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Comment by gascan | Hacker News Reader

We seem to take it very much case by case. Running efficiency augments are controversial. Drugs are verboten. But better bicycles are OK, and football players can wear eyeblack and grip-enhancing gloves.

The closer a sport is to pure human performance, though, the more sensitive we seem to be about it. Perhaps out of a sense of continuity through the ages. Yeah, we train better than Athenian athletes. But we still run the same way with the same air and the same gravity.

I'm not terribly worried about stunting development of augments; it's practically the DoD's charter to develop and productize unfair advantages.

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> We seem to take it very much case by case.

The principle is very consistent: You can't do something that gives you an unfair advantage over other competitors. Everything banned basically falls into one of three categories:

- It would be prohibitively expensive for others to adopt the technology. This is why you have weight minimums for bikes, boats, etc.

- Others would have to risk their health to compete. This is why you have bans of performance enhancing drugs, blood doping, etc.

- Others would have to break the law to compete. This is why you have bans on illegal drugs, even if they're not necessarily performance enhancing.

Occasionally things are also banned to preserve comparability to current records or to preserve the aesthetic sense of the sport, but for the most part when something is banned it's for one of the three enumerated reasons.

"unfair advantage" is particularly hard to define. We are not born equals, so there are already folks among us who have unfair advantage due to their genes, their upbringing, their social background, etc... I would say the definition is still blur. What if you have a medical condition that impairs you in some ways but make you stronger for doing one type of tasks? Is that unfair?

It's reasonable that amputees with prosthetic legs would be banned from normal competitions because they weren't born with those legs; they were manufactured. But what if it was discovered that people born without an appendix somehow performed better? Would they be banned? It would seem unfair to ban them. But it could lead to competitors surgically removing their organs, which would go against the spirit of the sport. But allowing them to compete might also create a class of appendix-less "mutants" who dominate a sport.

I heard a podcast recently about a wrestler who was born without legs. He was almost unbeatable at the high school level, due in part to (a) his very low center of gravity, (b) the ineffectiveness of many common moves on him, and (c) the fact that he could carry much more upper body muscle into the same weight class.

The other parents in the state were teaming up to try to get him banned for unfair advantage (!)

Genetic advantage is what we're testing for in these running experiments though. It isn't an unfair advantage, it's the whole point.

I like your comment and agree with it. The purpose of such sports, especially the Olympics, is to test for genetic (and, I'll add environmental & epigentic) advantages.

Your thoughts on Caster Semenya's "advantages"?

Events like the Olympics - and athletics as we know it - will lose the public’s attention if the most publicsed events (e.g. men’s 100m) become giant genetics microoptimization pissing contests - but it’s the direction the sports-science industrial complex is heading in anyway; but I hope it will lead to less contested sports becoming more popular.

Genetics will be interesting, but I wonder if we eventually reach a point where it's even beyond that. To use Gattaca as an example, a person with vastly inferior genetics was able to outperform genetically perfect individuals through sheer "human spirit" (the film's term) which manifested as work ethic, drive, will, etc.

I could see a future where we've settled on the perfect genetic template for specific disciplines so we progress on to brain chemistry and/or psychology in order to reproduce the spirit aspect which separates the merely genetically blessed from the world class athletes.

[Gattaca spoiler warnings]

> outperform genetically perfect individuals through sheer "human spirit" (the film's term) which manifested as work ethic, drive, will, etc.

I didn't like Gattaca's message for that reason: it's fallacious to suggest those mental attributes aren't also subject to genetic advantages.

Another issue with the story is that the protagonist has a heart condition, and in the end he got on the spaceship's crew, which meant other people's lives were put at risk if he collapsed due to that heart condition in-transit. Salute the human spirit, but he put others at risk for his own benefit, and that's irresponsible and immoral.

> I could see a future where we've settled on the perfect genetic template for specific disciplines so we progress on to brain chemistry and/or psychology in order to reproduce the spirit aspect which separates the merely genetically blessed from the world class athletes.

Adderall, lol.

It is a question of time until we have Gene doping. It might be happening already.

At that price and 100 mile effective usability, it's hard not to bring up the pay to win argument for these shoes.

I think it's interesting that the Olympics banned certain swimsuits because they were "too good." I dunno how much they cost at the time, but a quick search on Amazon shows these swimsuits are $200-500. That seems a pretty low bar for Olympic quality equipment.

https://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=36&doc_id=1286...

> That seems a pretty low bar for Olympic quality equipment.

IIRC the issue was either that you can only use them once, or else that they weren't widely available. $500 wouldn't be disqualifying on its own, e.g. a good 8+ shell costs around 40k.

Those suits are so tight that after one (or a few) use they are effectively ruined. So it comes out to hundreds/thousands of dollars per race, not to mention during training.

Another thing to consider is that swimmers internationally compete on the same playing field — any aspiring swimmer can measure their times in direct comparison to the greats. In this way, even a child at his first swim meet is indirectly competing with their idols. I can understand why there is pushback against removing that aspect of the competition.

> Others would have to risk their health to compete.

This is pretty tenuous for some things though, like ephedrine, clenbuterol, or blood doping.

Blood doping can clog your blood, also sticking needles deep into veins on a regular basis, gotta have some risks.

Regarding the needles my father had kidney dialysis 3 times a week for about 5 years. He had a shunt [1]. They had to switch arms eventually, but his veins held up pretty well.

In comparison, blood doping isn't done on a regular basis such as 3 times a week. And 3 times a week isn't much for a regular heroin addict (who are know to destroy their veins), either.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shunt_(medical)

> It would be prohibitively expensive for others to adopt the technology. This is why you have weight minimums for bikes

Weight minimums for bikes is for safety also, riders started using frames that were so light that a race become more of a gamble if your bike would break or not.

Swimming had this exact same issue a few years ago with the new full body suits that reduce drag too much. Each sports handles this differently and most decisions seem completely arbitrary with the biggest deciding factor simply being tradition. For example, no one cares that swimmers have always shaved their entire body and/or worn a cap to prevent drag. However the new suits just provided too big of a single jump to not require an immediate response.

One of the weirdest arbitrary decisions is the difference between almost universally banned "blood doping" and almost universally allowed "platelet-rich plasma therapy". You can draw a patient's blood and put it in a centrifuge to separate out the red blood cells from the platelets. Reinjecting the red blood cells is doping while reinjecting the platelets is an acceptable medical treatment.

One point that surprised me about those banned suits is that the drag reduction they provide is largely indirect. Instead, they're buoyant. They make the swimmers float higher in the water leaving less of them in the pool to be dragged on. So for roughly the same reason you can't compete in the freestyle paddling on a surfboard, you can't use those suits.

Apparently they worked by other mechanisms as well, but the floaty aspect alone seems a reasonable justification for the ban.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/why-ban-full-body-olympics-swi...

Your comment reminded me of the 80s movie Running Man. There are no rules, there is only winning.

Which is the antithesis to principles of competing fairly. And in Running Man there were undiscovered rules, but only ones to game the sport which came crashing down resulting in a loss of trust of the institution.

Transparency is key for trust in sport and thus continuality of the larger body.

I thought the only rule was to boost ratings.

When aero gear was introduced to cycling there was quite a bit of turmoil. Not the least of which was the fact that Greg Lemond used it to demolish Laurent Fignon in the last time trail, and jump what seemed to be a comfortable gap and win the Tour. By six seconds. I can still picture Fignon laying on the ground at the finish line, hands clenched in fists wondering where it all went wrong.

There were limits then and there have been limits since. No fairings. How long your helmet can be. I have a vague recollection about them banning inserts in your clothes (no teardrops for your calves, no articulated helmets or dorsal fins).

[edit: and apparently disc brakes were just approved last season]

These days Lemond is watchdogging for electric motors hidden in the bikes. Which is a side effect of trying to fix two other problems. First, PEDs aka doping. Second, paying to win.

The exotic materials some teams could afford resulted in light bikes that other teams couldn’t approach. They set a minimum weight for bikes, which meant you either put heavier equipment on the bike (eg, torque gauges in the rear hub) or you loaded weights into it. Or you hid a flashlight battery and a tiny 20 watt motor in the bottom bracket...

The easiest way to remedy all the cheating with bikes and equipment in cycling would be to PROVIDE official bikes the equipment every single day, and make it rotate randomly. Otherwise, you are always playing catching up to discover the latest tricks they devised.

That would wreck the economics of pro cycling because most of the teams are partly sponsored by bike manufactures. Those manufacturers want to be exclusively associated with particular winning teams for marketing purposes.

So what? We have to be afraid of changing stuff because the current statu quo of pro cycling would be affected? That's a pretty weak argument.

Motorsport is sort of similar where manufacturers build cars and there are independent regulations about the cars that define a class. There are spec racing series confined to single cars with very limited additions (safety) that are more oriented towards the driver in terms of competition (spec miata and spec bmw come to mind), but any international world champion type of sport is probably going to require enough monetary backing that manufacturer and aftermarket sponsorship is required to even afford to compete in the first place.

I don't think you understand how pro cycling works. Unlike other pro sports, cycling teams can't really sell tickets to spectators. Most of the revenue comes from sponsors for marketing purposes. So any change that makes it less effective as an advertising channel is a total non-starter.

> make it rotate randomly

In the days when Sussman was a novice, Minsky once came to him as he sat hacking at the PDP-6.

“What are you doing?”, asked Minsky.

“I am training a randomly wired neural net to play Tic-Tac-Toe” Sussman replied.

“Why is the net wired randomly?”, asked Minsky.

“I do not want it to have any preconceptions of how to play”, Sussman said.

Minsky then shut his eyes.

“Why do you close your eyes?”, Sussman asked his teacher.

“So that the room will be empty.”

At that moment, Sussman was enlightened.

(http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/koans.html#id3141241)

Or, in other words, making something random does not make it fair; it is still just as unfair as before, only unpredictably so.

The point is that everyone would be riding identical bikes. The rotation would be to stop the teams optimising around the quirks of a particular bike.

> But better bicycles are OK

UCI has lots of rules around the size, geometry, and weight of equipment that can limit how much better you can make a bike. They even explicitly don't allow new innovations without their prior approval. Manufacturers find ways around the rules but to a large degree better bikes are actually not OK.

This is strange to me and basically says the engineers are not allowed to compete...

This is similar to the limit imposed on various motorsports. It's not that engineers aren't allowed to compete (they most definitely do, within the limitations imposed by the sport's governing body)--the rules exist to level the playing the field a bit between teams and companies with radically different budgets.

My favorite example of forbidden ingenuity is the "sucker car" (Chapparal 2J) which used a plastic skirt to seal the car to the ground, and pump that sucked the air from underneath the car, producing an insane amount of downforce. It was outlawed of course after blowing away the competition.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaparral_Cars#2J

There is a legitimate safety concern with active aero systems. If they fail in the middle of turn the car is likely to slide off the track, endangering everyone on the track.

The next equipment we should ban: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3tMJ8U-2ZMU

I also liked the Mazda Rotary/Wankel engine that really threw the classification systems at LeMans.

Because the Rotary engines are something in between a 2-stroke and 4-stroke calculating it's displacement in comparison to 4-stroke engines was difficult.

In case of Formula 1 racing rules exists to force more innovation.

For example, the trend of the past few years is to limit engine capacity and reduce fuel consumption. So the rules say your engine must go down from 3 liters to 2.4 liters capacity and now it's your job as an engineer to maintain the same horsepower (of roughly 800 hp) at that lower capacity.

Actually, changing those rules every year puts teams with lower budget at disadvantage: they are basically limited to buying engines from richer teams, because they wouldn't be able to keep up with all those rule changes on their own.

The engineers can compete in engineering competitions. A bicycle race is not one of those.

@mathgladiator sometimes such rules are aimed at limiting the advantage you can buy with money. Not sure if this is the true motivation here. Or in Formula 1, the restrictions are generally for the safety of the drivers. Anyway, engineering within constraints can still be competitive.

(I don't feel strongly about this personally, just listing some of the counterpoints)

As another example of equipment that is banned because its technological advancements are deemed to give an unfair advantage, take a look at golf. Equipment manufacturers need to get their products tested & approved by the USGA in order to be allowed in many tournaments. Clubs or balls that fly too far when you hit them do not get the required approval.

And the USGA actually took away the stomach/gut putter.

In golf this makes sense as it is far easier to replace your clubs than make a new course.

it's case-by case, and also sport-by-sport. each sport is governed by their own organization that decides which technical advantages are fair and which aren't.

and it's interesting that you mention better bicycles being okay, because for the most part they aren't. UCI rules state "no technical innovation regarding anything used, worn or carried by any rider or license holder during a competition (bicycles, equipment mounted on them, accessories, helmets, clothing, means of communication, etc.) may be used until approved by the UCI executive bureau."

the full ruleset for what constitutes a race-legal bicycle is here: http://www.uci.ch/mm/Document/News/Rulesandregulation/16/51/...

Since your comment has spawned a lot of responses bringing up examples of how various sports have dealt with equipment innovation, this seems a good place to post this article, "The Boat That Almost Was" [1], about a project to design a better boat for the America's Cup yacht race.

[1] http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/3541/1/Clauser.pdf

Better bicycles are ok? There are all sorts of restrictions for UCI events. Recumbents are immensely faster than upright bikes --- banned. Beam bikes (like trek y-foil) are a bit faster --- banned. There's a lower limit for bike weight. You can't add fairings. You can't add motors or energy storage mechanisms. The stated goal is to maintain the primacy of man over machine and to some extent rider safety. Of course bikes do slowly change over time in ways that are presumably advantageous to their riders, but you aren't allowed to make huge leaps all at once, which makes some sense as it's fine if everyone has the same advantage (but also, pointless and expensive for amateurs).

Grip enhancing gloves are definitely not without controversy.

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