles. Once you overcome that heart attack, allow me to rebuff this nonsense.
the NYT article and the summary say:
Before you dismiss this notion, consider what we're stuck with today. The system is ostensibly designed to create a level playing field, protect athletes' health and set an example for children, but it fails on all counts.
Exactly how does it fail on all accounts? Where is the proof of this allegation in this article? I don't myself see this as a broken system, so this statement is not self evident. If someone has some proof please provide it. To dissect this statement, I don't see athletes dropping dead in sports where steroids are banned, and I know plenty of kids who think Steroids are wrong. I also see that, at least in high schools, steroids are the exception, not the rule. I have however, seen stories of kids and athletes dropping dead from a steroid overdose, or running into emotional, or worse, legal, problems resulting from behavioral changes that current steroids are known to cause. So show me what's broken.
The rest of the article falls on it's face because it's making an assumption I don't see as being there.
The journal Nature, in an editorial in the current issue, complains that "antidoping authorities have fostered a sporting culture of suspicion, secrecy and fear"
If you read the Nature article, it's slant is more a rebuke of the drug testing authorities who are not open about their processes, and athletes who are having problems disputing drug tests. I agree with that, if you are accused of doping you have a moral right to contest that. But to me that doesn't give any weight to a pro doping stance.
If doping was allowed, would there be an increase in the rate of death and chronic illness among athletes? Would athletes have a shorter lifespan than the general population? Would there be more examples like the widespread use of performance-enhancing drugs in the former East-German republic? We do not think so. Only a small proportion of the population engages in elite sports. Furthermore, legalisation of doping, we believe, would encourage more sensible, informed use of drugs in amateur sport, leading to an overall decline in the rate of health problems associated with doping. Finally, by allowing medically supervised doping, the drugs used could be assessed for a clearer view of what is dangerous and what is not.
This is from the PDF. More false assumptions. Only a small proportion of the population engages in elite sports because only a few are gifted to play that sport. The point is that with doping, more may attempt to be just that gifted, and then you have an explosion of talent. Everyone wants to be like Mike, just shoot up and you will be! That will then lead to health problems and side effects that come from doping. Sure you are guaranteed to get muscles and improve your performance, but there's more to life than sports, and if you dope for sports, absolutely everything else suffers.
And it's not the kids and the athletes I really have a problem with when it comes to doping. The number one problem I have with doping are all the people surrounding kids and athletes who will pressure the kids to dope! Coaches with pride on the line (and maybe an increased paycheck), principals and superintendents trying to increase notoriety of their school district. Deans trying to increase enrollments. Endorsers promising big contracts for more touchdowns this season. The money chain will explode! All at the expense of he health of one kid who just wants to be badass and land a big contract. Other people get fat and rich at his expense. I absolutely abhor that possibility.
There are things in health science that are working to improve performance of athletes without doping. It's my understanding that doping not only gives you an unfair competitive edge, but also leads to health problems down the road. If that's not true, someone please dispute what I'm saying. But that's the basis for the ban country wide of Steroids. The last thing we need are mega corporations shoving athletic performance enhancing drugs down our gullets, because if you think prescription drugs are bad now..............
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
You are really just commenting on the fact that the concept of super-high-level amateur sport is impractical. And to most of the rest of us, the objective is dubious. We CAN let people who make it thier young life's work to be excellent have a chance to make money for being excellent and still compete and continue to demonstrate their abilities.
...and letting athletes do whatever they want can't be much worse than simply accepting government-issued passports as proof of being 16.
Who is "we"? Who appointed this "we" to make choices for people besides themselves?
I'm not sure why we're all supposed to care about one organization's sporting event vs. any other organization's sporting event. Because the Olympics has a big hype machine?
Each organization can make their own rules and allow or exclude people based on whatever criteria they want.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
People suggesting two leagues in sports, modified and unmodified have the right idea I think. But that doesn't show the long-term side effects of these drugs. Those who overdose on stuff to look like the Hunk won't been doing it for long, but they only need to make it through that one Olympic competition to get that medal.
Therefore, I propose another solution - seniority requirements for the top places in big athletic events. If you want to complete for a medal in the Olympics this time, you need to have completed in, say, 3 other Olympics in the same events, but in non-medal competitions.
People can watch young freaks of nature, stupidly drugged up, complete in non-medal events, and then never hear from them again because of the horrible side effects these drugs seem to have.
They can also watch people who've been doing their sport for more than a decade at the Olympic level and are really, really good at it -- just not at the super-human levels that could have been reached very briefly if they'd overdosed on the stuff in their youth.
There would be no testing need. If these drugs really are as bad as they are presented, older athletes that took drugs in their youth shouldn't stand a chance against more "clean" athletes at the same experience level. The rewards of an Olympic medal would only go to those who act intelligently and manage their health over the long-term.
Of course that doesn't mean they won't use these drugs. Maybe aided by intelligent use and long-term planning of currently suppressed drugs we could have athletes competing at this more experienced and balanced level well into their 60s or 70s. That seems like a good thing, something that might even lead to empirical evidence of positive uses for these drugs through competitive pressures, uses of which the general public could take advantage.
My dad is an athlete and has to use a steroid to combat his psoriasis. Your argument is a fat steaming lump of FAIL.
On top of that he has to use a barbiturate for medical purposes (epilepsy).
I suppose as far as you're concerned his achievements are bullshit.
This leads to a "tragedy of the commons", though, where athletes can no longer compete on their own merits without using (potentially harmful) performance enhancing drugs because everyone else is using them. I don't think we want to go down that road.
Athletes are wrecking their bodies anyway, so I don't see what the fuss is about with steroids. And the article is right: the idea that doping can be reliably detected in the future is ridiculous.
The governing bodies may not care, but anabolic steroids and the steroids used for medical treatments are very different.
Weekend Update: All Drug Olympics
I'm guessing that won't make it onto NBC's primetime Olympic broadcast.
I propose all olympic athletes be required to smoke massive amounts of marijuana throughout the hours before their event. I will seriously watch every Olympic event if they did that, it would be so much fun to watch.
Doping was rife in sport until some poor sod, a cyclist I believe, dropped dead. In them days doping was part of the landscape not seen as something designed to gain unfair advantage.
In these days too much is invested in winning; nations see it as a way to gain political capital; contestants, money. Doping is a symptom of this overwhelming desire to win. What we have now is product, not sport; is the consumer says "no doping" then the marketing at least has to look like it's being enforced.
another thought would be to stop this crazy commercializing of the Olympics. Prevent full time athletes from competing! China spent 320 million on the games. You cannot justify spending so much money when there are so meant people in China and indeed the world who are poverty stricken.
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Inquires from investors can reach me c/o of Nigeria House, 828 2nd Avenue, New York."
The most telling incident about the Olympic opening ceremonies wasn't the technical glitch of a visible BSOD.
It was the Politburo's decision to force a seven year old girl to dub for her more photogenic replacement.
You legitimize drugs, you legitimize corruption on a scale that would dwarf the Tour de France.
Drugs are not going to ruin the life of an athlete anyway.
As for the olympic class athletes and pro athletes, they're ruined their life already by being separated from friends and family, removed from real schools and placed in training camps, been given inflated grades by "helpful" teachers so they don't get kicked out for academic ineligibility, and generally don't have the education or degree to succeed after retirement. Most end up pretty well physically ruined by retirement with no hope for the future. I'm sure you can find one counter example, maybe even a couple, but this is the truth for the majority. And we're supposed to think that with such a screwed up lifestyle that a hairy upper lip from roids is just going to push them over the edge, what a laugh, they're already ruined broken souls in bodies that will be broken soon enough and tossed aside.
As for the kids that emulate them, who cares. Anyone kid with that bad of judgment would probably otherwise try to emulate the local crack dealer or otherwise totally screw up their lives anyway. The point I'm making is that roids are not going to screw up good kids, the already screwed up kids are going to use the roids, and frankly maybe that will improve their lives, so why not?
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
I already had this great idea. A set of games where not only were drugs allowed but increasingly more common and more powerful anatomical enhancements were also allowed. I think I read some article were some poor double amputee was banned from an event(maybe not specifically Olympics) because he ran TOO fast on his fake leg-stilt-things. Why punish these people? Why not encourage body modifications. This will just make the transition to our cybernetic bodies that much easier once it's out in the zeitgeist.
Look, when an athlete dies these days due to an overdose on whatever steroid or performance enhancing drug he's secretly taking, it's his fault, sure, you could argue that the culture of sports and the culture of having to be better than the next guy drove him to it, but in the end it's illegal and against the rules and he shouldn't have done it. If you legalize doping, then it's no longer his fault. It's allowed in the rules and it's encouraged and if that's the case then doping wouldn't be a personal choice for the athlete, it would be a requirement to be able to keep up with all the other althetes in his field. So when an athlete dies doping in a dope-okay world, then he is a cruel victim of the system and the system is to be blamed. That's why you can't legalize doping. Make it legal, then people will be FORCED to do it, and then people will die because y'all thought it was too inconvienient to try to make better tests.
Google: "All your data are belong to us."
Why are these "what if?" questions getting media attention still? An endless array of people attempting good commentary have been asking this very same question for many years now, and the opinions have always been divided. There's nothing new or insightful about this, and I don't see how it has any place on the front page of slashdot.
You're naively assuming that it's up to the athletes at all. Given what goes on with doping being illegal, it would be a field day for sport club owners and countries; anyone who would benefit greatly without taking any of the risk. For them, to hell with the health concerns of the athlete, as long as they bring back sacks of gold. (and silver and bronze, but mostly gold).
Yeah, because people being upset about drugs used to enhance performance is EXACTLY THE SAME as people being upset about athletes using the same drugs to NOT DIE.
I think we should allow dolphins to compete with swimmers and elephants compete with weight lifters. And what about gene doping, we could just clone the winner, switch a few DNA code lines and the best distro wins. Seems fair to me.
So far as drug assisted sports goes - the same applies. The teams with the best chemists will win. The "Tour de France" has long been full of drug abuse: some detect, the more advanced ones not.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Vince Lombardi didn't have Gatorade, much less steroids or testosterone blood infusions stashed under his trench coat.
It isn't the desire to win that is wrong, it's the moral depravity of cheating. There's a pretty clear distinction between the desire to win and the desire to cheat.
Its more than just steroids. Athletes aren't even allowed to have caffeine in NCAA sports. http://www1.ncaa.org/membership/ed_outreach/health-safety/drug_testing/banned_drug_classes.pdf
What difference does it make? Doped or not doped, the entirety of professional sports is a sham. These people are treated with far greater respect, given far more opportunities to excel and far more financial compensation than any scientist, engineer or teacher ever will. Someone making 30 million a year for what amounts to being lucky to have their genetics is ridiculous (sure, training is involved, but training without supporting genetics means squat).
And I say all of this as an avid sports enthusiast: lots of mountain climbing, hiking, soccer, cycling, etc... but none professionally. People in science, education, arts and entrepreneurial business have to work their asses off to achieve something tangible as opposed to one of these "sports professionals" who have trained themselves to run REALLY fast in a straight line (sometimes in an oval too!)
I say fuck the games, let's simply let professional sport die as it should and leave sports as an enjoyable hobby / past time; not the enormous waste of time, money and space that it currently enjoys.
Allowing doping is the same as allowing cheating in a game. If you permit it, it will not be about the person who is the best but it will be about the person who can cheat the best. And that's just lame.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
Provided the athletes know what they are letting themselves in for, why not?
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
What would you rather see? Someone shave a 10th of a second of the hundred meters? Or someone do it in 3 seconds.
No illegal steroids that is :)
What happens when we allow doping we get an even more skewed playing field as we get athletes who need to be rich in order to compete.
Also didnt SNL do a skit on this once...I seem to remember a guy doing the dead lift and his arms ripping off....
Because I too make all my decisions based on what happened in a skit played on SNL.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
This paragraph is 90% incendiary adjectives and biased verbs:
Let's see...
This style of writing is amateurish and written to inflame, not discuss. It's what high school students sound like when they are trying to passionately defend or discredit.
Advice: on VPS providers
I'm just lucky my sport hasn't been infiltrated with drugs yet. (Yes, I know this from travelling with world/olympic champions) We've actually acquired a few people from other sports who realised that they couldn't win their running/swimming/cycling without resorting to questionable practices.
This doesn't mean just drugs either. Training in a depressurized chamber when you're 16 doesn't exactly fit the olympic ideal for some people. There's also lots of interesting things you can do with blood.
Insanity: voting in the same two parties over and over again and expecting different results
If you don't set clear limits on technology in sports, the competition is no longer one of athletics, but of engineering. The skill and effort of the participant becomes less important than the biochemists and engineers who have "rebuilt him".
While such a competition among bioengineers would be quite interesting to see, it would be highly unethical to use humans like this, as building materials in a glorified Pinewood Derby contest.
In all sports that can be called sports, the emphasis is on the effort of the participant, not the technology. Even technological sports like auto racing set up strict limits to the kinds of technology that can be used. Otherwise, NASCAR racing, for example, would just be a contest to see who can stick the biggest engine on four wheels.
Sports already has plenty of controversy with possibly-unbalanced technological advantantages: consider the Speedo LZR racing swimsuit, Oscar Pistorius, and so on. Allow biotech into the mix, and it's a nightmare. And we lose focus on what's important: the athlete.
I personally have no issues with your father's medical drug use, that is not the proble. It is sad that many tests and rules do not differentiate but does that mean we should just scrap the tests and let people use whatever the hell they want? I don't think so. Unfortunately current regulations discriminate against athletes like your dad, but dope supportive rules would discriminate against all hard working athletes who want to have a chance of winning without using drugs.
Honestly, I can understand how people who care about competitive sports and participate in them would be annoyed because they have to guess they keep losing just because the other guy is using a less tracable kind of doping or just because they're worse at whatever sport they play, even if I don't really see why you'd want to risk your life for it, but as someone above you already suggested in a roundabout way, it may be the only thing someone is capable of doing.
But it seems to me that the current culture (specifically in marathony/cycling long distances) is pretty much destroyed already by the mentioned suspicion, as pretty much nobody will want to risk being the only guy who isn't cheating, and consistently losing because of it.
For them, legalizing doping would just create more openness/honesty
Exactly and all which need to be said. What's the reason to have a competition in physical performance when some people cheat? Who cares what they can do if they use steroids, robotics, and so on?
Personally I think even doping free power lifting suck because of the belts, knee wraps and even more deadlift and squat suits and bench press shirts. The people competing in that area compete on how much they can lift, but then use equipment which raises the lifts above what their body could do alone? Who the fuck cares then? They can't lift the weights and the competition is totally useless. They can't even use the competition results to say (for real) that they can squat this or that amount of weight.
I guess a second alternative is to just not compete in any sports.
The game where you set the rules!
Starbucks, Harbuckle of Breath.
Well, it's a simple slippery slope.
If we allow someone with a disease or condition to use medicine that would make him stronger, it would be unfair to other athletes who didn't have this condition.
As soon as you allow this, all sorts of people will try to be diagnosed with conditions that will require performance enchancing drugs.
You are basically pulling the cork out the bottle with the genie. He will not go in again if you open it.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
Agreed. And even a flawed testing system sends a message that doping is a dishonorable way to win, even if it works. I may have to tell my teenage son someday that steroids are a bad idea. It would be a lot harder if all his sporting heroes openly admit that they do it, and if you have to do it to make the J.V. team.
This leads to a "tragedy of the commons", though, where athletes can no longer compete on their own merits without using (potentially harmful) performance enhancing drugs because everyone else is using them. I don't think we want to go down that road.
Actually it doesn't have much to do with the tragedy of the commons. It is, however, a very nice example of the prisoner's dilemma.
for anyone who might have read it there was a marvellous strip in Viz (uk comic) a few years ago which dealt with this scenario quite well (albeit slightly cynically). Featuring images of athletes bristling with syringes leaping over impossible heights totally off their faces. i have to admit to laughing long and hard.
I say let's create a new set of games specifically for this reason. Let the "all natural" athletes have their own games, and we'll hold separate ones for those who sacrifice their own bodies for their performance.
And why limit it to drugs? I say let them include anything and everything they want so long as it meets two requirements: First, it must be entirely self-contained (no power cables or wireless control links). Second, it must be operated directly from the user's nervous system (eg no buttons or switches - direct wetware interfaces only).
Just think of the medical advances a pharmaceutically and cybernetically enhanced olympics could produce once it catches on!
=Smidge=
A few points. First, a lot of you seem to be assuming that more steroids = better performance. Like all drugs, there is a point where the dosage inhibits your ability more than it helps. And to further complicate things, this optimum point varies from person to person. So instead of turning into an ever escalating "hulk on hulk" roid fest, sports would quickly reach another 'equilibrium' in which individual athletes seek out the right balance of supplements and training that optimize their performance. Thus the final result of endurance-type sports (sports where physical conditioning trumps skill, i.e. track not basketball) would be determined both by an athlete's innate physical makeup, and their metabolic compatibility with the range of available drugs. So where these sports were once largely determined by one set of innate factors, they would now be determined by all those PLUS the added dimension of individual chemistry. I don't see that as all that big of a difference.
Second, lets consider the advantages of training facilities. I don't think anyone would argue with the following: (1) the USA's training facilities and programs are big contributers to their olympic success (2) a big component to the failure of poorer nations is exactly their lack of such facilities/programs. Yet few see this as a "problem" to be forcibly remedied by organizations like the IOC. This seems to suggest that the issue with most people isn't fairness, but a knee-jerk revulsion to 'screwing with the body' (however vague and incoherent that is).
Third, in response to concerns about "big pharma": modern sports as we know and love them today are already firmly 'corporatized'; in fact if they weren't theres no way we would be able to enjoy the same level of competition. I think even those of you that lament any sort of profit seeking activity whatsoever would admit that the financial incentives to potential athletes are considerable.
Finally, (while I personally don't see the need for it) I think the two-class solution would be, pragmatically speaking, the best. If people want to cling to some illusory idea of 'purity' then let them - just not at the sake of an individual's right to their own body and the inevitable, fascinating march of technological innovation.
We've seen time and time again what doping can do to people. And over the years we also see what will become of them because of it. We've seen people drop dead on their bike, we've seen people becoming even fatter than Elvis and naturally we've seen plenty of people die at a rather young age.
So what would happen? A good mixture of the above IMO
Funny that silly things like these should come from the land of the dope. Sure, in the early days it were the communist countries which had plenty of doped people around but in my impression it would seem as if the US has taken over that part and took a good advantage on the rest at that. Just take a look at that so-called tour winner Lens Armstrong who has been proven guilty already.
Let's see several hundred countries spending millions if not billions dollars to make their athletes faster, better , stronger, more flexible.
The spin off technologies and medicine would really help mankind, isn't that what the Olympics should be about?
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
to make money? By stating that question, you're assuming that people act rational and responsible. The failure of game theory in the social sciences and economics have taught us that this is not the case.
Unfortunately, it wouldn't be the atheletes to decide which drugs they'd take, but the sponsor or trainer. And, if athlete X refuses to take the newest, untested drugs, there will always be an athlete Y who, for whatever reason (monetary or else), is willing to take it.
So, no. Stupid idea. Forget about it.
Georg
Is it true that PRACTICING (a sport) was considered cheating by early atheletes?
Larry Niven and Steven Barnes wrote a novel on this very subject, "Achilles' Choice" - do you want a long, boring life or a short, glorious one?. Interesting and involving read. You could compete in the Olympics in one of two classes - natural, or augmented. Augmented atheletes Gold Medals offered very substantial perks. The games themselves had an intellectual component as well as a physical one, so the augmentation had to be mental as well.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
As long as we're banning performance enhancing drugs, we should also be banning performance enhancing technologies. No ultra-low-resistance suits for swimmers, no special shoes for basketball players, no compound bows for archers, no ultra-light bikes for cyclists ...
Well, that kinda happened today to a hungarian guy.
Look up olympics elbow in youtube or something. No link, because they keep yanking off the video.
This is understandable. My cardio sessions are much more fun and much more productive when I take just 200mg caffeine about 10 minutes in advance. I can believe that there would be long-term noticable effects from caffeine stimulation, especially from whole-team competitions.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
kinda like what formula 1 had for car development in the early days?
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
BTW Using a steriod cream for psoriasis is very different to taking the amounts used for body building/weight lifting, though the steroid cream would possibly trigger first-level tests.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
I think part of the problem is Pro vs. "amateur" vs. real amateur.
Pros are the money makers in the big sports.
"Amateurs" are the money makers in the sports most people don't care about.
Real amateurs are the rest of us.
My belief is that part of the problem is the cost of entry to participate in the events.
Sure, you could ride a bicycle coast to coast with just what's in your saddlebags in competitive time,
but the rules state that you have to have a chase/support vehicle...
"amateurs" can afford it through subsidies, grants, gifts, and sponsorships.
A couple of years ago, some co-workers and I looked into some various cycling races, but the support vehicle requirement killed us.
Hell, you could be the best target masturbator on the planet, and if people want to watch that,,, great; but when the rules pop up about how you do it, what you do, and rules about support personnel, you're just another jerk-off.
Flat out though, I'm against doping; but if you wanna do it, fine; but let all the consequences be on you, you made an assload of cash on it, you're gonna need it to survive the next few decades. Drug abuse is bad, but the war on drugs is worse.
That cork is already out of the bottle.
And swimmers should swim naked. :-D
Yeah because it's comparable?
Though I think high tech swimming fabrics are weird to.
But powerlifting gear would be more like using an uv scooter in the swimming competitions ... Or at least a pair of fins on their feets.
The basic need for "gear" in swimming is still to cover up body parts, you can still do that in powerlifting without a suit or bench press shirt increasing your lifts with say 20%.
Why not have a Drugged/Whatever-it-takes Olympics? Separate from the Summer Olympics proper. We have separate olympic events for paraplegics, quadraplegics etc. Why not have a separate Games where athletes are able to do whatever it takes to be the best.
If they want to remove their legs just below the knees so they can supplant them with carbon fibre fins, they can.
If they want to get juiced up on steroids 'til they're a quivering mass of muscle, they can.
If they want to have implants in their feet that act as flippers, they can.
That way, the purists can keep the Olympics free of "cheats" and the rest of the world can see what humans are truly capable of, when mankind chooses something different, chooses the impossible. When athletes are not bound by petty morality. When the great are not constrained by the small...
I remember this match .. Mohamed Ali Rashwan, an Egyptian Judo player, in the Judo finals of the 1984 summer Olympics, playing against Japan's Yasuhiro Yamashita, who was playing with a torn right calf muscle.
Rashwan voluntarily did not aim for Yamashita's right leg because he was conscious of his competitor's injury.
And he lost the match, preferring not to win a Gold medal through dishonor.. but rather play on his opponent's healthy limb.
He won a prize from the international fairplay committee recognizing his sportsmanship.
To this day, the Japanese admire this man very much.
Um. Anabolic steroids and corticosteroids are not the same thing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anabolic_Steroids
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corticosteroid
Thanks for that video that can only be seen within the US. The UK.
is a perfect example of the "sport" where you can not make it without taking massive amounts of steroids at some point in your life (to grow the muscles and stretch the muscle fiber sacks).
The benefits of taking steroids at one point in the body builder's life are long lasting (almost for life). Even when the body builder goes off steroids, their muscles are stretched and it's easier to fill them up years later.
Everyone knows it, except perhaps little children and yet there are people who still support the sport where one can not ever make it naturally.
Besides the standards of achievement for the sport were set in an era where steroids were legal. Every body builder could go to their doctor and ask for steroids.
Today it's illegal, so the only difference is that body builders get the steroids illegally (often times of suspicious quality and purity), and they shoot themselves instead a qualified professional doing it for them, which is more dangerous. And the doses have gone up 10-100 times as much.
As the island of our knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.
This issue was raised in the Movie Gattica, everyone is addressing the issue of current doping while ignoring what the original poster is discussing with his future projections. That is, what happens when biology excels to the point that we as humans begin modifying the gene code to improve humans. First we will start by eliminating genetic diseases, then people will start improving their children. Probably clandestine at first but I have no doubt it will grow into a culturally approved and even expected process. At the point when you can genetically create the perfect human swimmer do you ban them from the Olympics? What happens in the beginning when you can subtly make a stronger faster human and the enhanced humans aren't common, how do you select and prohibit those that were modified?
It's an essential question because at the point where we begin altering the human genome and improving the strength, speed and intellect of humans at the genetic level, doping is a non issue and those without the modifications become incapable of competing against those that have been. Not only that, but it's going to be nearly impossible to tell if someone was modified at the genetic level before birth. It's decades away, but it is going to happen, I have no doubt, the genie was out of the bottle years ago and making it illegal won't change the fact that we will start changing the human genome while trying to make a better human being than the one nature created.
What next? Legalize drugs so that drug dealers and users suffer less?
I think I've heard these arguments before and this definitely won't happen in the USA.
Although you can patent performing enhancing drugs(unlike recreational ones) so the profit would still be there even if they're legal.
At some point with drugs in the water, food, air, how do we keep the spirit of the olympics the same without limiting it so people who live in a recycled food sealed environment?
Anyway I seem to remember an ancient story about chewing willow tree bark before an event
The major difference is that I don't want thieves to steal my stuff. But, I sure as hell want all athletes doping as much as possible.
We're not talking about high school sports. We're talking about high end freaks strutting their stuff. Why should some lucky freaks get to be the winners just because they were born with some special trait? Doping levels the playing field.
Cow Cube
The basketball players are amateur? because they are on vacation this week?
Many athletes get paid for a winning a medal including US and Canada... Phelps should have a couple hundred grand in pocket change by now.
Many certainly get something as they are training full time, they beg for dinner on the street after training perhaps?
Irrelevant anyway as you said there is still more money later on often times and that wouldn't change either way. Even without any money at all some are still going to want to be the best at any cost.
LOL @ parent's parent
It seems to me that stopping doping a lot like stopping piracy. It's just not going to happen.
I suppose we could adopt an "anything goes" attitude, but what then would be the point of sports contests? To see who has the best experimental biology funding?
What it tells me is that contests of physical prowess are no longer exciting exhibits of natural talent. I have never found watching other people play games exciting anyway, but I certainly won't be interested in watching the outcome of who can afford the most sophisticated body modifications.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
A benefit of this kind of policy would be to turn a good portion of the absurd amounts of money in professional sports to the advancement of medicine and the biological sciences. It would also serve to justify the enormous salaries of some professional athletes. Medical experimentation on people who have been heavily invested in and have volunteered to boot seems to present a much smaller "ethical risk profile". As valued talents, beloved celebrities, and of course dangerously wealthy people in their own right, professional athletes are fairly capable of defending themselves against those who might abuse the system, which should remain well-regulated and as open to the eyes of the world as possible.
That's part of the point, too. It's being done anyway, right now, today. There's so much money and power at stake that it's going to happen substantially and frequently no matter what we do. It's just being done in the dark, amateurishly. So why not learn as much as we can by keeping it spotlighted, above board?
The whole idea of sport as some "pure" form of physical human competition seems kind of deluded anyway, at least since they gave up the competing-in-the-nude bit. We augment ourselves with an array of tools already, from sports medicine, to computer simulators, to fancy new swimsuits that cut through the water more quickly than the old ones. And if you don't think a dental filling is a performance enhancing device, try swimming a few laps with exposed nerves in your teeth!
This should not be a matter of shaming and shunning: all told, we are not a species of remarkable physical ability; compared to the rest of the animal kingdom we are not particularly strong or fast or durable, we do not have fancy claws, no poison, no wings. Instead, we are the tool-makers and tool-users, the single most dynamic and creative species. These abilities have served us well indeed; they are actually and provably responsible for our success, not something we're just putting on airs about. Good sport, and particularly sport with ambitions of humanism, should embrace our legacy and strengths as much as possible. Will it be somewhat riskier at an individual level? Probably, and certainly at first. But that, too, is our legacy and strength.
In their time, theirs was the right decision, but in ours I think I know what the ancient Greeks themselves might have chosen.
Dude, put it on pay per view TV, and you'll be rich!
Who wouldn't want to watch weightlifters literally explode into pieces (on live TV!) from the overwhelming stress on their bodies, or watch losers in a race go into a 'roid rage and kill half the officials and coaches with their bare hands? Or swimmers with conehead and shovelhand implants?
It's a winning formula!
I'm only half joking since it would be quite a spectacle, but in a very sick, twisted, and depressing kind of way.
Except that people will use the knowledge gained in the "anything goes" olympics to get away with cheating in the regular olympis.
with the price of athletes health and lives amazing accomplishments in biology and medicine would certainly be achieved. once athlete gets busted with doping, they could be prohibited from ever participating on normal large scale competitions ever again. separating traditional sport and special doping included events
And more for those who die on the track...
My brother is of the opinion that they should put the swimming as the last part of the triathlon. That would really weed out the field.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Anything goes... but once you compete in such a class in any sport you are no longer eligible to compete in the "clean" events.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Part of the thrill of the games, and of sport in general, is witnessing _human_ competition. When it becomes chemical, I lose interest. McGwire vs Bonds? I honestly didn't care, and wouldn't blow my nose on their so-called achievement. They didn't do it. Marion Jones Olympic achievements are no more impressive to me than an MD writing a prescription.
I still have some interest because there are real people actually competing. People who compete man vs. man (or woman), who put countless hours of un-chemically assisted work into becoming truly great athletes.
When they're all just steroid filled meat, I'll just completely lose interest. It'll be the final nail in the debacle the IOC has made of the modern Olympic games.
I personally look forward to the All Drug Olympics!
The NCAA also regulates the distribution of supplements by schools, limiting the kinds and contents to a very short list. Included in the impermissible list is creatine and artificial protein powders, and anything with 30% or more of its calories from protein.
I agree wholeheartedly.
But then the "natural" athletes will bitch and whine about how no one wants to watch or sponsor their league. The doping league will be so much faster, stronger, and injury prone that they will get all the TV ratings. The world doesn't want to watch the second best games. Look at it like this: How many people watch the Para-Olympics on TV? The stories and athletes are just as inspiring or more so, but they aren't quiet as good as the regular Olympics so they get no love.
We are all just people.
Their healthy lives depends on them not doing that much sports, too. Gymnasts beginning from infancy so that they're pros at 14, before their childish elasticity ends, have totally broken bodies by the time they're 20.
Let them destroy their bodies in whatever way they want to. They're *all* doped anyway.
Making laws based on opinions that stem up from false informations leads to witch hunts.
Hulu was put up by the TV Networks themselves. It's the only legal place to view those clips, and it was the only place I could easily find it. You want to see it, google it yourself, but here is a summary with pics: transcript.
Idiots modded idiot parent "informative" . There are anabolic steroids and corticosteroids - both used in medicine. Exactly same anabolic steroids used s in strength and bodybuilding as well. Most anabolic steroids were developed for their medical applications.
Corticosteroids are immunosuppressants.
Not possible. Athletes in Naturalympics will dope too, just try to avoid detection, just like now.
Making laws based on opinions that stem up from false informations leads to witch hunts.
It's not like any of them are particularly representative of the majority of humans on the planet as it is.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
The only person to blame for losing the Tour de France is Floyd Landis.
He doped. Get over it. Not all American bikers are superhuman like Lance.
Give them all drugs and you have leveled the playing field. Its not as if its about anything but money anyway.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
There's like two guys on this site that know anything about cars; can't you make the analogy be about M:TG tourneys?
The whole idea is completely ridiculus and stupid. Even if a comitee would allow doping in their competition, the next day a new would be formed to do the same sport, just without doping. So we would end up with the same sport as we have now, plus another league for the sport with people openly doping. Obviously hardly anyone would be in support of the doped sports when you can have normal sport too, so it would shut down soon after. Therefore, even legalizing doping would change nothing ( and the author didnt spend 10 sec to think about the results ) ...
Rich in order to compete? Most steroids are relatively cheap (a few bucks for a daily dose, and a lot of time is spent off-cycle), and the more expensive stuff is more expensive mainly because it's harder to detect.
Jesus is coming -- look busy!
People should be able to dope and borrow for houses how much they want !!!
Truer than it seems. There's actually a thing called "Natural Bodybuilding" where guys get as jacked as possible without artificial help (stuff like creatine is OK, steroids, prohormones, and diuretics are out), and guys STILL cheat to win.
Jesus is coming -- look busy!
Except drugs for medical reasons is allowed so that's a non-issue.
Of course he meant non-authorized drugs, or whatever to call them.
WADA doping list covers lots of substances, anabolic steroids just being one group of them.
http://www.wada-ama.org/rtecontent/document/2008_List_En.pdf
Over here in Sweden AAS is what's (non-authorized) illegal to use for each and everyone, but if you compete in a sport under WADAs control there is a lot of other substances which are banned within that sport and competitions, even though normal non-competing people are free to use them.
lol, yeah because protein is scary!!
Burgers with fries = ok.
Protein isolate = not ok.
Not that I know what "artificial protein powders" covers, there is nothing artificial with whey, caseine, egg, soy, pea, rice or hemp protein I guess (not much more than any other food atleast) but the 30% energy percent would cover it anyway. I don't see why it matters if it's synthetically created amino acids or not either.
I can see how they may want to limit competitions and kids asking their parents for lots of supplement and such though. But uhm, care, like everyone have equal opportunities anyway.
My dad is an athlete and .... his achievements are bullshit.
there. corrected that for you
I say give them all the drugs they want. I want my athletes like Nintendo game characters! Who cares what happens to them after they retire. They live for the game anyway, once they retire they always complain about how dead their lives are - so let them burn themselves out with the drugs. Everyone's happy!
"The story so far: In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and has been wide
The issue is not doping, per se; it is the lack of objective testing methods. Imagine trying to conduct F1 races if there was no agreed upon means to measure the size and location of the rear wing, for example. Yet, this is the situation as to doping tests. Conducting a sporting activity within defined rules is not the issue. Regulating the chemical characteristics of the athlete's body is as logical as regulating the construction of an F1 car. But, such rules are only valid if they can be measured objectively with repeatable results.
The current system of sports drug testing does nothing but serve to generate sensationalist headlines and ignite moral indignation. In short, it sells newspapers; and, it does it well. But, what the current system will never do is create a fair and level playing field for the athletes.
An egg white gets waaaay more than 30% of its calories from protein, about 12 of 16 calories. Ban them!
Insert pithy comment here.
A row of swimmers are at their marks,irridescent skin shimmering in the sunlight while their gills gently flap in the breeze. Over at the Shot Put range contestants are picking fleas off team members while team captains beat their chests at each other. At the 100 yard dash Cheetah spotted Russian runners eye the graceful Gazelle horned African team and lick their lips. Olympic representatives fiercely deny gene doping even though the ban has long been lifted.
If you LET people dope themselves to death, they will, a la Jackie Joyner-Kersee. Besides, we already have an Olympics where the athletes are allowed to dope themselves silly, it's called World's Strongest Man.
So it's google's linux. interesting.
Send your spendthrift head of state this
If I may quote a line from Futurama... "He's good, alright. But he's no Clem Johnson. And Johnson played back in the days before steroid injections were mandatory." -- Professor Farnsworth
Let me start by stating that I'm not into sports. That said, fully pharmaceuticaly enhanced EXTREME sports, might actually be watchable.
If they are going to do it, make a special league.
I'm in favor of it, but I think full disclosure would be necessary. If that were the case, I think we'd see a rapid decline in doping. What would you rather do, win with the world knowing you used steroids to do it, or come in a clean second?
Thanks for your eloquent and persuasive rebuttal. Now everything makes sense.
Much of this debate is skewed towards "well, the problem exists, so lets legalize it" I believe it ignores the effects this has on ordinary competitors.
I'm a fencer - not at Olympic level, but my friends are. I enjoy fencing competitively - I enjoy testing myself against my opponent. I don't want to win any any cost - but by winning I can get sponsorship, status etc - things that help affirm my decision to spend so much of my spare time and money fencing.
If my opponents were to use drugs to be better fencers, my status would slip and my likelihood of getting sponsorship deals is also decreased. In other words, for me - and for many other athletes, the choice would be take drugs, or don't participate competitively in the sport. While there will always be people who will do anything to win, I don't think they form the majority of competitors. I think allowing drugs in sport would force the majority of people out of competitions.
It would be like the formula 1 of Athletics :) You have the regular athletes, then the super athletes.
I think the problem is there would be many many athelete deaths overdosing or trying experimental drugs or dropping dead in competition from too much stress on the body
There have been some great examples of sportsmanship in bike racing, including the Tour de France.
For example, when Lance Armstrong was taken down by the strap on a spectator's handbag, the other contenders held back and waited for him to get back in the race.
My favorite example of sportsmanship was a few years ago in the Tour de France. Before I explain it, let me describe a little bit about how "breakaways" work. A breakaway is a small group of riders who pulls ahead of the main pack, and tries very hard to stay ahead so that some one member of the breakaway group can get first place. They always ride in a "paceline", where one person is in the lead and all the other riders are in a row, one tucked into the draft behind another. All the riders in the draft are working about 30% less hard than the one in the lead. This cooperation is essential if the breakaway group hopes to stay ahead of the main pack. At some point, the cooperation ends and it becomes a free-for-all fight to see who can cross the finish line first. All too often, the cooperation falls apart too soon: the riders stop taking turns and start trying to shake other riders out of their draft, and meanwhile the main pack is getting closer. I have seen breakaway groups, who had been working together for hours, fall apart too far from the finish line; the main pack then blows past them and none of them wins.
Well, a few years ago there was a breakaway group of exactly two riders. They worked together beautifully, and then, about one kilometer before the finish line, they stopped the pacelining, and rode side by side for a moment. They shook hands. Then they both pulled out their best sprints to see who could cross the finish line first.
I don't even remember which of them won the race! I remember that shining moment of good sportsmanship, and it still makes me smile.
P.S. Okay, I had to look it up. It was Stage 10 of the 2003 Tour, and the riders were Jakob Piil and Fabio Sacchi.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
For which athletes? I'm pretty sure the Greeks used to train and prepare for their games.
quote: The athletes ... had to prove that they had been in training for ten months before the Games. They also had to spend 30 days training at Olympia before the Games began under the supervision of judges who made the choice of the athletes who would compete in the Games.
http://www.library.uq.edu.au/olympics/milns.html
Anyway, you are still going to have to draw a line somewhere: doping, cybernetics, gene mods etc. So not allowing doping is a valid practical line. And so is "allowing full body swimsuits but only those with a buoyancy between X and Y".
Car analogy: it's just like Formula 1 racing, there is really no "formula unlimited", because at the end of the day people have to decide "What is an acceptable car?" and "What is an acceptable way of winning?", so they might as well decide "What is an acceptable F1 car".
After all with future tech, there could be cybernetics, or genetically modified humans, or biomodified humans. And then you also start asking "what's human".
While the rules do restrict, the rules also help provide _shape_ to the event. Are we sure we are ready for a games with mods and doping? It could be a slippery slope to quite a lot of nastiness - even _in_ spectators.
On a vaguely related note - this is why to me, exploration in some areas of science should be discouraged till humans are ready (in terms of tech, medical, culture, society, religion - religion isn't going away any time soon whether you want it or not) for the implications. It's like the "Civ" game, where you do some stuff first, then only other stuff.
For instance say some genius suddenly creates a gene mod that makes us super fit, AND also makes it contagious. I don't think all of us want it automatically - no matter how good it seems.
I agree. Tierney in particular likes to present himself as someone who comes up with insightful ideas that buck conventional wisdom. However, the evidence suggests that he typically gives a cursory examination to a complex problem, and then offers an "easy way out" solution that is already rather popular among a large group of people.
Here's another example, this time about women in math.
"Your notation sucks!" -- Serge Lang (1927-2005)
And think of all the kids that will be getting their "good" normal limbs ripped off of them to get bionic implants by countries like China and Russia. Your logic is very similar to Adolf Hitlers with regards to killing Jews to gain a better understanding of medicine. Yes large advances were made when Hitlers "doctors" tore people apart to see how they worked, but that still doesn't make it right and not a path that we as a society should go down.
A previous poster said it... It comes down to morals/ethics.
The testing will get better and to the grandparent poster. The guy for that originally won the Tour De France was a cheater. The amount of testosterone in his body was WAY over. There are now test (early) to detect HGH, so the playing field will get more and more level over time.
The more I learn about science, the more my faith in God increases.
Do Slashdotters really care?
Your OBVIOUSLY wrong about smoking laws. Smoking does EXACTLY what you mention later - it kills other people.
These laws don't prevent YOU from smoking and killing yourself, they only prevent you from doing so IN (generally enclosed) public places and forcing (unfiltered!) carcinogens on everyone ELSE. Whether you think that's 'fair' or not, smoking in a public place isn't a 'private' matter unless you're so antiscience you don't believe in second hand smoke. You're not normally allowed to walk around spraying other known toxins into the air in great quantities. Most of these laws don't prohibit chew, because it's not about you killing you - it's about keeping you from killing me. And I've heard that modern US cigarettes are actually quite a bit worse than just rolling up a bunch of old natural tobacco was, including things like Polonium.
Everything ELSE you've just said is fine with me, honestly - as long as then you die. Because every single one of the above doesn't just improve statistics, it costs the government, and therefore us, the taxpayer, a bunch of money.
So I think you SHOULD be allowed to not wear a helmet - if you've signed a waiver saying that under no circumstances will my taxes pick up any part of the astronomical bill for your long term brain damaged life - or if you're going to off yourself if that happens. Since we're not presently at peace as a society with just letting you publicly rot in an acute way, the only way this currently works that I can see is if you pick up a sufficiently large long term insurance policy from a sufficiently well rated insurer. If you just die, that's not usually an excessive cost, relatively speaking.
Do you have even the slightest conception what kind of costs are involved in long term care for cancer or a debilitating brain injury? Sure, depending on where you are, on the thinly stretched public dime you might end up in some crazy terrible place with substandard care - but even THAT will be costing the taxpayers a very pretty penny, while being a fraction of the cost to give you top-flight care.
And I'm absolutely not making a point to be fanciful - I think motorcycle companies should sell helmet vs no helmet insurance, and I think if you have an appropriate long-term-care coverage you should be free to ride helmetless. I'm not even sure that would make motorcycle insurance that much MORE expensive. Maybe I'm wrong and the cost difference would be trivial, even.
Lest I come across wrong to the Slashdot masses - I decidedly think helmet laws are your strongest point... because the people who die without them have some balancing effect on the people who live with more debilitating injuries with them. Everything else is much more reliably costly.
And if you don't think obesity increases health costs, and that many of these health costs are in the poor, and that this dramatically increases the unreimbursed expenditures of emergency rooms, you're sorely misguided.
As an amusing note, last time I checked in Alaska you could legally ride without a helmet - but if you have a passenger without a helmet, YOU get a ticket.
Looking for freelance Actionscript (Flash/Flex) or ColdFusion work and/or freelance developers. Email me, put Slashdot
Dan Gardner, an excellent columnist for the Ottawa Citizen, wrote a good article for a similar argument last year.
myselfmusic
the idea of any sport is to marvel in human strength, endurance, dexderity, etc.
but if athletes are artifically doped, you destroy interest in sports
because now they are artificial: they don't represent great feats of human endurance, strength, dexderity, etc., they represent great feats in biochemical research
in other words, if you allow athletes to take performance enhancers, you destroy the fundamental appeal of sports in the first place. the public simply won't be interested anymore, because they won't see themselves in the human thrill. it won't BE a human thrill anymore, it will be a technological achievement
so if you want to destroy sports, if you want smaller audiences and tv ratings for baseball, cycling, the olympics, etc., then allow doping
meanwhile, if you want sports to be compelling spectacles that people want to partake of, then you do your damnedest to keep doping out of athletes. of course this is difficult and an ongoing costly arms race, and there will always be those who try to cheat. that's the price you pay for keeping sports interesting. meanwhile, relax your standards about what athletes can dope with, and you will find that interest level in sports will wane. you've destroyed the fundamental human interest factor
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Who doesn't want to see the "Steroid Olympics".
it'd be sad, but awesome.
There is a big flaw in your logic. It is absolutely, 100% impossible to determine univoally if an athlete is using steroids, at least for some types of steroids. THat is because some are undistinguishable from human hormones. Even if you perfected detection so that you cannot hide hormones not naturally produced by humans (which is unlikely), athletes can just use natural testosterone for doping, and there would be absolutely no way of detecting it's not theirs. In fact, steroids are not currently banned in practice, the sports organizations just set an upper level for doping. If they find above that level of steroids in your blood, you are banned. Under that level, it's OK. That's why currently ALL, ABSOLUTELY ALL competitive olympic athletes (in specialities related to strenght or speed) are using drugs. They just use the amounts that are permisible. And the allowed levels are not low, by the way. As there might be some freaks of nature with excessively high natural testosterone levels, and banning them would be unfair, the levels allowed are set quite high. When one athlete is caught doping, what happened is that the athlete was just caught doping above the permitted level. Nothing more, nothing less.
What is why we should discourage exploration in some areas of science? You haven't really offered a reason, just a vaguely articulated fear.
Many of these performance enhancing drugs will have effects on longevity and/or age-related problems.
So long as they provide good medical records, we should welcome their contributions to human welfare.
The only penalty should be for using a drug that wasn't in the record, or for inaccurate records.
More penalties won't work, as the advertising value of winning continues to increase.
This will also get the drug companies involved, advertising value for them.
I agree. After all, we already allow sports in which the athletes have a very good chance of receiving permanent injuries (ultimate fighting, boxing, American football, etc.). It seems like a league that allows performance enhancing drugs would fall under the same category.
This is true for early (modern) Olympic athletes. The proper role was to look like one never practices and doesn't need to try. Pretty messed up.
Imagine what the olympics would be like if these athletes were allowed to use crystal meth!!
"So Johnny, can you explain to us what the apparatus they have hooked up to Felps is doing?"
"Yes, I believe it is a dialysis machine circulating his blood. But on the machine, we have one filter removing lactic acid, another adding oxygen, and the IV in his neck is pumping in testosterone, endorphin and methamphetamines."
"This looks exciting Johnny! But what are the chances that he'll actually SWIM when they release the chains?"
"That's anyone's guess, but if the elephant tranquilizer rifles his coaches are carrying are of any indication, we may have a problem."
"Well this is one problem we have that the Japanese don't I see! Look over there, they're re-programming Kitajima's brain right now. Word is that half his brain was replaced with a Sony built embedded unit."
"Yes indeed! And I've heard that it runs Linux!"
Now don't tell me you wouldn't pay hard earned cash to watch this! ;-)
All they need to do is change the rules to mimic Formula-1 racing. Athletes must not be lighter than 90kg. They may not make revs higher than 19,000RPM. And they need to use the same body for 4 consecutive competitions. ;-)
We already have one spectacle in 'professional' wresting, where the rules of the sport have been replaced by soap-opera scripts and de-facto behavior of 'if the ref didn't see it, it didn't happen'. Is this really where we want more sports to become?
The governing bodies may not care, but anabolic steroids and the steroids used for medical treatments are very different.
The governing bodies are not all the same. Google "operation puerto". The blood recovered from Dr. Fuentes refrigerator was identified as belonging to cyclists and football (soccer) players and iot was turned over to the respective governing bodies.
The UCI investigated vigorously. Ullrich retired. Basso was banned for 2 years, etc.
FIFA lost the blood samples. OOPS!
Thanks for BBC iPlayer videos that can only be seen within the UK. The US.
Really!? you too?
CS: It is all sink or swim...oh and did I mention there are sharks in that water?
And the NFL, MLB, NBA and FIFA, etc. Let's not kid ourselves. There's a show of an anti-doping movement in Pro sports, but it's just for show. Barry Bonds is still playing. NFL rosters are full of 300 lb linemen who can run the 40 yard dash in 5 seconds. There used to be none. What changed? "BETTER NUTRITION!" Oh, yeah.
What I really meant is that when you talk about "steroids" in sports, you really mean "anabolic steroids". On the other hand, when you talk about steroids in medicine, you almost always mean corticosteroids (although anabolic steroids are occasionally used).
Steroids are a whole class of chemicals -- more than just anabolic and corticosteroids.
Same video, but viewable..
meh
Many of the complaints about an open drug policy section of competition is the effect of encouraging the use of "dangerous", "harmful" drugs.
To solve this, how about we make the competition be about what it is we actually want encouraged, long term extreme health and physical capability. To do this, make the goal to "win" be this. Give medals every 4 years at a drug-open competition, but have these be relatively minor accomplishments, sort of like "legs", or "heats".
You may get a gold at the Olympics, but will you actually win the competition?
To really win, you have to get the most gold medals in a single event, or the most points in a point based system. The champion swimmer is the guy who won 3 golds, 3 silvers, and 7 bronzes over (3+3+7)*4 = 52 years of competition (in a single competition, so you can't just burn yourself out but do 14 different events to 'beat' the guy who has won a single event for decades).
This should allow ALL drug use, and would encourage drugs to be made which will help people live long exceptionally healthy lives. It wont make them take drugs which will ruin their lives, as those drugs would make them _lose_ the competition, not win.
What we are talking about is a bunch of people devoting their lives to moving a little faster, throwing an object a little further, jumping a little higher .... and I'm wondering why? Why does anyone care? Someone swam a race 0.08 seconds faster than another person - how did that affect another individual on this planet?
if someone wants to screw up their biology, wreck their health for a pointless entertainment, then go ahead. At the end of the whole endeavour means nothing. Zero.
This leads to a "tragedy of the hackwar", where players can no longer compete on their own merits without using (potentially malware-ridden) performance enhancing scripts and modifications because everyone else is using them.
Besides, what's a discussion of games without a video game reference...
I personally like to compete in my sport of choice without hurting my health. That implies that I don't want to dope etc. Which means that if allowed, then I would have a greatly reduced chance of success because I value my health more then my competitors. So the question is not "Let them do what they want, it's their body", more like "Let me do what I want (stay healthy) and compete on a level playing ground".
Now imaging the ban's are lifted and I'm not the only person who wants to compete "cleanly". Now you have to have another classification for non-doped athletes in parallel with the "no-limits" classification. What's to say someone won't be tempted to dope and compete on the non-doped event?
It doesn't solve any problems to ban doping, it only creates more.
Well, we'd surely see more amazing, stronger, faster (brighter? *shrug*) feats; probably learn more about ourselves; but money still talks - those athletes with the best sponsorship will weight the field and capable others will lose-out. Mind you; that already happens - it'd just be to greater extremes.
I suggested to my co-worker, who keeps me informed of the latest NASCAR rules; even though I'd rather smash sharpened pencils into my temple rather than hear about car-racing; that instead of nailing the ass of any team that gets caught making some 'mod' to go faster, better (see, it does tie-in with sports); allow them to do so; making _ALL_ details clear to the 'officials', privately; then, if some particular 'mod' was advantageous (ie: that they clearly won the race due to that modification), yet no lessening in safety; make the best 'mod' the new 'standard' for the next race year (bringing the whole playing field up a notch, likely each year).
In sports, that would only be partially true; such as better equipment/clothing, etc. Inate capabilities pushed, enhanced and fine-tuned; can't be equalized among competitors. Which brings it back to: Let them do as they see fit, to better themselves; but... Money Still Wins (though the spectators would get a helluva better show!)
And, of course, it's all Great - until someone pokes an eye out (OK, 'til someone dies from their attempted 'enhancing' tweaks).
that the appeal of that is very different from the appeal of watching a guy run?
or watching a guy run souped up on drugs?
right?
i'm glad you love the thrill of ICE engineering and that translates for you into watching an exciting indy500 race
but you do realize that not everyone shares that specific thrill with you, nor does that thrill directly translate into what makes baseball, or cycling, or the olympics attractive to others.; you do understand that, right?
to take this observation a step further, say we had two olympics:
1. where people were allowed to dope any way they wanted
2. where people were not allowed to dope at all, enforced by testing, etc.: basically the status quo today
question: which olympics would be more watched? which would be more appealing to people? which would win in viewership, advertiser sponsorship, athlete participation, etc.
well, why do people ever watch sports? what is the connection between the viewer and the spectacle before them?
it is the thrill of human achievement, being they are human as well. that basic empathy. but if instead they are watching the thrill of bioengineering, that will of course appeal to someone, somewhere, such as yourself, but far, far less people. the thrill of HUMAN achievement is not the same as the thrill of CHEMICAL achievement
advertisers, who spend their entire professional careers identifying what appeals to people and what doesn't, of course will fall in line and support the nondoped olympics
and finally, the athletes, given the choice between potentially life-shortening, body corroding drugs and competing without that, will compete in the nondoping olypics as well. oh of crouse, there are always the minority who will be pressured by evil govts or their own craven desire to win under any circumstances, who will give themselves cancer or destroy their ability to have children by doping themselves with toxic brews, but this minority of people are not the deciding factor here
they are just the cheaters. whose faulty decision making processes should not drive the debate here, even though it is driving the entire subject matter of this thread and the author of the story we are posting under
these people are to be identified and excluded from competition. the entire competition itself should not be destroyed for the sake of those who would win by doing that which destroys the fundamental appeal of the sport in the first place
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Maybe exploration is the wrong word. I'm more like saying some things should not be done yet, and other stuff given higher priority. Right now stuff seems quite haphazard.
:).
Perhaps one day the equivalent of a "Big Red Kill Everyone Button" will be cheap and fairly available, will everyone have the discipline or desire to not push it?
Already the cost of making custom viruses is getting lower and lower.
Oh well, maybe it's just too late anyway and all we can do is hope for the best
Sport is healthy, we hear, which is true in moderation. Take running as an example: running up to a few miles every day is healthy, it strengthens your body; but running a marathon is never healthy. The reason is simply: exercise causes a lot of minute 'damages' in your tissues, and the body responds by not only repairing the damage, but also improving things in anticipation of future exercise. But a marathon causes more damage than the body can repair, to put it simply.
So, the Olympic games are definitely not about promoting health in the first place - they are about meeting in peaceful competition, and about making money. As far as I can see, the money involved is what makes it such a higly strung and overhyped event that the participants want to win no matter what the price is for their own health. Remove the business aspect and make it exclusively a forum for nations to meet in 'peaceful battle', which is a good way to avoid war; I think the doping problem will be a lot smaller.
As it is now, when an athlete fails a doping test, it is regarded as their personal attempt at cheating; if the games were more of a meeting of nations, doping could be seen as the attempt of that nation to cheat; the whole country would be put to shame, and the athletes would be under much less pressure to cheat.
would think that the Chinese aren't cheating their asses off.
And the Americans and the Russians, Japanese, Australians, French, Italians etcera infinitum.....
That'd be interesting. Athletes lives would not last for more than one Olympics game, once they reach minimum age/height required for the competition. Think of Formula One engines: those are designed to last one race weekend and that's it.
The games would display the apex of human achievement and give a lesson on balance at the same time. Everyone can relate to that lesson, I guess.
It's not really that simple.
Different sports have different doping drugs. For a pistol shooter it may be beer.
But I agree - doping is not the way to get better results.
A differentiation between prescription drugs and open drugs may be in place.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
I hate the "have a separate Olympics" argument. That's the first reason: if you have a separate "enhanced" Olympics, no one will watch the normals anymore, and it will die out. The second point is: what's going to stop enhanced athletes from entering the regular games, and cheating the system like they do now? It puts you right back at square one.
She did not look that manly in 1995.
Or the US\AU\UK etc
Everything is relative. Good luck with that.
"Strangers have the best candy" -Me
In fact, there should be very little technology; no video cameras for monitoring one's performance.
testing out my trending skills
Corticosteroids (the kind used to treat psoriasis) are a completely different animal from anabolic steroids when it comes to human performance. Yes, they share some chemical commonalities, but croticosteroids don't raise testoterone levels (anabolic steroids do). Also, an barbiturates probably aren't considered performance enhancing either.
Of course, all of the above have side effects (I'm sorry your dad doesn't respond to other anti-seizure meds, the barbs suck). But the reasons for this is that those effects are not as bad as the the problems they address.
A good way to avoid war? Right, that is why russia went into Georgia right when the olympics have started, that is why when Adolf Hitler hosten them WW2 did not happen, that is why games have been boycotted or not, why the berlin olympics just went on after the attack.
The olympics are just a sports event, you might as well claim that F1 racing is a good way to avoid war.
You could also claim it for soccer just don't do it after a soccer riot or people might call you silly.
The very fact that China has been allowed to host them shows just how meaningless the olympics are.
The true meaning of the olympics? The same as twin cities, a way for the elite to host a big event where they can go to private parties on the taxpayers expense. Some olympics have been so bad that the locals are still paying for them and in other cases they only benefitted the locals because finally the higherups had a reason to pay some attention to their area. Lissabon 'benefitted' from the Olympics it is said although you got to wonder, if the money had been invested directly, how much more would have been gained?
The entire olympic idea is just a nice bit of marketing spin to make it seem something it is not. If you really want to avoid war, you need to get rid of the olympic idea in the first place.
Because what is the olympic idea really? That YOU are YOUR country. That is facism. Nations competing purely because they are different nations.
Drop the flags from the olympics, just let find the best sport people and ignore what passport they may be carrying.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Scanning through the highly moderated article, I didn't see this point raised, which seems critical. The doctors that would be required to do this research to provide doping and drugs are bound by a ethical code of conduct, and this definitely forbids giving people medications with very serious risks to somebody that is healthy.
Some have expression the opinion of "let them be lab rats." Well, I doubt that any good doctors would touch that ethical quagmire with a ten foot pole. I mean, the notion of informed consent alone is a huge red flag. Can you say that somebody that is willing to risk their health and life to potentially (nothing is certain) perform a bit better is truly of a state of mind to consent? And what doctor would do such a thing. Would you want a doctor that doesn't care about your health, but just want they can get away with?
And the ethics are there for a reason. Bioethics exists for a reason. Part of the Human Genome Project was funding to examine carefully and intensively the impacts of the project, how the data should be used, the impacts on society. In fact, there was discuss if the project should be allowed at all.
Of course, things can improve in testing. What I think needs to happen (and has, in the NFL, for example), is that more athletes need to come out and say that they want to test their limits without risking their health. That at the end of the day, they don't want to dope. That they are not willing to do anything to win. They want to test themselves on their terms, not as some "mad scientist" experimental rat.
And the sport fan needs to learn that the best part of sports is not winning or losing, it is the pursuit of excellence and being tested and retested time and time again.
Aargh! Everything is being done in excel these days. Starting with meeting minutes and ending with drawing pictures or mechanical parts. But for christ's sake don't let them put hands on PowerPoint!
The problem with doping is the advantage it gives to the rich nations. They can pay for sophisticated research to boost their national athletes.
When considering pure human biology, people from poor countries, especially the negro people of Africa are more talented and gifted in physical activities. They are generally taller, have longer legs and more stamina. If there was no chemical boost in athletics, even more gold medals would go to negro athletes due to their inherent human skills.
When the rich industrial nations use advanced biology for doping, medals unduly go to whites or coloureds living in those countries and the native africans are deprived of due acknowledgements for their efforts in training hard.
Poor nations, like those of Africa, cannot afford doping or only the crudest steroid methods and therefore would stand greatly disadvantaged in an "unlimited" Olympics.
The laws and order have clearly failed. There is no justice in the judicial system and it has clearly failed. People are shot to death every minute, people who can evade the laws by criminal facts are becoming richer and get a higher social status then poor, law obeying people.
The judicial system will always be an arms race between enforcing the law and new criminal acts.
We should get rid of this judicial system and introduce raw anarchy. Let the strongest survive.
NOT!
Staf.
During the 90s, it regularly happened that a young cyclist would drop dead during a race or training; e.g. the son of the seven-times world-champion cyclo-cross Eric De Vlaeminck died during a race. To the people who favour allowing doping, I'd like to ask: how much of this would be acceptible to you? How many cases of athletes dying during events could the olympics and other sporting events endure?
The current situation may be bad but it still allows athletes to pursue a career in sport without risking their lifes.
Tommy Tiernan's Drug-Olympics sketch
"Linux is for noobs"-The new MS fud strategy
For some reason I'm reminded of the southpark episode where Cartman competes in the paralympics
As it is, athletes have access to people that are willing to assist them with doping and know how the tests work so the probability of getting caught can be minimized. I remember how one such expert was interviewed anonymously by a reporter for a program about the doping problem - the expert said quite arrogantly how he can guarantee that you won't get caught.
Now, since such knowledge is available, what I'd do to stop doping is to have all athletes submit blood and urine samples and store them securely and frozen so that they can be checked again and again as new tests are developed. Thus athletes contemplating whether to risk getting caught would know that nobody they can consult with about it knows what sort of new tests can be developed in the future and that their samples will be tested over and over again.
And in addition to that fear of not knowing what sort of test they're trying to fool, they would know that if they later do get caught, the humiliation would probably be even bigger. At the moment, the games generate sports news at such a pace that a doping case isn't guaranteed to be the main sports news. However, if the IOC several years later breaks the news that such and such an athlete used doping it is likely to be the main sports news in at least said athlete's home country.
It's hardly a good comparison, since Cartman really does have a disability. He's big-boned.
If I'm not mistaken Cortisone and medical drugs that stimulate cortisol production are considered doping.
Case in point is a drug called Synacten which stimulates cortisol production. There was a "scandal" a few years back when a cyclist in the Tour de France used that drug without a medical condition. I believe the use of synacten is allowed with the appropriate medical condition to warrant its use. This is mainly drawn from memory so you'll have to google to get some exact dates and names.
I think that athletes with the appropriate medical condition should be allowed to use their medication, unless it would boost their abilities beyond what an athlete without that medication would be able to achieve. There are two problems with my opinion though:
The problem with sports in general is not the athletes using doping to enhance performance, it's the insane amounts of money involved in sports. While I feel these people are entitled to a nice wage, when you hear the crazy amounts of money involved sometimes I'm not surprised people cheat. If one athlete gains an unfair advantage, I can imagine that other athletes will eventually try to level the playing field because in the end it's their income we're talking about.
I once worked with a soccer player for a 3rd class team (which is just a level above very local soccer teams where players usually are just hobbyist). The wage he officially received for playing was barely sufficient for making a living, but what he received that wasn't noted in the books was quite impressive. When a person builds a house, buys a new car, plans an expensive trip and in the end finds enough money to "play the stockmarket" that means they make quite a nice living. When I injured my knee a few years ago, he suggested I should visit his doctor who's really good with these things. He mentioned in passing what wonders that doctor had done for him, and the list of medication seemed endlessly long especially since except for some sport-injuries this guy was in perfect health.
After looking up some of the drugs he named, I figured out that most of that stuff involved cortisol or cortisol production in some way. Soccer players in 3rd class teams don't get tested that often (if at all some years).
My conclusion then (which may be very wrong) was that if doping happens on those low-profile levels of competition, then it must be much worse at a higher level since there is more money involved.
While I feel that everyone should be able to do with their own bodies as they see fit, I think that competitive sports should be clean. If you can't push your body past a certain point as an athlete you should accept that and focus on another point to improve that can add to your strengths on the playing field. Pushing your body with medication will have consequences in the long run, and in my opinion isn't as impressive as someone who goes by exercise and discipline alone.
Posted anonymously for obvious reasons
This leads to a "tragedy of the commons", though, where athletes can no longer compete on their own merits without using (potentially harmful) performance enhancing drugs because everyone else is using them. I don't think we want to go down that road.
Who cares? Honestly. It's a bazillion dollar industry of children's games.
It's not like the status quo is egalitarian (the average NBA player is 6'7"). It's not like some sports aren't inherently dangerous (football, boxing). It's not like athletes decline competitive advantages that stunt their body's development (gymnastics, weightlifting).
Let them take drugs.
you can have my violent video games when you pry them from my cold, dead hands.
Prime UID Club
So what exactly are we "ready" for and who decides?
America, Home of the Brave.
I get your funny in your post but it's hardly evolution, it's modifying our genes using drugs. No selection involved.
Some creationists post here and you might give them false ammunition.
America, Home of the Brave.
Just out of the blue allowing doping would not realistically be accepted by politicians / sportsmen / the general public in most countries
But I would be in favor of experimenting with it, so my idea would be to create a doping and a non-doping category for a few events and see how it goes. That way you would avoid the problem of athletes having the feeling they are being forced to use doping when they don't want to.
This sig is just as redundant as the rest of this posting
Power lifting belts and such are actually more about stopping people getting hernias.
America, Home of the Brave.
Yep, lets make the athletes honest again by not checking on doping. After all its is painful that we make them lie.
And, while we are at it, lets abandon all rules. So a cyclist can take the train or bus, and win.
Our a soccer player can shoot down the goal keeper and score, why not.
Maybe we must abandon all rules in society too, why not. It is painful for us to lie too.
Honesty, fair play, morals, just throw them overboard. They obviously have no meaning for society.
I don't think so.
The way I look at it is that all endurance and explosive sports are irrelevant now because it cannot be determined if the winner is fair or not.
And this problem will only increase in the future when we have more knowledge of the inner workings of our body (for example precise knowledge what causes fatigue in muscle cells, etc.). Eventually genetic engineering will be the death of sport. Just build to the spec.
So, currently, I look at endurance and explosive sports as a spectacle. And I'm not interested in the winners any more. Most of the time I don't look at all. After all, I don't like dishonesty and cheating.
I decidedly think helmet laws are your strongest point... because the people who die without them have some balancing effect on the people who live with more debilitating injuries with them.
It's also been suggested that safety features like seat belts and helmets lead to more collisions, because drivers who think they're well-protected respond by being more reckless (see moral hazard). So, despite making crashes less lethal on the average, motorcycle helmets may have the unfortunate effect of increasing motorcycle-related injuries.
Yup, there's a lot of history down that road.
I used this same logic in school when it came to test taking. That is anybody can cheat, just not everybody takes advantage of it.
"During My Service In The United States Congress, I Took The Initiative In Creating The Internet." -Al Gore
Though most people would probably accept belt and maybe knee wraps as reasonable injury precautions. But you've have a hard time reasoning that way for a bench press shirt of deadlift suit.
And personally I'd see if like if you can't lift the weight in say a deadlift without the belt and not do it in a bad way then you actually CAN'T lift the weight. If you can do it with a belt doesn't matter. But I'd guess we would have seen more ugly and injury inducing lifts in competitions if belts wasn't allowed just because people wanted to win and would risk their back for a couple of extra KGs. Most people are intelligent enough to not do those kind of lifts on training though.
I've never heard of a risk of getting hernia from lifting without belt, bu maybe that's true to. Though I'd guess that if you increase your weights the whole time and never uses a belt your body will get used to and be able to handle it even when the weights have gotten bigger.
Reporter: So George, what do you think of the dope problem?
George Carlin: I agree, we have far too many dopes.
I am officially gone from
FAIL! AFAIK, anabolic steroids (the ones talked about in relation to doping) are not used for treating skin conditions. It seems you don't actually know what your dad was taking.
Usually when people talk "steroids", they mean "performance enhancing drugs". I guess we should try and filter out pseudo-scientific vocabulary in popular speak, but that's the way it is I guess.
Also didnt SNL do a skit on this once...I seem to remember a guy doing the dead lift and his arms ripping off....
And that guy lost the competition. Right? People forget that one of the most prominent problems in the Olympians of previous generations was OVERTRAINING. Any coach worth her salt knows when to tell her athletes to cut back. Give the body a chance to heal and recover.
Being able to use drugs to enhance performance is a hallmark of the modern age and has promise to enhance our lives in so many ways beyond big brutish guys playing games. Wouldn't it be nice if your local fireman was a fit as possible to carry you out of that burning building? Ruling authorities running around with their fingers in their ears is just stupid.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
If you look at bodybuilding, they have two types of competitions. Natural, and well... the other variety. Personally although the supplement companies are all over the hyoooouge IFBB pro's, who without a doubt have gained a reasonable portion of their mass unnaturally, I think the natural competitions are where you really see the nice physiques.
Some here mentioned earlier that allowing doping would just turn everyone into hulks, but that's ridiculous. I agree that watching huge unnatural hulks run around is nothing but a freak show, just as the pro bodybuilding contests have turned into freak shows decades ago. However the fact remains that in most sports pure bulk is not the key to winning, and beyond that most of the sports where pure bulk can prove an advantage, there are weight classes (think olympic judo, boxing, etc..).
For the non-combat sports, being too big usually slows you down, makes you require more oxygen to operate, and in many cases makes it more difficult to execute correct technique, which has been designed around a more natural body.
Personally I think bringing doping out into the open would do exactly what the scientists think: reduce the risk for both athletes and amateurs dabbling with (currently) illegal performance enhancing drugs. Additionally I would like to point out it's quite plausible that the drugs and methods being used for performance enhancement now because they can't be detected yet by drug tests, are more detrimental to the athletes' health than the "tried and true" ones, such as plain testosterone or other "natural" AAS for example?
Finally I would like to add that while doping should quite possibly be allowed, I would guess having a "natural" class where athletes are limited to more natural performance enhancers, would make a lot of sense, as most people have tremendous respect for those who wish to take their body to the limit without the help of drugs. The important remaining question is whether the fact that an "all-out, doping allowed" class existed would eliminate cheating in the natural class. I would hope so, but human nature has stacked the odds against it.
The "potentially harmful" aside is uneccessary. The parameter for safe use are understood and well documented. The only thing that makes steroids 'unsafe' is wankers shooting themselves up with extreme overdoses in the locker-rooms of the local gyms. I know some of these wankers, and I know they're taking a real chance of destroying themselves, just as you would with a 10X overdose of any other drug.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
Add one more criteria. It must only be fueled from the athlete's body chemistry. No gasoline, batteries, uranium packs, etc. All the energy must come from the athlete.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
Unfortunately, the slippery slope is actually a marble. You can slide off in a lot of different ways.
Once you start banning substances, where do you stop. Can we ban steak, because some countries diets are low in protein, and all that fat is unhealthy to the athletes? (yes, it is an extreme example. To the point of being silly....or is it?)
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
Why stop at the games? Why not doping for IT? I mean we dedicate our lives to a craft much the same way an athlete dedicates their life. Ever since the baseball steroid scandal broke I have been asking about the use of enhancers in IT, admittedly much to the response of some pretty strange looks but hey I can take it...
A hand up and a foot on every chest...
This is /. after all, we are Nerds, do any of us care about sports, or whether they're fair or not? I don't. Let athletes destroy their bodies for a temporary edge in any way they want to. When "Monday night Chess" is the hot game of the week, or some other endeavor which stresses thinking rather than brute force then I'll care about "sports".
But then you'd still have to test the natural atheletes, because there would be more fame in doing well in that league which would be considered 'pure'.
"I only speak the truth"
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Thing is, it's just unethical to let a wounded man be wounded because of his own stupidity. Then we enter a dangerous area where we're only required medical care after our case has been viewed and accepted yada-yada-yada.
This is one issue that needs to be black and white. We may have to suck up some bills of stupid people, but at least they are in pain for their stupidity...it's not like they are fleecing the system while drinking margaritas in Curacao. That's the most ethical way to handle it.
"I only speak the truth"
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Inevitably someone will die from whatever drug they're abusing.
Imagine your kid in high school getting "supplements" from his coach. Happened to my nephews and my brother-in-law who is an MD went ballistic with the elite private school the boys were in -- but my nephews were part of the football team that had the only winning season the school had ever had....
"Oh well, maybe it's just too late anyway and all we can do is hope for the best" makes one smile and sigh simultaneously. It's actually a time-proven principle, but of course the definition of "the best" is where you may have problems with the outcome. :-)
Since natural selection selects for those that survive, it can take any direction without regard to the individuals perception or judgment of what is desirable. For that matter, whatever the result is becomes "the best" by virtue of its occurrence.
And by the way, that is exactly what is going to happen, because all of our actions or omissions add up to natural selection anyway.
Driving this thread in a somewhat different direction... My interpretation of the original is that the writer is advocating a more considered approach to selecting the areas that we study in science, so that we do not develop a technology that lets an ill-considered action reduce the human population too much. Ignoring the inherent valuation of that as a "bad thing" we must recognize that while the ability of humans to predict the future distinguishes us from most other living things, we are much better at predicting what those in our social group will do in response to our individual actions than we are at predicting how a technology will affect the economy or how a new law will affect or society. The point being that we are so poor at it that in my opinion we should not even attempt to regulate what we investigate in basic science. Though an exception to that may be to encourage or even require investment in finding ways to predict what will happen if a given technology is developed. And even that is inherently unpredictable. Think about all the possibilities if we could reliably predict all of the outcomes from a given action. What would happen to markets? Certainly selling short would be a losing proposition. In the philosophical realm, what are the implications to the concept of free choice?
The mind boggles - at least this one does. Ah well, all we can do is hope for the best.
To hear the gods laugh tell them your plans.
And he's pulled his arms off!!!! Oh, he's going to feel that in the morning...
(Phil Hartman with blood spurting out of arm holes....)
Says it all.
Anyone remember the old Saturday Night Live skit from the early 90's where the Olympic Committee decided to have an all-drug Olympics? I still remember Chris Farley as the weightlifter who had gotten so strong on "Steroids, hormones, and some sort of fish paralyzer" that he ripped his own arms off trying to do a world-record-shattering dead lift. I'm sure it would be on Youtube if NBC/Universal hadn't turned into such a bunch of party-pooping bastards and removed all the classic SNL content.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
These laws don't prevent YOU from smoking and killing yourself, they only prevent you from doing so IN (generally enclosed) public places and forcing (unfiltered!) carcinogens on everyone ELSE.
Well, its filtered by my lungs...
I hate to say it but really.... think of the children.
I haven't been watching much of the events, as honestly I am not that interested to begin with. However I was flipping through and saw some Chinese gymnast that looked about 12. Her papers say she is 16, the minimum age requirement to compete. However even the tv announcer left it up to the audience to draw their own conclusions.
In any event these are amatures. Many of them very young. All of which are under considerable pressure as it is. To give a green light to modification and enhancement will only escalate things beyond what is already pretty brutal.
Anyway its bad for the guinea pigs and its bad for the kids watching. Not only that, you can bet that some countries will refuse to allow the enhancements anyway due to law or morality, which may mean a whole lot of astricks in the statistics . I mean if I was an athlete of that caliber I would hate to hear, oh sure he did the 100m in 5.2s, but thats juiced, the real one was 8.2s natural or something like that.
Having said all that, I think you can get rid of more than half the competitions as well. I think they really need to scale back the events, competitors, and overall glut of spending on it. It really is pretty grotesque.
Ok. So we have 2 classes. One gets to build their decks only from Invasion commons, and the other guys get blank cards, where they can pencil in any cards they like from extended.
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
"designed to create a level playing field" and I'm sure you can define that concept? Hooey, your search for perfection is futile. Limits are all that is available and they are not perfect. "protect athletes' health" I'm sure some are better off for not having massive amounts of chemicals poured in their bodies. The horrors of the past should be our guide. "set an example for children" Hey, getting bumped for doping is a pretty good deterent in my book. What's your answer? "that fails on all counts" Maybe in your mind, but I think it's working as well as can be expected. "The journal Nature" These are experts in sports? Go back to your labs. You know nothing of real world sports. "antidoping authorities have fostered a sporting culture of suspicion, secrecy and fear" Well, welcome to the real world. Humans cheat and the world ain't perfect. I suppose these Einsteins would then legislate which 'doping' materials would be allowed. And then if someone cheated...... Absolute balderdash.
Normally I ascribe all life to intelligent design, but in your case I'll make an exception.
"like the unreliable test for synthetic testosterone that cost Floyd Landis his 2006 Tour de France victory"
So this is basically bitterness at an American cheat getting caught? Okay, check.
It's fairly obvious what would happen if unrestricted doping were allowed: there would always be someone willing to take the most risky and dangerous enhancement substances available (or some government willing to compel its athletes to do it), and damn the long term consequences. It would quickly become impossible to win any form of professional sporting competition without behaviour highly dangerous to both short-term and long-term health, reducing any potential athlete's choices to: compete and risk possible sudden death and probable shortened life span, or don't compete (at least meaningfully). And sports fans would either stop being sports fans out of disgust quite quickly, or become very objectionable characters (I'd hate to be someone who supported an activity that essentially killed its participants).
An imperfect 'war on doping' is massively preferable to this outcome in just about all possible ways. I really don't see how you can reasonably argue otherwise.
If you ever let the athletes do what they want, i'm betting on a steep decrease in doping. If you let sponsors and recruiters decide, on the other hand...
--- Back to the trees, back to the trees !
Being a competitive athlete, albeit many many echelons below Olympic athletes, I have mulled this over before. The burning question is, where do you draw the line? Nike's athletes like Galen Rupp live in a climate-controlled house where the air pressure is set to the equivalent of 12,000 feet altitude, have electro-stimulation machines designed to increase muscle mass, and use zero-g treadmills so they can log more mileage without the wear and tear of actual running. Is this not considered an unfair advantage?
I am not advocating that we allow doping, but why exactly does using chemicals that enable your body to recover faster constitute cheating, whereas sleeping in an altitude tent and utilizing "weightless" treadmills is allowed? Furthermore, some forms of doping don't even use chemicals at all. Some athletes have a small amount of their blood drawn and stored for a few months, and then re-injected back into their bloodstream a short time before competition; this results in an increased amount of red blood cells, thereby giving them the ability to carry more oxygen to their muscles. This is also prohibited in sanctioned competition. Who decided what is fair and what is considered illegal or unethical, and how will the line progress as time passes?
The problem is a cultural and political issue among the IOC members, judges, doctors and athletes. If you do everything to support doping behind the scenes, then this is what's going to happen. There's always new ways of cheating which might not be caught with current technology. I think the threat of keeping for 10 years blood/urine samples and if you're later found to be cheating, stripped of your medal might be motivation not to dope. If not for loss of sponsorship money but for honour, if there's anything left in the athletes.
The Games have long been run by large commercial interests - NBC paying in excess of $300 million for broadcast rights for last 10 years. Having "Official" world-wide sponsors of products that are unhealthy and have absolutely no association with sports - Budweiser (or whoever it is this year), Coca-Cola and McDonalds are examples. I'm sure this is of no surprise.
If the Games are *really* about the best competing against each other, then we have the technological means to get around much of the financial interests. Camcorder + YouTube or BitTorrent. Film each event in an existing venue in a country of choice - fly the athletes over. Might not look as professional for filming purposes. If the statdiums/venues are full of paying people to watch the events in person, then you break even for bandwidth costs.
I'm all for competitive and amateur sports. I was heavily involved in competitive cycling. But the idea that nobody watches cycling until its the "Olympics" shows there's too much mystique created by commercial interests. Its the Super Bowl effect. This ruins the idea of the competition and the athletes. And if you watched the NBC broadcasts over last few years - where they continually cut to show Americans winning - its cheap and in poor taste. Again, ruins the event.
We need a steroids league in baseball. You're not allowed to play in the game UNLESS you're all hopped on on the 'roids.
Left to their own devices, athletes didn't use EPO or other steroids to gain an edge. Athletes used HARD DRUGS and nightly blood transfusions to get ahead. And for a long time, it was just accepted. Everyone knew that athletes did these horrible things to themselves to win - it was the elephant in the room.
The push to stop doping was originally done NOT for "fairness" or because of concerns of cheating; cheating is what it became AFTER the push to stop it. Never forget that this push to stop doping started for their SAFETY; because many athletes, in their competitive fervor, were willing to do ANYTHING to win, and that wasn't right, safe, nor was it what was intended.
Look to the example of Tom Simpson who keeled over & died climbing Mont Ventoux during the 1967 Tour De France to know why we shouldn't let athletes do whatever they want. That guy doped himself up on 2 vials of amphetamines with a 3rd ready to be downed in his jersey pocket (never mind the dieuretics he used to 'weight down'). He was so doped up he didn't know he needed to stop, and literally exhausted himself to death.
Think about that. THAT is the mentality of an athlete who can do whatever he wants. THAT is what an athlete will do. It's not unlike an anorexic's compulsion against food or a bulimic's compulsion to expunge (not to say that they're the same, but only to compare the compulsion aspect).
We should be so lucky to be in a grey area where athletes resort to relatively tame attempts at getting an edge like EPO rather than snorting coke, shooting heroin, downing LSD and having a witch doctor lay hands on them. Because THAT'S HOW IT WAS BEFORE.
Pessimism towards athletic performance only comes from those who are ignorant of history and who fail to empathize with the pressure.
i'm amazed that i survived - an airbag saved my life.
Well, the evolution part comes into play when athletes choose the wrong therapies or drug regimens and experience consequences like sterility, genetic damage, or early death.
So, evolution, actually a pretty clear case. The successful ones live to pass on their genes, the unsuccessful ones either die or damage the genes they do manage to pass on.
But the value of free lab rats willing to test this stuff for us so they can succeed at a game cannot be overstated. Now the situation is less than desirable because they are all secretive and stuff so it is difficult to use the risks they are taking to contribute to our store of scientific evidence regarding the effects and side effects associated with these therapies.
Plus i just like to say 'evolution in action'. Maybe they have a bumper sticker or something. I would totally wear that t-shirt.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
And the gold goes to Merck, the silver to Wyeth pharmaceutical, aand the bronze to Novartis. Congratulations!
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
I might even watch "baseball" if the ball thrower (pitcher?) had orangutan thumbs and the bat person had electronic trigger actuated super twitch reflexes swinging a glassy-tungsten-steel bat. Protective gear would have to ramp of course b/c people in the stands and in the field could be killed by the super sonic ball.
What I really meant is that when you talk about "steroids" in sports, you really mean "anabolic steroids". On the other hand, when you talk about steroids in medicine, you almost always mean corticosteroids (although anabolic steroids are occasionally used).
Wait, what?!?
You mean when I got prescribed steroids for poison oak and I spent a lot of time at the gym I was really doing nothing except pissing off everyone who got it from using the same equipment?
He he sorry about that.
I've been saying for years that all the arguments used against drugs in sport are nothing more than rehashes of the arguments against playing sport for paid advantage of 150 years ago. "It's bad for your health to train so hard as to win at any cost." "It brings corruption and disrepute to sport." "Sport should be pure and free of outside influence." Just to name a few.
The third example (outside influence) is clearly absurd, as there are sports where outside influence is a major factor. Swimsuit technology that's available to the wealthy nation's swimmers. The first carbon fibre bicycles compared to poorer countries' chromo framed rides.
The solution 150 years ago was 2 sporting tiers, amateur and professional. It probably IS time for a third tier, medically assisted.
"I hope you like Guinness, Sir. I find it a refreshing substitute for, er... food." Col. Jack O'Neil, SG-1
Recumbents would get slaughtered on the climbs.
Not true. Are you saying its impossible to make a lightweight recumbent? An extra few kg means a few % slower climb. But the difference on the flat is much more.
The other problem is that you can't stand on the pedals, but if the gear range is low enough, thats not needed.
Olympic games are for both poor and rich countries. Most of olympic disciplines can be trained using very minimum or easily obtainable training equipment, thus making all atletes to compete mostly on their own physical abilities.
Allowing doping will benefit to rich countries and will make more competition of pharmacy companies than human beings.
Sadly, I think the future is for athletes to undergo independent, ongoing testing. The 2 american teams in the Tour de France went through it.
I think it's as much to prove they're clean as to protect themselves from lab errors.
..like the unreliable test for synthetic testosterone that cost Floyd Landis his 2006 Tour de France victory...
This is like the jailed thief who blames the police for his incarceration. It's never his fault.
Raisinettes are my raison d'etre