What's the point of the competition when a good portion of the top athletes are doping? It's not a pure contest of man, willpower, carbon-fiber, and asphalt.
The real spectacle is now between the athletes, regulators, lawyers, coaches. I see no romance/art in watching them chase money and evidence around.
They chase money and evidence around precisely because people like you will stop caring if they can't prevent doping. You draw a (very arbitrary) line between 'natural' and 'unnatural' athletes, and you create a market for goon squads to hunt down the unnaturals to preserve the purity of the culture.
It never was a pure contest of man, willpower, carbon-fiber, and asphalt. It's also a contest of means, luck, money, food, biology, and genetics. Even without the doping.
It's especially visible in running, where sprinting world records never last long thanks to new knowledge of nutrition.
wait, it was just the introduction of EPO.
I'm arguing that athletes who perform in games and competitions must follow the rules of these games and competitions, or else what is the point of having the structured organization of a sport? No one would care about the Tour de France if it wasn't assumed that the athletes were all following the same set of rules. Athletes who dope should play in their own league, with their own set of rules.
I agree: the line between different performance enhancing technologies is blurred. I'm not trying to pass judgment on whether taking steroids is more or less "wrong" than following a high-protein diet.
All I can comment on is my decline in interest given the shaky boundaries and clearly unethical actions of the top layer of these sports.
On the other hand, if you're going to pay them so much to win, it will naturally be worth the risk to lie and cheat to do it.
Unfortunately I am but one individual in the greater market of people who determine athlete salary by attending games, sitting in front of the TV, and buying endorsed products.
I do love to watch a good old Federer v Djokovic match every once in a while though ;)
Even in the case where you were to break things out into a doping/vs. non-doping leagues, I have a feeling that in the ultra-competitive world of top athletes, there would be a temptation to get an edge in the non-doping league by similar means as are used today thus buying nothing (except, perhaps, an additional league of super-human athletes who I suspect would get more recognition, fame, and money than their counterparts and therefore push more athletes into a doping arms-race).
David Millar's autobiography goes into some detail about it.
Someone saying "take this blood transfusion or inject this 'recover' syringe or you're out of a job" to a young athlete, far from home, is a scary thought.
"Natural" forms of athletic enhancement (pre puberty rigorous training) lead to stunted growth from the stress and impact placed on growth plates. What happens when the only way to get ahead is to gamble with Human Growth Hormone and steroids pre puberty?
I'm a transhumanist, so I just want to see the most impressive things the human body can pull off, and that includes the use of chemical enhancement..
This may be a ship-of-theseus sort of question with no widely agreed upon answer, but at some point doesn't it stop being what the human body can pull off if you modify it enough?