Drugs make athletes better. So why ban them? Let's regulate instead.
The Greeks had their gods and heroes. Twelfth-century Frenchmen celebrated dragon-slaying knights. We moderns have sports heroes. Friedrich Nietzsche explained it all in 1883: Every culture needs the-bermensch ("over-man") to make lesser mortals - the rest of us - feel pride in our shared humanity.
In sport, the over-man has always been considered a freak of nature. Sandy Koufax, with his unearthly long arms. Muhammad Ali, with his combination of size and speed. Michael Jordan, with his tongue-wagging flights to the hoop. But nature isn't keeping up with the demand for superathletes. With the explosion of professional and Olympic sports, we now need squadrons of hyper-evolved stars. Predictably, science and technology have stepped in to fill this need with everything from designer steroids to beta-blockers. It's time to face the obvious implication: Athletes should be permitted to use performance enhancers, so long as the users are monitored for safety.
Fans and sports authorities may protest, even governments may object - recall President Bush's State of the Union swipe at steroids - but the sporting world must ultimately accept that the distinctions between doping and nutritional supplements, illegal enhancements and scientific training, no longer exist.
Elite sports are already thoroughly enmeshed in a laboratory world of pharmaceuticals, medicine, and high tech nutrition. Any athlete who wants a banned drug can get it. And as we've seen repeatedly, designer drugs coevolve with tests, staying one step ahead of authorities and allowing savvy athletes to juice unnoticed.
None of this is new. Athletes have long relied on science to get game. "Sport as we know it today can hardly be separated from technology," historian Edward Tenner observed in his 1996 book Why Things Bite Back. But the trend has accelerated. Videotaping enables athletes to study their motions and refine them. Nutritional supplements, hypoxic tents, and weight-training machines give competitors more speed and power. In the not-too-distant future, gene therapies such as insulin-like growth factor-1 (a protein that promotes muscle growth) will allow athletes of any age to gain a permanent advantage - in speed, power, or durability - that no blood tests can uncover.
Imagine a world where performance enhancement was open and regulated. Instead of forcing athletes to sneak through back alleys to stay competitive, sports authorities should admit that drugs are essential - then help athletes cope with the side effects. Once legalized, drug use would still have limits, but they would be established by physicians and athletes - based on their ability to handle performance enhancers. Bad outcomes would be far less frequent if players were not forced to rely on quacks (such as the former Tower of Power bassist at the center of the baseball designer steroid scandal). Innovation in performance enhancers would accelerate in the light of day. There might even be spinoff applications that would benefit you and me.
To be sure, monitoring all this would be tricky. Balancing benefits and costs is hard. So for pharmco Luddites who want a simpler world, where performance enhancers don't transform competitions and the cult of the natural still thrives, I have an answer: Create one league for the genetically engineered home-run hitter and another for the human-scale slugger. One event for the sprinter pumped up on growth hormones and another for the free-range slowpoke. One tour for the supercharged cyclist and another for the antidoping racer.
Without staging an experiment, we know which league would garner the higher television ratings, the greater prestige, and the larger financial rewards. We may all worship the natural for the sake of our fragile psyches. But when we watch sports, we want an encounter with the mythic. Faced with two outs in the bottom of the ninth, bases loaded, and the pitching team holding a one-run lead, who would you want on the mound: an over-man or just any man?
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