John Tierney is suggesting that we abandon this fruitless attempt to keep athletes from doping:
Once upon a time, the lords of the Olympic Games believed that the only true champion was an amateur, a gentleman hobbyist untainted by commerce. Today they enforce a different ideal. The winners of the gold medals are supposed to be natural athletes, untainted by technology. After enough "scandals," the amateur myth eventually died of its own absurdity. The natural myth is still alive in Beijing, but it's becoming so far-fetched -- and potentially dangerous -- that some scientists and ethicists would like to abandon it, too.
I'm with those unnamed scientists and ethicists. The absurdity of the amateur ideal is evident when you watch Chariots of Fire (still a good movie, btw)
One of the heroes, rich and Jewish, is upbraided for hiring a trainer and thereby making it hard for the others to compete. Certainly, training for a race is not natural--particularly with the ever-finer-grained videotaping an so forth that perfects modern technique. But we don't view it as unfair.
On a practical level, I don't think you can get doping out of the games. It has been over a decade since a friend pointed out that every time they find a test for a new drug, you suddenly see a lot fewer world records being broken. Which isn't surprising. We're not genetically any different from the people twenty years before us, so if world records are constantly being broken, that's because something besides the athlete has gotten better. Sometimes its training and equipment--modern tracks are faster, as are swimsuits. But that's hardly enough to explain the constant smashing of records.
Athletes are crazy competitive. They will do anything to win. Why not acknowlege that, rather than making fruitless rules? It's not "natural" or "fair", you say? But is there anything less natural or fair than sport? I will never be a good athlete because I don't have the genes for it--hours of practice would make me somewhat better than I am, but not good enough to compete with a decent JV athlete. Hardly fair, that I am shut out by accidents of birth. And as for natural, just imagine what our Homo Erectus ancestors would think if they could see us suiting up for a modern track circuit, swimming competition, or basketball game.
One problem is that many performance-enhancing drugs such as steroids and human growth hormone have potentially dangerous side effects. Having strictly enforced anti-doping rules at least in theory helps protect athletes from themselves.
Without getting too far into the weeds you really need to Google something like "EPO and cycling" before you compare doping to wearing clothing that cuts down on (aero/hydro)dynamic drag. A rash of primarily Dutch cyclist died in the early 90's because they were pushing maple syrup thru their veins. It's not like any of these practices are FDA approved.
"It's not like any of these practices are FDA approved."
The FDA shouldn't be doing anything more than telling us whether Doc Johnson's 100% Snake Oil really contains 100% Snake Oil or not.
Not to detrail the thread or anything.
The problem with doping is that it filters down to the lowest levels of competition. If you told me that I could take a drug that would allow me to win a gold medal but it would take a couple of years off of my life, I might do it and even if I didn't I wouldn't blame someone who did. But once you allow doping, the choice is made for everyone. It means that you have to dope to compete at the Olympics. But of course you are not born an Olympic athlete. You start at lower levels. If you allow doping for swimming in the Olympics, that means that all of the college athlete and post college athletes who compete for the spots on the team will also be doping. If there are some athletes in college who dope, that means all the athletes in college will dope if they expect to compete with the ones who do and so forth until finally one day you have people doping to play high school sports.
This is exactly what has happened in football where Division I and even DII offensive line prospects often weigh over 300 lbs in high school and steroid use among high school athletes is rampant because they don't test for doping in high school. Do we really want to live in a world where high school and college athletes who have little chance of earning a living at a sport face the choice of doping and assuming the health risks associated with it or not competing at the highest level they can? I certainly don't.
The main issue is the tremendous dissonance between what sports are and how sports are perceived and marketed.
Doping doesn't fit into the convenient narrative about 'everyday people' achieving something spectacular through hard work and perseverance.
Until we're willing to give up that story, and admit that most athletes are a bunch of cutthroat bastards who would do anything to give themselves an edge, we won't have a coherent doping policy.
Regarding FDA approval.
What I meant to say was, as it stands, the people overseeing doping, at least in cycling, are very old Belgians guys doing what some other old Belgian taught them or doctors with absolutely zero ethics.
No one is overseeing this. Perhaps your argument is we should have evil medical school so these MDs can oversee the practice. And of course you get to be called Dr. Evil officially.
But, as John points out, this trickles down. I race with amateur (very low level) cyclist who dope. Google Joe Papp. Who is going to pay for those guys to have some oversight?
I think you're kind of shoe-horning in the "fair" argument there. I don't think doping per se is unfair, what's unfair is having some people dope and others not. In other words, if doping were unbanned, fine and well, everybody dopes as well as they can and the best doper wins. But if doping is banned and some people dope and get away with it, that is unfair.
As to whether it's natural or not, I think the argument is about how dangerous it is and how, as John said above, it trickles down to everyone else. I don't think we're banning drugs because they're "unnatural", we're banning them because some of them kill you and all of them hurt you if you abuse them, which you'd have to in order to get the most benefit out of them.
I mean, good grief, the equipment modern track-and-field and swimmers use is far, far from "natural" but it doesn't actually hurt you, so far as we know. If use of sprinter's shoes took years off your life with a not-insignificant chance of death from overuse on any given day, we'd probably set the rule to bare-foot running. Ditto for swimsuits.
And also, largely, ditto for training practices. If there were some method of training that identifiably hurt your body (in ways other than the extreme wear-and-tear that is inseparable from high-performance athletics) my guess is we would make an effort to ban that too.
I think the argument is about how dangerous it is
Exactly. We let myopic archers "unnaturally" enhance their vision with eyeglasses and rifle shooters "unnaturally" enhance their stability with slings, not to mention the allowing gymnasts to use leather grips on the high bar and a springy floor for tumbling. And of course anybody can drink all the protein shakes and glucosamine they like and soothe their inflamed tissues with ibuprofen.
The issue is not naturalness, it's killing yourself (and your family, for roid-ragers), and by extension, encouraging high-school kids to kill themselves.
I was thinking about it, and even modern surgery is unfair in a way.
If sports are finding the limits of the human body, doesn't a blown out knee or shoulder qualify as a limit? People can push themselves farther than ever because they can repair ever greater amounts of damage.
And it wouldn't be impossible to have natural/enhanced leagues for high school/college. Bodybuilding has that dichotomy, where the buff but within-reason guys compete against each other, and the Roid freaks have their thing.
Thirdly, enhancing drugs might be dangerous, but they would be considerably less so under the supervision of a doctor rather than getting an injection of Mexican horse testosterone in the butt by some other athlete.
Rob Lyman writes: "The issue is not naturalness, it's killing yourself (and your family, for roid-ragers), and by extension, encouraging high-school kids to kill themselves."
This argument brought to you by Budweiser, the US Army, and the National Football League.
Yes, better training and equipment have contributed to falling records, but I think there is also a psychological element as well. For example, the further today's swimmers push down their times, the more the swimmers who come after them see those times, and even lower times, as attainable.
I'm going to preface this by saying I don't deny that more world records are broken in years where they don't test for new drugs...
However...
Until 1954 it was thought impossible to run a four minute mile. The Roger Bannister broke the record. This was not because of steroids.
By 1964 a high school kid had done it. Also probably not because of steroids.
Right now the "average" world-class runner does a less than 4 minute mile. Not all of these guys are doping. So how come a high school kid in 1964 can do what no one in 1928 could do?
Equipment (such as shoes), more scientific understanding of where the body goes and how to move it, a better understanding of physics and aerodynamics in general, a better understanding of sports medicine and probably a stronger commitment to achieving a goal (including the incentive of monetary compensation for being a world-class athlete). How does doping differ from all of that? There is nothing inventive in doping, there is no higher purpose; there is simply the drug. So who cares?
As if you're not a NFL fan, Moe.
I disagree for two reasons. First, if we make PE drugs legal then athletes who have decided increased performance isn't worth the negative health effects have no choice but to give in or quit. We're putting pressure on people to endanger themselves in a way far more egregious than what OSHA spends 95% of it's time pursuing.
Second, once the drugs are legal the health effects become a litigation nightmare. We have people suing over hot coffee and the fat content of foods. It's impossible to reconcile modern western culture with legalized PEs.
Given your general support (allowance?) for market interferences intended to benefit workers I'm very surprised to find you farther out on the Z axis than I. I don't believe there's any difference between employees and athletes for this purpose. The restrictions are to prevent the lure of money from influencing decisions negatively. The same priciple applies.
Klug writes: "As if you're not a NFL fan, Moe."
Of course I am. The point is that arguing that an activity might in some cases shorten lives is not a particularly good argument for banning it. Benefits have to be looked at as well. You can extend the nanny-state and say no one should ever be a coal miner or a cabdriver, too. It's an inane stance.
The IOC, NFL, NBA, etc are also protecting their brands by prohibiting doping. Fewer people will watch if sports are generally recognized as a PED cocktail party.
They tried this a number of years ago at the All Drug Olympics in Bogota:
http://www.hulu.com/watch/4090/saturday-night-live-weekend-update-all-drug-olympics
I think the nature of the sport (especially in gymnastics) is often pretty dangerous, too. What do they do? They ban certain moves as too dangerous. Similarly, drugs should be evaluated on a case-by-case basis for safety. I'm not sure what the threshold for safety should be. I mean, these athletes are willing to cause tremendous wear-and-tear damage (and possibly catastrophic, paralyzing injuries as well) to their bodies in the course of their training. This is considered ok, so why not a little liver damage (or whatever else the drugs do), too?
Whether it's physical enhancement for sports or mental enhancement for research, it will be very entertaining watching bans be applied, then dodged, adjusted, then dodged again and maybe someday lifted. I've got my washbasin-sided bowl of popcorn. Let the show begin!
Not all banned drugs are harmful. In fact, many medicines taken regularly by the general population are banned for athletes, even in the regular approved dosage.
Also, even the 'natural' methods can harm. Simply pushing the boundaries of the human body's abilities can cause permanent injury, even without any disabling incident.
>Not all banned drugs are harmful. In fact, many medicines taken regularly by the general population are banned for athletes, even in the regular approved dosage.
That's what gets me about WADA's zealousness. Unless the guy swallowed a whole bottle, who cares if someone takes the wrong cold medicine two days before the event?
Matt B says: "Fewer people will watch if sports are generally recognized as a PED cocktail party."
Prove it. I think most people don't give a rat's ass either way.
Ditto Moe's comment, Matt B
You may be right, but I don't believe that fans pick their teams based on the perception that the players are law abiding....
Matt B:
Matt B:
My understanding is that the drug test can not differentiate between I took a big mess-o-steroids and I took cough medicine with codeine. And unless those Romanian Gymnasts were all touched with a really bad flu when they won their team gold medals...
Apply that to gender politics and you've just destroyed the entire basis of Feminism.
As for the athletes, it's a matter of the IOC saying "you may make these sacrifices to win gold (family, friends, time, stress, shortened lifespan), but not these other ones (chemical dependency, external hormonal changes, stress, shortened lifespan)"
I'm a non-competitive bodybuilder (because to be competitive you have to dope or make major lifestyle changes to be a 'natural' bodybuilder, both choices that I've decided not to make) so I'm pretty knowledgeable of the subject. For example:
Many athletes already face that choice (negative long-term health effects) by the nature of their sport and/or training regimen. Like I explained above, it's a matter of the regulatory bodies saying "these risks are ok, but these aren't" even when some of the allowed risks are much more dire than the banned risks.
Do we really want to live in a world where high school and college athletes who have little chance of earning a living at a sport face the choice of doping and assuming the health risks associated with it or not competing at the highest level they can?
and
First, if we make PE drugs legal then athletes who have decided increased performance isn't worth the negative health effects have no choice but to give in or quit.
The problem here is that, because of the illegality, we really don't have good information on how much PE drugs harm the athlete or how much they help performance. This particular argument (everyone will need to do it!) presupposes a fairly substantial level of benefit, such that good athletes simply couldn't even compete when "clean."
Add that we don't know how pernicious the harm really is, and what we really have here is a justification based on people waving their hands around and saying "but think of the children!"
What Brad said: if PED were legal, they'd probably be a lot safer or at least we'd have some actual science on the dangers of such drugs. I'm fairly sure Tylenol kills more people than steroids.
They might as well legalize all of it, I'm convinced they're all doping by now and nothing much is going to change my mind. I'm also bored silly by swimming and track and field.
And, in a rare moment of libertarian zen, I do think that freeing up the market for performance enhancing substances will solve most of the problems. Like most libertarian solutions tried out on real people, it wouldn't be pretty and lots of juicers would suffer lots of awful consequences (by their own choices) but if it's all open then there's a better chance of being able to deal with the problems medically.
It could also destroy the market for most olympic doping-prone sports. Boo hoo.
I think you've got it backwards, unfortunately.
This has nothing to do with the private morality or risks of doping. Doping is dangerous, but so is motorcycle racing.
These aren't moral principles, they're mutually agreed-upon rules of the game. Thus, the judgements of ethicists here are irrelevant.
It is legal to run while carrying a ball in football. It is not legal to do so in basketball. This is not because ethicists have determined the Platonic ideal moral code of sporting ball-carrying, but because these are the bounds that these games are played within.
Sport is by nature activity bounded by, and played within, rules. These rules are set by the participants to showcase skill and limit risk. Without rules, we're all playing Calvinball.
Football players have agreed to accept the risks and showcase the skills of tackling. Basketball players have not. Boxers are willing to get punched in the face. This would not be appropriate in diving. Sometimes these rules change - we've introduced the shot clock, banned turbochargers from Formula 1, and added TV timeouts.
The world is reasonably capitalist, and you are more than free to go out and start Meganball, which is like basketball, only you can carry the ball and tackle ball-carriers. You can play football on a 90-yard field, play baseball on a pentagon, or make whatever sporting innovations you care. Further, you're also free to start Megan's Dope-lympics, where any and all PE drugs and treatments are legal.
These aren't moral principles, they're mutually agreed-upon rules of the game. Thus, the judgements of ethicists here are irrelevant.
I don't think most people making an anti-PED argument would agree about this.
But taking this on its face, that this is merely just another rule, I'd be compelled to ask: why not change this rule, as we have so many others, to improve the aesthetics of the sport(s)?
After all, we generally agree that we want to see the best athletes, at their peak performing ability. IF PEDs could raise the bar there with minimal harm, so much the better, right?
"We're not genetically any different from the people twenty years before us, so if world records are constantly being broken, that's because something besides the athlete has gotten better."
It doesn't dispute the larger point, but I just wanted to point out that this makes no sense. We weren't evolving from the period of "Chariots of fire" to the 1980s either. Athletes (and human beings in general) today are not genetically any different from athletes 100 years ago, or from a greek javelin thrower 2500 years ago, or from a hunter 10,000 years ago. Some of the amazing abilities of modern athletes might be due to doping, or knee reconstructions, or lasik eye surgery, or improved training, but what has surely changed things is that there is a larger pool of potential athletes to choose from, whose unique talents can be developed earlier. So I'm not surprised that world records are still falling; some of it may be due to the "unnatural elements" you cite (although I think it's a false equivalence to say that steroids are the same thing as scientific training regimens), but most of it is due to the fact that we're better at finding people with unique genetic advantages, matching them with their appropriate sports, and training them from a very young age.
As for the point at hand; in spite of its seductive consistency, this libertarian approach to athletics, which would encourage athletes to do grave harm to their bodies, and reward those willing to do the gravest harm with the greatest glory, is just foolish when you sit and think about the repercussions for more than five seconds. And as a former minor league baseball player I can assure you that while athletes are very competitive, not all of them are enthusiastic about putting unnatural levels of powerful hormones in their bodies in order to succeed. It would be really sad to make success dependent on that.
Brad L:
"we" have changed no rule, so far as I can tell. Unless you're a sports official, that is. I'm not. These rules are not for "us" to change, but for those who run and play the sport to change.
Fencing would surely be more exciting and graceful if the participants did not have to wear cumbersome protective gear. Fencers have chosen to agree to wear that gear.
Foolish?
"Sacrifice yourself for glory" is how we convince young men to become soldiers and eventually to protect our borders and rights. And if sports is worth sacrifice over, then going to war should be high on that list of things worth it, right?
You have to remember that there is a distinct difference between how society treats men and women. Women are valuable for being.. for simply existing. Men have no/little social value until they are doing. That's why male athletes are much more likely to dope to achieve success: They gain respect and value for achieving as human doings rather than existing as human beings.
Why is this? Back to the first paragraph: we need someone to defend our borders. It would be social suicide to diminish our reproductive capacity to use women as the soldiers (not to mention not as effective as a fighting force, meaning more would die for the same accomplishment), so men are those we socially burden with the task of sacrificing themselves "to achieve glory" and becoming "valued" in society's eyes.
Of course, there are those who will say "we should value men just for being too!" which is an admirable dream. Unfortunately, it also leads to foolish set of repercussions: nobody willing to die defending the border from those willing to kill to take what they desire from you.
As to your first paragraph, I'll agree up to possibly the 100 line. Viewing the phenotypic differences between certain classes of humans who have existed under disparate living conditions for perhaps not much more than 2000 years, leading to different breeding selections, has demonstrated a measurable difference in trait expression. Environmental factors that change mate selection and survivability is very powerful in driving genetics.
"we" have changed no rule, so far as I can tell.
Unless you think that rule changes within a sport have nothing to do with appealing to the public, but rather are created in near accidental fashion, this is merely semantics.
Sure, to be as didactic as possible, we can say that leagues, and their rules commissions, change rules all the time in the hopes of appealing to fans, and then keep or discard those rules largely based on the perceived success of those rules.
But in the end, rules change all the time, regularly for the sake of aesthetics. Shootouts get added to hockey, hand-check rules get added to basketball, and the type and amount of contact between cornerbacks and wide receivers seemingly changes every couple of years to "open up" or "close up" the field.
These rules are not for "us" to change, but for those who run and play the sport to change.
Leagues (and by extension sports) need their fans to exist. With our dollars and attention, we make them what they are. And, consequently, they seem to have a great interest in what sports fans want (well, among other things).
Why are we having a discussion of the mechanics of rules changes? Are you saying that since you or I can't unilaterally implement a change, we shouldn't even discuss whether particular rules changes might or might not be good? We all just get what we get, and we'll like it?
(a) we may be no different genetically, but I'm four inches taller than my parents, as are many of my generation. Genotype =/= phenotype.
(b) if we're going to scrap rules because people break them, why not go hog wild and scrap them altogether? I reckon I could probably whup Michael Phelps if I was allowed run up and down the side of the pool while he swam. Having a trainer has never been against the rules, *even if* it was against the spirit.
(c) let's say we allow athletes to take what they want. Presumably we then allow other, "normal" athletes to compete in an undoped competition. Presumably, this will be reasonably lucrative, since many of us would much rather watch it than the freakshow that would follow legalised doping... so people will just start taking drugs *in that*. Legalisation just punishes those who obey the *actual rules of the competition* and don't dope, depriving them of the choice to compete clean.
People seem to be ignoring an important aspect of this. Unless you ban PE drugs, most competitions will quickly become a PE drugs arms race. Who wins and who loses will become more about whomever finds the perfect cocktail of steroids, growth hormone and amphetamines than anything else. Which is fine, I guess, unless you want to emphasize training and natural skill more than pharmaceutical innovation. This is different than shoes because they are widely available, and individual athletes typically lack the resources to develop and produce their own equipment. It's different than training methods, because that is something that we want athletic competitions to be based on. It's different than surgery, because that's not making an athlete better than he was in his natural state -- it's restoring a "defective" athlete to his natural state, and besides, because surgical methods are widely known, it doesn't create some sort of surgical arms race.
(Says the 2:55 marathoner who takes 400 mg of caffeine before a race -- in tablet form, because drinking that much coffee would make me have to stop for a pitstop during the race.)
Are there surgeries that could enhance performance if used on an otherwise-healthy athlete? If so, do we condone them or not?
Comparing doping (a harm to the body) with videotaping (reviewing what's done in the past) is comparing apples-to-oranges. It's good that athletic organizations try to catch dopers because it sends the signal that some advantages are, in fact, cheating. To do otherwise, sends a signal that cheating is acceptable, and even encouraged. Then, if you can cheat at sports, you can cheat at anything. Would you allow insider trading too? I mean, after all, it's so hard to catch, why bother, right?
demonspawn-
I'm having a little trouble following the jump you made from my fairly banal point about what motivates athletes (I said "glory" but I could have said the attendant factors of money, celebrity, etc.) to "being" and "doing" and war and feminism. I'll merely say that when the financial incentives are strong enough (as they are for minor league ballplayers trying to make it in the majors, or professional cyclists, or Olympic athletes), anyone is susceptible to cheating via chemical enhancement...think of Marion Jones, or various recent female marathon runners. It just happens that most of financial incentives are for men.
And while I'll agree there are some pretty minor phenotypic differences between certain communities of homo sapiens that have developed over a relatively short period of time, I think it's safe to say, as a species, that we are not evolving into better athletes or that we are physically much different than we were millenia ago. Between medical science and our modern, physically undemanding lives, I would suggest that, if anything, species-wide, no selective pressure is being put on athleticism at all.
Rob Lyman writes: "Are there surgeries that could enhance performance if used on an otherwise-healthy athlete? If so, do we condone them or not?"
In theory you could surgically remove the pericardium, the protective sack that envelops the heart and protects it from infection. This leaves a void in the chest where - with training - the heart can beat more effectively.
I remember hearing that that surgery could get you a 10% improvement in cardio (I think it's been tried in dogs just as a proof of concept).
However, it would also leave you more susceptible to a dangerous infection. AFAIK no one's tried it in people.
Rob: Does Tommy John surgery count?
jhd writes: "And while I'll agree there are some pretty minor phenotypic differences between certain communities of homo sapiens that have developed over a relatively short period of time, I think it's safe to say, as a species, that we are not evolving into better athletes or that we are physically much different than we were millenia ago. Between medical science and our modern, physically undemanding lives, I would suggest that, if anything, species-wide, no selective pressure is being put on athleticism at all."
Wow. You couldn't be more wrong. The average male today would be a relative giant in the days of "millennia ago." You may think 8-10 inches in height and more-than-proportionate added musculature are minor differences, but they're not.
Rob Lyman writes: "Are there surgeries that could enhance performance if used on an otherwise-healthy athlete? If so, do we condone them or not?"
Yes, LASIK surgery. According to this article:
"Certainly, training for a race is not natural--particularly with the ever-finer-grained videotaping an[sic] so forth that perfects modern technique."
Does this sentence make any sense (grammatical and/or logical) at all? Granted, it's been quite a while since I've seen Chariots of Fire, but how is training not natural? The other runners didn't train?
MoeLarryAndJesus-
I don't think you understand how evolution works.
There's a really easy explanation for why people are taller today: nutrition. Today we get a nutrient-rich and ample diet (perhaps a too ample), from the womb through puberty. Think of it this way: people are, on average, considerably taller than they were just 100 years ago. Are you saying that this is because a massive evolutionary change occurred in this short period of time? that the environment was selecting for tall people somehow? Or perhaps you've seen what a severely malnourished child looks like and you can see what a big difference that makes and why people from a millenia ago are shorter.
"One of the heroes, rich and Jewish, . . ."
I'm wondering what your intention is in mentioning the person's religion coupled with an adjective describing his/her economic status; I as well wonder if the religion would have been named had the person not been "rich," e.g, "One of the heroes, Christian . . ."
I don't think you understand how evolution works.
There's evidence that a few epigentic changes can allow a species to adapt to a changed environment in just a few generations.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epigenetics
Phenotype can change more rapidly than genotype. The change we see is undoubtedly triggered by better nutrition. But there's also evidence that such changes can be inherited. Which would be 'evolution,' technically speaking.
Sometimes I wonder what traits influence a man's fecundity.
secret asian man - The world is reasonably capitalist
Given the level of High School funding, state level support (building new stadiums), national level funding (for the olympic teams) and so on, I think it's fair to say that the sports world is reasonably socialist, though atheletes certainly have private salaries and compete with each other.
>My understanding is that the drug test can not differentiate between I took a big mess-o-steroids and I took cough medicine with codeine. And unless those Romanian Gymnasts were all touched with a really bad flu when they won their team gold medals...
If the tests can't tell the difference between opiates and artificial hormones, then we're in even more trouble than I thought. I believe some cold medicines are similar to illegal stimulants -- think making meth from OTC drugs. I don't know if the problem is false positives or actual stimulant effects.
>[re fans not wanting overt PED cocktail parties] Prove it. I think most people don't give a rat's ass either way.
Did you miss the show trials for McGuire, Giambi, etc? As soon as more-than-circumstantial evidence came out that they were dirty, the sharks started circling and everyone started thinking of the children. People want at least plausible deniability.
jhd replies: "I don't think you understand how evolution works.
There's a really easy explanation for why people are taller today: nutrition. Today we get a nutrient-rich and ample diet (perhaps a too ample), from the womb through puberty. Think of it this way: people are, on average, considerably taller than they were just 100 years ago. Are you saying that this is because a massive evolutionary change occurred in this short period of time?"
No. You were talking about "several milennia ago," though, and while I didn't go into it, I believe there have been more general changes in the human animal over that span. And see what Ryan W said at 8:19.
And you also said you didn't think "evolving into better athletes or that we are physically much different than we were millenia ago." I think that statement is (at best) overly broad.
Allowing doping just creates a whole new arms race in the art of seeking false (and dangerous) advantages.
It's like saying, "Well, I think there are smart people everywhere and it's hard to keep the atomic genie in the bottle, so might as well just open it up with nukes for all."
It takes a certain type of cynical person who assumes everyone (accept themselves, naturally), is cheating, doping, lying, cutting corners.
It's a nasty way of looking at the world. We assume everyone is doing it, and thus, encourage everyone to do it.
From the original post:
On a practical level, I don't think you can get doping out of the games.
and
Athletes are crazy competitive. They will do anything to win. Why not acknowledge that, rather than making fruitless rules?
Just because we can't eliminate doping it doesn't follow that we should stop trying. I would much rather be in the equilibrium where athletes only do what they think they can get away with, than the equilibrium where athletes will do any and all PEDs to excess to get a competitive advantage.
One other point about evolution, assortive mating has definitely increased in the last 100 years due to transportation and travel, so we are also probably sampling more of "gene space" than ever before. For instance both of Yao Ming's parents played basketball for Chinese national team, and Yao himself married Ye Li who also played for the Chinese national team. Olympic athletes are almost by definition outliers genetically.
Sigh. Please, watch the movie before you assume that I'm antisemitic. The fact that he is Jewish is a fairly major plot point in the film; his treatment as an outsider, not part of the established club at university, is one of the reasons he's chastised for hiring a trainer.
Thirdly, enhancing drugs might be dangerous, but they would be considerably less so under the supervision of a doctor rather than getting an injection of Mexican horse testosterone in the butt by some other athlete.
Except that the pressure would then be to take even more than your supervised dose in order to get that last extra drop of performance in.
I'm not particularly in favor of the government banning steroids, but I think it is a reasonable policy for sports leagues to make for themselves.
Athletes (and human beings in general) today are not genetically any different from athletes 100 years ago
True.
or from a greek javelin thrower 2500 years ago
much, much less true
or from a hunter 10,000 years ago.
Oh, please. 10,000 years (approx. 300-500 generations) is plenty of time for significant genetic differences to appear.
This is one area where I agree with ol' Moe.
Gender relations is "my thing" and therefore I am aware of links other people just don't know about. Sometimes I forget this stuff is not common knowledge.
Historically, sport was a method of demonstrating, in boys, a willingness to endure pain, take risks, work as a team, and accomplish... for fame, glory, and, most importantly, the attention of females (the source of and reason for cheerleaders). When we train boys to associate enduring pain and repressing emotional expression with serving the greater good and obtaining personal desires we train them to become the killers to protect society. This is the historical purpose for sport and the tradition upon which it is based, even though it does not serve exactly or as much of the same purpose today (but the quarterback still gets the prom queen).
So, my was to refute your "foolish" assertion. We teach boys to endure pain for an important reason. We already encourage them to do substantial harm to their bodies. To propose otherwise would be to get them out of competitive sports entirely, to start valuing boys for being rather than doing... and to accelerate the downfall of society that feminism has already started.
Traditions exist for a reason. That reason is often because "it worked" or "it served a purpose for society".
As for feminism, I replied that directly to Megan, not to you. Basically, my assertion there was that life, like sport, is not "fair" and that the best people in any category is almost exclusively male. That's why men are on top (and on bottom, but oft ignored for their status there) by fate of genetics and phenotypic expression. That men and women are not equal, and therefore the entire supposed premise of feminism is bunk (but feminism was never about equality anyways... another tangent that can be discussed when it is actually relevant).
Several years ago, Scientific American magazine had an article by two researchers working on gene therapy to cure muscular distrophy. They said in the article that the 2008 Olympic games were to be the last in which you could say with high confidence that none of the athletes had been genetically altered.
The same therapy that one day may allow one of "Jerry's Kids" to walk and live a normal life can also be used to bulk up a weightlifter, give a long distance runner more slow twitch muscle fiber, or give a sprinter more fast twitch muscle fiber. While there are severe restrictions on gene therapy experiments on humans in the US and Europe, the authors pointed out that there are authoritarian governments that might not have the same ethical biases as we do, They might see sacrificing the health of some athletes to win Olympic medals as a net positive. *cough* China *cough* It was done in the past with PEDs in East Germany.
That's beans. We currently have the gene therapy technology to cure some forms of blindness....
....
...If you're a dog, that is. Ethics panels in the US won't allow the research on humans.
Thanks for the thought though... I had forgotten about that area of research. Takes "doping" to a whole new level, doesn't it? Testing for this will be extremely difficult and potentially impossible (the tissue samples required would damage an athletes ability to perform).
P.S. Full disclaimer: I might be a little ahead on "currently have" as I last heard that it was ongoing and they have had some successful cases.
"Not all banned drugs are harmful. In fact, many medicines taken regularly by the general population are banned for athletes, even in the regular approved dosage."
Most prescription medicines are harmful if you don't have the condition they treat. Many are harmful even if you do, but hopefully less harmful than that condition.
Steven Barnes and Larry Niven wrote an SF novel (_Achilles' Choice_) about this exact subject. It's an interesting examination of almost every issue raised in these comments.
BTW, Steven also blogs.
There's a point here that nobody has addressed: there's a cost to the current regime of PED banning, which is the privacy and bodily autonomy of the athletes. Because there are so many ways to "cheat," the testing regimes get more and more intrusive. (The tests themselves are intrusive, and one also has to notify the appropriate authorities where one will be at all times just in case they want to surprise-test you.)
It's fine to say that leagues should be allowed to ban drugs if they want, but it's misleading to act as if they're doing so unilaterally. They're doing so at the point of a Congressional gun.
My plan for steroids, in track and field and swimming, at least. Two sets of races, one with steroids allowed and one with steroids banned. We'd have the steroid record and the non-steroid record. It doesn't solve the problem for team sports, but to the extent that we need running and jumping and throwing and swimming records as accurate measures of human performance, it works. We would know what effects the drugs had.
"Athletes are crazy competitive. They will do anything to win. Why not acknowlege that, rather than making fruitless rules?"
So true. I intend to win the Tour de France next year. I will be riding a Harley.
You are so fucking stupid you should thank your god every night that people even stupider than you run the Atlantic, so you have a gig. If you do not have a god, you should get one, just so you can be thankful to it.
For me, I just like the idea that we scour the world for genetic freaks who are perfectly designed to do some particular activity (see Phelps). Turning athletes into lab rats who are trying different cocktails of drug just isn't as interesting. Plus, the genetic freaks look cool while the dope fiends just don't (usually, for cycling it doesn't seem to be as obvious).
Also, thinking about steroids too much makes me physically ill, so there's some of that going on, too.