Doping Destroys Sport

[cthulu2016]

Ideally you want the most talented people to compete in any given sport, not the most talented people who are willing to risk weird cancers and strange side effects.

Say you are a remarkable natural athlete in a sport where doping is the norm. You can either take weird, dangerous drugs or else abandon the one thing in the world you are best at.

I don't have a ton of sympathy for Barry Bonds, but I do have a little because he was the best player in baseball for a decade before every doping, and the suddenly he wasn't because Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa and the rest were smashing all the records. Sammy Sosa on steroids was better than Barry Bonds clean. So Bonds reclaimed his position as the best player in baseball by showing that Barry Bonds on steroids was far superior to Sammy Sosa on steroids.

Not a defense, but I get it. If anybody is doing it then everybody has to do it, or else be inferior.

And it is dangerous.

Picture being a brilliant high school athlete. That gift is what you've got. But you are competing for scholarships with inferior athletes who are doping. Then in college you are competing for a small number of spots in the pros, and again competing against people who are doping. Now, in the pros, you are trying to stay on the team, competing against people who are doping.

Every step of the way, in a doping filled environment, you can dope or get out of the way.

And that is not right.

So yeah, zero tolerance.

I think any individual ought to be free to turn himself into the Incredible Hulk if he wants to, but not in competitive sports. It is wrong to force people to dope or get out of the way

[Stargazer09]

1. I agree

The problem is the fact that so many people think that winning is everything, and that cheating is the only way to win.

Unfortunately, we only reward the winners. And we reward them so handsomely that cheating is worth the price for a lot of athletes.

It's sad. I love watching sports in which the players do well just by working hard and perfecting their sport, but it's difficult to know who is clean and who is not.

[porphyrian]

2. Maybe there should be separate leagues, one doping and one non-doping. n/t

[Canuckistanian]

3. Sort of like "stock" and "modified" in car racing

I've been saying that for years.

[porphyrian]

4. Exactly. That way, everyone can compete however they like. n/t

[TlalocW]

5. Or like the All Drug Olympics from Saturday Night Live

You have to put up with Dennis Miller in this clip. Sorry.

http://www.hulu.com/watch/4090

TlalocW

[Spike89]

6. Agree, but it is getting worse and more complex

Pumping yourself full of steroids is a pretty clear-cut "wrong" for competing fairly. As you rightly point out, it puts the natural athlete at a competitive disadvantage. What about altitude training, barometric "training" rooms, even transfusion therapy--Pumping in a little extra of your own blood? Those are either legal or virtually impossible to test for.

However, the real complex issues are just around the corner or almost issues. I pulled hard for the "bladerunner" in the Olympics this past summer (the South African runner with carbon fiber prosthetic legs). However, the debate over whether he should be allowed to compete was at best slightly hypocritical. Simply put, the blades are not natural and there is no way to judge whether they give him an advantage. The only "test" for that would be to time him with "real" legs (impossible) and compare the times to his blade-wearing times. He didn't win of course, but what if he had? What if the next model of blade is slightly better/faster? What happens in a few years when an athlete "needs" heart surgery and they add a "turbo boost" device that pumps blood a bit faster than a "natural" heart can produce. What if parents screen and even geneticly enhance the physical characteristics of their zygote?

Even a slight modification could be hugely important--perhaps we can do simple gene therapy on a fetus in gestation to "cure" a family trait such as near-sightedness, but the cure results in slightly better than "normal" vision?

We've got rules against performance enhancements, but the banned behaviors of today are basically crude and not always effective. Much more subtle and effective treatments--which may become quite common among non-athletes--are already in our labs.