The flavor of the current outrage over doping in the Tour de France and Barry Bond's vitamins suggests that we've always been reluctant to change and one age's norm is another's work of the devil. No doubt the first runner that showed up with a sandal and a gourd for water was met with cries of unfair advantage.
It is a tug between the drive to excel and evolve and the protectionist instinct of the status quo, Back iN the Day , it meant real survival. If chewing some leaves or drinking a tea gave you a boost on the food chain we just did it.
Sports and gambling predate the written word. Like medicine and the current debate over genetics and stem cell debate there is the pull back but the gravity is to move forward. What's the difference if a CEO gets to buy and organ to live another day to plunder more riches and a guy injecting horse sperm playing a kids game for millions of dollars a year?
Yesterday's piss test is today's blood scan, the further tests are refined the further the edge goes. Let's erase that edge all together. Full disclosure! The sports world loves stats, thrives on them. So does the supposed medical research industry. Now with full disclosure it's all out in the open for them to discuss, you could merge them into fabulous real life Sci-Fi, "This tour de France features the first four legged rider, the 100meter butterfly done with genetic halibut therapy." Yes shocking but no more strange then the first guy you saw shave his body to skim seconds of his butterfly time or more close to home people being poisoned by the 'fake sugar' industry. For me these are the real doping scandals, poisoning people in secret to decrease their performance.
Maybe I do have a second tongue in cheek here. I don't really care about sports, but I would love to see the wheat grass, raw foods yogi as a batting or boxing champion. If we knew what everyone was on it would clear up a lot. If senators, doctors, much less sports hero's had a full blood chemistry declarations then we're getting somewhere.
The East German swim teams of the 80's trounced other nations and elicited cries of hormone irregularities. In the west hormones were handed out to women like candy. The swimmers could have been the hormone canary in our cancer and heart disease coal mine.
The belief that you can 'clean' up something from the outside with a system of security and testing is bad mathematics. It only and always leads to a suspicion. Like deep down we know the drive to succeed is stronger then any social morals and someone is going to figure out a way to circumvent the testing.
So maybe it will let us look at the idea of champion in a different light too. If someone is willing to trade their health and gamble against cancers and organ failure for a fleeting record, fake gold medal or moments on the podium we all get a lesson. Sure they may say, records and championships assure a mark in history. The thing about history is it includes the now and will always be updated, so when the gold medalist is a candidate for radiation and surgery then we all get a lesson without loosing and organ.
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