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.""

Comments

Re:No

[FatherOfONe]

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.