Every sport hits this sort of threshold where they ban optimization. Swimming did it with 'sharkskin' suits and long distance running with Nike's Alphafly and Vaporfly shoes.
Maybe that's where advanced baseball bats will end up eventually.
Maybe that's where advanced baseball bats will end up eventually.
https://www.therunningweek.com/post/carbon-plate-running-sho...
Would you be willing to be the guinea pig?
Why in the world would this have any bearing on the conversation? What point are you trying to make?
If the former, I regret to inform you: you are a psycopath.
If the latter, then please go read some Nassim Taleb and refrain from opining on what is acceptable risks for others unless you yourself are willing to pay for the consequences.
It's no different than asking if workers should be allowed to work without PPE.
The problem was not offered as your sibling comment as a forced decision. Some people choose to juice, others do not. That same logic applied to if you want to do it, here's the waiver to acknowledge it was your decision. I can feel sorry for someone's family for being related to a dunce, but no empathy is required on my part for the dunce.
The spirit of fair competition (and thus ordering teams according to some predefined metric) is very important to most sports.
F1 introduced a cost cap to stop the top manufactures from being able to test and develop everything they want to.
F1's regulations are very strict and completely artificial, just not quite so strict as to allow only 1 car. This is both for safety and cost control. In Schumacher's days, why did ferrari dominate so much? Because they have a private circuit, a much larger budget than anyone, and the racers flew back to the factory to spend long day after long day of testing right next to where the parts where being manufactured. We'd not have a full grid if anyone had to compete with budgets like that
You could probably accomplish something similar by strictly capping spending per team to force people to do real engineering and optimize their play accordingly, but the result would be a very different sport that would appeal to a very different (and probably much smaller) audience. Formula One and Robot Wars come to mind.
This is simply not reflected very well in how professional sports are structured. If this were really a priority teams wouldn't be privately owned. It has extremely negative effects on each sport, easily dwarfing the influence of performance enhancing drugs.
Anyway, I would absolutely love to see what the human body is capable of. To me, hearing a ban of performance enhancing drugs is a guarantee of a more boring and less competitive game. I understand the impetus of protecting children, but we're already buying and selling humans. How good of an influence was this to begin with?
But ultimately you run into issues like the colorado rockies where the owner just views it like an entertainment venue and basically refuses to invest in the team in any rational way. The entire model of competiton-through-investment doesn't make as much sense once you realize you can place butts in seats without a competent team to root for.
(And personally, i think it makes a lot of sense for the team to own itself, or a state to own a team, or something like that. I think the Green Bay Packers have a setup like this.)
It's also not possibly to divvy players rarely—sometimes you run into people who are truly extraordinary, and exorbitant salaries can help balance this, to debatable efficacy.
Edit: yup, https://www.packers.com/community/shareholders. Kind of an orthogonal issue to disproportionate spending of teams, though.
It almost sounds like corporate ownership could help with this, something like shareholders owning the team, and then the management is obligated to do what’s best for the shareholders (and somehow that should be to win). It seems like part of the problem might also be:
- sports teams make money by selling tickets and merchandise
- teams sell tickets and merchandise by being entertaining, which may or may not involve winning
Custom drugs seem like a step too far IMO. As far as the suits go that's to level out body shapes as an issue.
Sports should be for those doing them, and then if people end up caring and commercial competitions end up viable, then that's a bonus but we shouldn't design them for entertainment of the audience.
Customization of equipment should always be fine unless it increases injury risk or completely destroys the game.
Amateur sports like colleges or olympics could continue to have the traditional rules to keep things "competitive", but might as well let the pro-sports just go full tilt.
Do you not see the contradiction here? Professional wrestling is huge. It has very loyal fans. The fans pay for pay-per-view and live event sales. They buy merch. Nobody attends a WWE event expecting Greco-Roman style wrestling. They all know exactly what they are getting.
This is because winning in this game is seen as an achievement, and a natural and reasonable achievement-- after all, there are many world records that nobody cares about.
There's a reason someone might prefer a sport over seeing a circus performance.
You’re arguing that others should not be allowed because you don’t like it.
All the major sports alter their rules every year to increase their entertainment value. Here is a short, non-exhaustive list off the top of my head: NBA flopping penalties, NBA player resting policy, MLB base stealing rule changes, MLB free base runners, MLB pitch clocks, NFL changing overtime rules almost every year, NFL challenges and reviews, etc.
There is nothing wrong with not having much knowledge of sports, but it might be worth reconsidering your strident opinions if that's the case.
But I agree that sports at the elite level aren't about health. It's not unusual to be doing things that at least risk injury.
I think these kinds of rule changes are destructive though. They certainly are in tennis.
Suddenly a line was draw between have- and have-nots based on whose parents could and would buy this stuff. (My club, like many, practiced in a small municipal pool and it was very budget friendly. The fancy suits would be a large fraction of the annual cost to a family.)
In my opinion banning the suits was great for the sport at the age-group level, and thus the sport in general.
It's called worker safety.
Brazilian jiu-jitsu /submission grappling is like this right now
The biggest events don't test. That's adcc and ibjjf tournaments only test the winners of black and belt and they can skip the testing somehow
Personally I think it's bad for the sport and hobby. Downstream effects where it normalizes ped use for hobbyist tournaments and delusional parents have their kids on steroids and try. The best don't win neccesarily, just who handles the drugs the best
The problem here is of course that you probably won't get the best athletes in the world to sign up for that. So you'd be watching desperate and quite mediocre athletes who feel they have literally no other option in life.
Are you suggesting the rules of sports are a natural property of the universe? It’s all completely arbitrary. That’s kind of the point: we watch people perform these arbitrary tasks and then we celebrate.
Always wondered why the NFL doesn't ban sticky gloves.