Make it uniform and regulate it and maybe you keep everyone safe. Or not. I don't really care, I build scripts for a living. /shrug
Secondly, this 'sets a bad example'. Not in the moral sense, but in a pragmatic sense. Regulated doping in competition encourages enthusiastic amateurs to also start doping. Not only does it seem wrong to require aspiring amateurs to take medical steps, there is the added issue of lack of guidance. Amateurs have less of a support team around them, thus making mistakes or uneducated use more likely.
In the end, you rule against doping not to keep the sport fair, but to keep the sport safe for aspiring amateurs and professionals. In turn, this keeps the sport alive by having a steady influx.
There is a fairness issue regarding 'pay to win' becoming a more effective strategy whilst, at the same time, also increasing the financial barrier to entry.
Pro athletes generally strive to achieve excellence at some task the human body is adapted for -- running, jumping, throwing. But it's within the limitations imposed by their own human bodies, which are very well-adapted for keeping themselves safe while accomplishing these tasks. They know that going overboard risks burnout and injury, so their incentives are generally aligned with staying healthy. Chemically tricking the body into doing something long-term unsafe in return for short-term performance is a different ballgame.
(Of course there are a few outlier sports like American football and sumo wrestling which are just clearly unhealthy. Even for those, I don't see why we should make matters worse by sanctioning unhealthy PEDs.)
There are many sports (especially in track and field!) where we are meeting the limitations of normal humans. Can you be a world class sprinter if your body is not aligned to it at birth? If you are disadvantaged at birth, how reasonable is it that after sacrificing most of your life to training you are going to accept inevitable failure? What if a PED can push you over the top?
One of my favourite quotes of all time is from the Simpsons: "Cheating is the gift man gives himself".
With billions on the planet and hundreds of millions who are rich enough to pursue sport, the pool of people who have the drive and are willing to dedicate everything to being the best at their sport is HUGE. What is sport at that point? Filtering for genetic freaks?
But then, looking at it another way, should we then see it as a technological challenge? Let's look at cycling. Whether or not we accept the premise that doping and PEDs in the pro peloton are a thing of the past, it's hard to argue with the success of Sky's "marginal gains" strategy. The margins of victory in large stage races are so minute that even a 10 watt difference could be meaningful.
I kind of look at this as an F1 style of sports. Those with the access to money for research will win (as we see with Sky in cycling). If we include PEDs? Well, then money for research becomes even more important.
Now, I actually like F1 racing (even while not really liking cars -- I'm complicated ;-) ). I like pro cycling. I like a lot of things. But, I honestly don't think this is the direction that sports should go. As someone who participated in track and field in his youth, I'm highly disillusioned with current trends -- competition for medals, the need to beat world records, people sitting on their sofa watching 10 minute vignettes of "life drama" with occasional intermissions of some guys running.
Sports for me is 50 year olds getting together for a game of soccer; jogging in the morning every day to get ready for the 10 km "marathon"; riding in a "sportive"; softball; hockey; kendo; whatever you enjoy doing.
Watching people at the top level is awesome, but we don't need to enhance it. We don't need to embellish it. We certainly don't need to pay someone the GDP of a small country so that we can have bragging rights at the office the next week. Especially if a PED makes the difference between a struggling athlete bagging groceries for a living or living the life of a super star.
But the real crux of the situation is this: For a given individual, on every possible lift and every possible weight, it is always safer to use anabolic steroids than not.
If professional orgs would ban athletes for life, there would be little doping, but somehow nobody does that. Why? Perhaps money from sponsors is much more important than safety and fairness?
Make the punishment for burglary the death penalty, and burglary would go down. And yet, such harsh punishment is generally frowned upon.
Depends on the context, if it's hard to be caught or people who commit burglary today are people that are ready to accept any risk due to their socioeconomic condition then it's not a good deterrent.
So, just because lifetime bans would be an effective deterrent doesn't mean that we should instate lifetime bans.
Such moral violation is for me first sign that counterparty is dangerous to the well being of others. Why not exclude such counterparties from the game altogether? I don't care as much if it will deter the future ones, I just want the ones already caught to be out of the game!
This is less desirable outcome than is ideal, which is why there's room for making everyone better off through enforcement of norms against PEDs. It's a question of what everyone must do in order to be competitive.
That said, there should be a conversation about whether the cure is worse than the disease. If PEDs are safe enough, the costs of enforcement and allowing the cheaters who make it through the screens to win will outweigh the benefits of having the bar for competition lowered.
I really like this framing. You've expressed something I've felt intuitively but never really been able to articulate (either to myself or others).
Better is making sure that economic opportunities remain available for those without degrees, when possible. Make it illegal to discriminate against those without college degrees unless it's a bona-fide occupational qualification.
The analogy would be more clear with sports - putting more effort into youth basketball training won't make more NBA players, it will just make NBA players better.
Even if there were a finite number of "slots", not funding smart poor kids to go to college is a dumb idea. Having smarter/better candidates for the "slots" is better.
However, this isn't the point that the "free college for everyone" crowd is aware of, let alone considering. It's straight equivocation between "college degree holder earns on average $X more" and "an extra college degree is worth $X more to society as a whole".
Anabolic steroids are legal in many countries, like Mexico and Poland. It's just the US that criminalizes them, and probably has influenced the decision to ban them outright.
Regulation is another thing. I'd actually say they are regulated, in that the current rule is "don't take them". And even enforcing that relatively simple rule - just detect them, is actually a hard problem we can't solve very well, given the amount of athletes that lost medals over the last couple of olympics.
In the end, PED regulation is just another set of rules added to each sport. These are professional athletes, and most manage to not run into any problems understanding and following the rules. Adding some kind of "permitted level of use" is theoretically possible, but I suspect you'll just end up spending a lot more money trying to detect how much anyone is using at a particular period of time, etc. etc. Add stupid political pressure from the US federal government, and I'd imagine any kind of "lenient system" would just be far, far more expensive to execute.
This is not entirely true. You will not be penalized for possessing anabolic steroids in Poland but selling without prescription is illegal. So without prescription the only way to get them is black market and there are tons of fakes on black market. So you don't really know what you are buying..
I'm not so sure about peds for competition or recovery, but if cannabis is considered a ped by various sports commissions and can be beneficial to brain injury that is a damn shame.
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/ae3gqe/the-nfl-sh...
http://www.timesofisrael.com/cannabis-could-treat-traumatic-...
Cannabis is a problem due to other political issues which means it's illegal in most major sport playing jurisdictions.
Cannabis is very, very, much considered a PED. It is banned in competition by USADA and WADA.
Anesthetizing effects, motor processing effects, lung performance, etc...
I will agree that most people most of the time are not smoking and becoming super athletes. I do not agree that athletic performance is unaffected by it and that it's consequences are universally negative. Hence the ban against using it in fair athletic competition.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldman%27s_dilemma
The update in that wikipedia link point to changing attitudes in more recent years.
My only issue is that athletics start at a young age for most. For some sports, people routinely go pro in their teenage years (tennis, baseball, etc.). We would have parents PEDing up their kids just to get the college scholarships or drafted out of high school. Feels like that would do more harm than good.
The vast majority of Olympic athletes are not professionals.
Of course, it's perfectly valid to say that we're already at that point, but I don't know that sanctioning their use is the right thing to do for the governing bodies. I don't know what the answer is, but I agree completely that they should be illegal in the eyes of the law.
Admittedly, those two are at an extreme in terms of destroying your body, but they're not alone. Gymnastics leaves people in rough shape in their later years. I'd imagine figure skating and tennis are also pretty hard on you too.
I suspect the better fitnes that sports persons have in most other sports, combined with the above average income, means they almost certainly have better health than the average person, even after adjusting for the fact that they likely have better physical health genes.
> Make it uniform and regulate it and maybe you keep everyone safe. Or not. I don't really care, I build scripts for a living. /shrug
I am skeptical, however, that doping will ever get under control unless the pressure behind the doping relents. The rewards in elite sports are perhaps too great. By the time athletes reach their prime mentally, the body is no longer at its peak, and they're desperately trying to compensate to finally reap the rewards of a career of brutal training.
I admit, my curiosity was piqued by Mutant League Football, but I still think it might be viable. They can maintain separate records and petty much allow anything. One might even make another group that allowed body modifications.
Well, it is regulated. What is not regulated is that for example steroids permanently modify the amount of myonuclei so that a steroid user will have better long term recovery (rebuilding from reduced muscle state) for decades after usage. Or take EPO: the effect of using EPO is the same as using a compression chamber and has the same dangers (arguably, using EPO is safer than subjecting your body to a outdated compression chamber sourced from the landfill), yet one is allowed and one is forbidden. Then there's steroid usage after injuries (why do teams have a dedicated physician? so he can give people steroids if they stub their little toe).
You can either forbid (on paper) or completely deregulate; "some" regulation will not change very much vs. prohibition.
And there's nothing really arbitrary about the rules, or at least no more arbitrary than almost any other rule you can find. Just because you can argue about the exact requirements to become a lawyer in Iowa doesn't mean that my hamster is as good a lawyer as the top graduate of Harvard Law.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-powerlifting-tells...
If you want watch people go all out with AAS, HGH, insulin and all that you can watch modern bodybuilding.
Edit: See here for a really detailed comparison from someone who knows what he's talking about: https://www.strongerbyscience.com/steroids-and-strength-diff...
As per motor sport it is obvious what class a car is in, there is no pretending to be the other class.
The testing would be more part of signing up to a given class, everyone would know what everyone was taking whether that be nothing or everything. Much like how in Motorsport you know cylinder count, oil used and so on.
It would be both a sport and a laboratory for transhumanism. I'd be incredibly interested to see what science came out of it.
There are probably ethical arguments to be made against doing that, but... meh.
The entire modern sport of cycling is based around the idea that riders sheltering behind forward team mates or rivals burn much less energy pushing through the air.
Without the rules governing bike design riders would probably gravitate to the use of fully faired recumbent bikes and the team dynamic would be lost. We'd be reduced to what amounts to individual time trials.
This is one reason why we have individual and team time trials on slightly less restricted designs to separate the desciplins.