Lies, Damned Lies, and Sean

Olympic trap shooter disqualified for doping

... would make a nice headline for a story in The Onion, but I don't recall it ever happening in reality.  Therefore I find athletes hard to believe when they deny taking drugs and test positive.  But I wonder if drug testing will persist.

Testing for drugs is a hard problem, and in the long term, the testers probably won't be able to detect it after more advanced drugs and gene doping mature.  See a fine article in Scientific American for details.  From the article, "Sports authorities fear that a new form of doping will be undetectable and thus much less preventable.  Treatments that regenerate muscle, increase its strength, and protect it from degradation will soon be entering human clinical trials for muscle-wasting disorders.  Among these are therapies that give patients a synthetic gene, which can last for years, producing high amounts of naturally occurring muscle-building chemicals."  Perhaps the anti-drug constraints should be eliminated now, so anything goes.  The original Greek games had no drug bans, right?  It would make for a cleaner solution, but athletes would probably overdose and die or suffer severe side-effects, and their parents or friends would insist on rules to prevent drug use in sports, which puts us back where we are today.  Rather than having such rules, I think the athletes should sign a consent form saying they realize that drugs may be needed to perform competitively, and they alone assume all associated risks.

In the longer term, I anticipate the games will devolve through genetically engineering athletes that no longer appear human, although they were derived from humans many generations ago.  Why, for example, does the ideal sprinter need hair, a nose, or high-level brain functions?  Or how about some gills for the swimmers?  Or 12-foot tall basketball players?  Such creatures may be able to breed with humans, and so be technically part of our species.  As the Olympics are supposed to be conducted without regard to "race, creed, or political beliefs," it would be difficult to exclude them.

When I was in junior high I reached the conclusion that spectator sports amount to an enormous waste of time and money.  Sports are recreational drugs for society.  Watch football game?  Do some blow?  The difference is minor.  Instead there are much more rewarding things to do:  go exercise, create, learn, teach, or earn money engineering genes and undetectable drugs to help athletes entertain the moronic masses.

Posted by seander at August 15, 2004 04:40 PM