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An Olympic Games For Enhanced Athletes?
ananyo writes "With the Olympics due to kick off on 27 July in London, Nature has taken a look at how far science would be able to push human athletic abilities if all restrictions on doping were lifted. The article mentions anabolic steroids (up to 38% increase in strength), IGF-1 (4% increase in sprinting capacity), EPO/blood doping (34% increase in stamina), gene doping and various drugs and supplements, as well as more 'extreme' measures such as surgery and prosthesis. Hugh Herr, a biomechanical engineer at MIT, says performance-enhancing technologies will one day demand an Olympics all their own. But is that time already upon us?"
Mad Magazine had this a long time ago. Pretty funny.
I'd love to watch this! :3
The point of sport is exercising your body for the fun and health benefits. What is the point to kill yourself with drugs and supplements?
I've wondered what F1 would be like without all the restrictions. Modifying humans to this extreme is probably going to have unforeseen consequences in the long term. However with F1, if you were to take out the human element and have AI or remote control, you needn't worry about human safety and could lift all sorts of restrictions, allowing R+D budgets to be spent on whole new automotive areas.
Wait. It isn't moral when the government says something, but it is moral when a human being is fed hormones and drugs so that the sponsors can peddle the next tennis shoe to a million voyeurs in front of all those TVs?
You have some morals you can be proud of.
And then we won't have athletes representing countries any more, but drug companies.
"Well, GlaxoSmithKline are looking great, taking home four gold medals, two silvers and five bronzes so far. This is sure to push their stock price up substantially for the coming year."
Did not RTFA.
Right, because I remember the time I was almost forced by the NFL to be a starting quarterback, was almost forced by the NBA to play professional basketball, etc.
Its their choice to:
A) Play their chosen sport professionally
B) Play in a league that allows it
C) Participate in taking those drugs/hormones
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Unless they want to die at 35 of a cancer or something, I wouldn't advise it. One of the reason those kind of things are banned is because they are dangerous
On the other hand, the present regulatory state(where even using the ones that are legal by prescription can get you tossed right out of the sport) has unfortunate side effects of its own: since development of assays for novel drugs tends to lag behind, but not too far behind, development of novel drugs, there is a strong incentive for people to move away from drugs with the most testing and data available and toward novel ones with poorly characterized risks, to avoid being caught. Also, because the doping is largely clandestine, society at large is denied a valuable source of information about the effects and risks of performance enhancing drugs.
Olympia has long since ceased to be a sports event. This is entertainment delivered by modern day gladiators who sacrifice health and life in a quest for money and immoratility through fame.....
It isn't nearly as simple as you imagine it to be. Organized sports are a show business that has to consistently deliver extraordinary performances in order to attract coach potatoes and sponsors. The people who get into sports are attracted by the promise of fame and money, but this only goes to very few lucky ones.
Unfortunately, all who try are young, immature and quite often unaware of the consequences of the drugs they are using and the real costs they face. Many are lead into all this druggery by the coaches, peer pressure, etc. By the time they get the experience and maturity to be able to make a good decision it is already too late.
I've lost a friend to this kind of "sport". Heart attack at 29. Very moral.
I might agree with this conclusion, but I'm compelled to ask whether or not we still really live in a moral world, since the popular conception in industrialized societies these days seems to be to view ideas like "good" and "bad" as culturally subjective, rather than absolutes that exist for all human beings.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I can't wait for the one man three legged race.
As Bob Page says, "their... ethical inflexibility has allowed us to make progress in areas they refuse to consider." (a quote from the opening of Deus Ex that has stayed with me over the years). As a side note, the military has been using performance-enhancing drugs like dextroamphetamine for decades so in a way there is nothing new here. When it comes down to the crunch, humans will use any enhancement they can get their hands on. Competition driving technological development.
When we have the technology, we've the desire to test it out, see what it can do, see what its effects are. From a purely practical standpoint this would be the driving reason -why-. Much like how in racing, it isn't just skill, it's also the engineering that is being tested.
This may sound strangely immoral, and I agree the morals can be debated, but I don't think the answers will turn out to be as simple as 'doping is always wrong' (queue controversial studies about caffeine and athleticism) or alternately 'well the athletes are consenting' (when you factor in potential societal pressures, long term side effects and other things--for example fighting in hockey is always under debate, as it is an expectation from some of the fans, but is over time being documented as causing a lot of harm both physically and psychologically to the players, aka the hockey suicides over the past couple years).
"The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place." George Bernard Shaw
Top-level elite athletes are already genetic outliers who have also benefitted from good fortune in early training and nutrition and, typically, tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of targetted training.
It's not just a matter of will power or clever training schedules. It matters not how strong be my willpower, or how dedicated my training: I will never be an olympic-class athlete.
Bring on the drugs, and the treatments. It would make elite sport more equitable, and further, the medical risks taken by those with the burning desire to compete at any cost will allow the greater majority of people to benefit from enhancements with more safety.
That's gotta be a big disappointment for the big Russian - http://www.hulu.com/watch/124975
Maybe if we stopped watching pro sports, the sponsors and the money would go away, and this sort of stuff would never happen.
Then sports could be something people do for fun, not a way to get into college (?) or a way to make a living (?!).
But as long as pro athletes are getting paid millions upon millions of dollars, I demand that they take on a proportionate level of risk, say at least roughly 100 times the risk that active duty deployed combat troops face (based on the wage ratio).
The 2012 Tour de France
I like the Stock vs Open analogy. NASCAR, Indy, Formula1, NHRA have it right.
There are rules for different classes of racers (athletes). Stock is very strictly controlled where as Open allows for major modification.
The "professional" sports are really "professional athletic entertainment". Conversely the Olympics are the best "amateurs" - at least until the 1990s when they opened the sports up to the "Dream Team" professionals.
The Olympics can pretend all day long that they are serious about drug enhanced performance, but if they want to prove it then get ride of the professionals. Take away the money and you're left with those fighting for the podium, which there will continue to be cheaters, but at least you're getting rid of those who are making a living off of cheating.
These pros have their venues - and those who want to compete in a clean environment should have the Olympics.
-CF
It's already the case that one has to train roughly 7 days a week, 10+ hours per day for about 10 or more years to even be able to ENTER the Olympics, never mind winning a gold medal. The suggestion that a person might one day have to have surgery, drug injections, and so on just to compete in an international games festival is sickening to me. Yes, some Olympic athletes already do this--probably because they're short-sighted, excessively "driven," and/or stupid. That still doesn't make it "right."
I realize that it's technologically interesting (and hence /. news), but I REALLY hope this never truly comes to pass. Sports just aren't worth such abuse to a person's body (or the gajillions of dollars spent on the Olympics, for that matter...but that's another topic). I have trouble justifying such human abuses as the Games already cause to young athletes (resulting in such things as sterility in women, irregular bone growth, joint problems later in life, etc.). Why on Earth would we want to add to that?
I guess this is where we'll see how obsessed with technology and sports the world really is...
It's a funny cartoon, but not funny when you look at the actual athletes. These people destroy their bodies pushing themselves to the limit. Even in ice skating which looks like a nice "easy" sport, people tear-up their knees or hips, and have permanent pain for the rest of their lives. In running Florence Griffith Joyner pushed herself so hard, she died before age 40. She had been training for the next olympics.
Let's NOT have an olympics where athletes use steroids and other enhancements to kill themselves prematurely.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
Athletes of all stripes push their bodies to the limits, whether they're doping or not. That's sort of the point. Anything less than "to the limits" is considered half-assing it. Of course, they used to have football coaches that wouldn't let their boys drink water on the sidelines, so maybe what "to the limits" means could use some refinement.
I don't know about you, but on the rare occasion that I bother to work out, if I don't ache the next day, I feel a little bit cheated.
Why shouldn't one be allowed to choose what they do to their body?
As long as there is no coercion to the individual ("do this or we send you and your family to the rape pits") and it truly is that individual's choice what they do to their body, I don't really care what an athlete does to themselves.
Maybe put restrictions - no modifications allowed until after the age of 18 and then after that they can consent to whatever - so that children aren't being damaged any more than they already are by being pushed to hyper-competitiveness.
Now, I do feel bad for people who have wrecked their bodies in the name of sport, but by and large, it's their choice to do so. I work with an ex-football player who, at the ripe old age of 50, has severe arthiritis in knees, hips, elbows and shoulders, has had multiple back surgeries, and who, when it's cold and damp out basically needs Vicodin in order to function through the pain, but he has said he wouldn't have given up playing even if he knew just how bad he would feel now, and that it was worth it. I feel bad for him, but I'm not going to try and protect people from themselves as long as they're capable of making a relatively informed decision.
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
So you would fully support blood sport where two gladiators willingly fight each other to the death?
There is a line where we should not cross, and I find allowing a "drug olympics" is crossing that line.
Fights to the death were actually fairly rare in gladiatorial games because gladiators were so expensive to train that it would be wasteful.
That said, we already have things that are essentially bloodsport, but we pretend as if they aren't. What is boxing and MMA other than gladiatorial combat? Granted the purpose isn't to have people die, but it's certainly a risk, and long-term injury and debilitating brain damage is almost certain.
We also already have people doing incredibly unsafe things to their bodies in the form of training or drugs now, it's just that often times they pretend they aren't doing it. I would much rather have it be legal and in the open (and more closely supervised by medical pros) than illegal and hidden in the dark where we can't have any idea of what is going on. Making it legal would mean that people doing this would be more able to get adequate medical attention, would mean that more research could be done in the open about the long term effects, and would make it easier to inform the general public about what kinds of things people are doing (sacrifices they make) to excel.
There is no way we will ever stop people from using performance enhancements. I recognize that and think that, in a world where people will use those enhancements it's much better to have it in he open and supervised than the dark and unsupervised.
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
Exactly. Some countries already use drugs and harshly punish athletes that do not win which encourages them to do anything it takes to win. I hate to see what would happen if this was actually encouraged everywhere, and you know the science and technology would eventually filter down to us. This just seems all bad, nothing good can come from this, no records are worth the damage the would do. Besides how would this help? Records are broken every Olympics already so what would this do that is not already happening?
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
No, she died as the result of a a congenital brain abnormality that made [her] subject to seizures.
The revolution will be mocked