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Comment by mpsprd | Hacker News Reader

This website ignores the big problem with enhancement medication: the health of participants.

A future where there is an incentive to juice up athletes as much as possible is a recipe for disaster.

Wikipedia has a list of premature professional wrestlers deaths, look for the ones that died of heart attack before 50: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_premature_professional... - the roid era really did a number, though of course, working through pain and injury with the help of pain killers and other drugs didn't help either.

Oh man, this is such a sobering read. There are a lot of suicides in those tables :/

They do address it here: https://enhanced.org/science-is-real/

Whether you like or accept their treatment of the subject is up to you

Aside from the normal risks of injury there is the simple fact that many athletes would take the risk. I think it's morbid but top level athletes probably already deal with things that would make the normie sports fan queazy. They'd do it happily for the status and adrenaline

Yep but that's true of many sports. In fact most sports at high levels involve a heightened risk of life-changing injury. It's a difference of degree rather than type.

Not that that invalidates your criticism but it does require it to be formulated in a more nuanced way.

The biggest problem isn't that the highest-level athletes would waste away their bodies (that's a big problem, but not the biggest); it is that below them, there will be thousands if not millions of second- and third-level athletes doing the same. With much less control.

Imagine if every kid out there that wanted to be the next Ronaldo or Neymar (and could afford it) started taking steroids and EPO. That's a huge cost, and what did we gain exactly? A slightly lower number on some clock?

I agree with you, the higher the level, the more athletes will destroy their bodies in the process.

My critism is about actively encouraging said destruction via promotion of stimulants. It's already bad as it is.

The participants ignore the health of the participants quite a bit already in many a sport. Let them do what they want, I say.

The argument that I’ve heard against this is that pro athlete training is already really dangerous - yet athletes are valuable enough that their handlers have some incentive to be reasonably cautious to not push things too far most of the time.

Of course, we also know of many many athletes that have been permanently injured during training, so it’s hard for me to know how true the above is.

If something is already really dangerous, why add performance enhancing drugs into the mix and make it even more dangerous?

recipe for death, ultimately

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