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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.""
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.
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.
You should join the debate club with that incredible logic you're using.
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.
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!
We shouldn't let journalists dope either. Case in point: this article.
I draw the line at androids! no athlete should have less then 40% natural body parts! THEIR body parts!
- Minutus cantorum, minutus balorum, minutus carborata descendum pantorum.
Wrong direction, everyone should be riding the exact same bike. The Tour is about the athletes not the equipment.
I completely disagree with this. There are approximately 200 athletes in the Tour de France and I think it would be cruel and unusual to make them share one bike. It would be hard enough to get them to fit on there let alone figure out who actually won.
Don't anthropomorphize computers. They *hate* that.
And more for those who die on the track...
It would be just my luck to get picked for the ski-jumping...
Once I was a four stone apology. Now I am two separate gorillas.