Why I won't be watching the Olympics, but love robots

by Cliopatria

"Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules, and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence; In other words, it is war minus the shooting." -- George Orwell

Though we're not quite at the point of genetically engineered athletes, there's no doubt that an awful lot of sport these days has more to do with pharmacology and money than with skill and talent. I was looking for an article on Kelli White, the runner who's going to name names, and I hit the motherlode: http://www.drugsinsport.net/. Nothing new there, you understand, except a mass of evidence demonstrating the pervasive role of creative biochemistry in professional sports (and Olympic sports, many of which really are professionalized, including high economic stakes for winners).

As I've said before, there's no joy in it, no pleasure in watching something which is basically an infomercial for food supplements and drug testing companies. That won't stop me from going to a ball game when I'm back in the land of professional sports this summer, but if I want to watch real athletes competing against each other, I think I'd have to find a minor-league park: I miss the Kernels.

More Productive Science: A robot can make a paper airplane, and someone got a Ph.D. out of it. My father, who taught computer science, asks"But can it make a Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwich" a reference to his classic challenge. Try describing the process of making a sandwich in sufficient detail that a literal robot could follow them.... If the equations for paper folding are so challenging, imagine what the equations for"sticky" and"lumpy" are going to be like! Not to mention the pumpernickel function....

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Derek Charles Catsam - 5/25/2004

My problem with most drugs in sports discussions is that they taint all athletes when really it is only a few who are clearly cheating. or at least who have been proven to have been cheating. And this is not fair to those athletes who do train hard and are the best. I liken it to how all historians somehow got brushed by the Bellisles tar and were put on the defensive. It is unfair, and we need to hold two parties accountable: Those who do cheat, and those who engage in witch hunts. Until they have a steroids olympics (a la the great SNL skit) I'll continue to watch the Olympics, because I was an athlete who would have wanted so badly to have been that good.
dc

Richard Henry Morgan - 5/25/2004

Actually, they don't get it from food. Now there's the rub. An amino acid, not one found in humans, but a building block of nature nevertheless. Talk about your gray areas.

Jonathan Dresner - 5/25/2004

You're right: states are complicit in this process, as well, being subject to the same forces of pride and economics as individuals, but not suffering the actual effects of the transgressions.

As far as the HGH v. Amino Acid question, I'd argue that there's not really much difference at all. Unless, by "taking an amino acid" you mean eating large quantities of food with naturally high levels of that particular substance, then it seems pretty much fair game to me.

Richard Henry Morgan - 5/25/2004

The unexamined perspective is the use of athletes by the state as chemical guinea pigs. Witness the East German athletes of previous days, as well as Chinese athletes even a decade ago. When the Berlin wall fell, the East German pharmacists packed their bags for Peking, leaving behind a generation of malformed and cancer-ridden athletes who were not told what they being injected with, and had little choice even if they had been.

There are other state reasons involved. In the World Swimming Championships in Perth, during the run-up to the Sydney Olympics, the host country provided free pre-competition drug-screening to the swimmers, so as not to embarrass the major buyer of their wheat, China.

Sport is a lot cleaner today than it was, and it looks like it is on the way to getting cleaner still. Yet problems remain, and always will. What is the distinction between taking human growth hormone, and taking an amino acid that induces your own body to triple production of its own HGH?

Jonathan Dresner - 5/25/2004

While I appreciate the distinction you are trying to make, the dividing line between foods, food supplements and drugs is just not that hard to draw.

And I think there is a problem with the drive to be not "the best one can be" but "the best there is." I don't consider it a harmless quirk, this "must be number one" competitive spirit: I think it is a highly dysfunctional personal and cultural phenomenon.

Oscar Chamberlain - 5/25/2004

"an awful lot of sport these days has more to do with pharmacology and money than with skill and talent."

The problem with that statement is that it suggests the drug takers are in some manner less dedicated. The problem, and it is a real problem, is that the opposite is often true. These are people who put everything on the line to be the absolute best in their sport. Yes, a part of the motivation is money, but a really big part is pride, and pride has been part of sport since the Greeks ran naked at Olympus.

A reasonable response to this assertion would be, "What is pride when you work outside the rules?" To which one could respond, "what are rules if they keep me from being my best?"

"Bu you use drugs. You alter what you are."

"Anyone who trains alters what he or she is. Anyone who goes to a physician for advice on the proper nutrition, the proper vitamins and minerals, the proper bit of surgery. The line between the legal and the illegal is not a chasm betwen enhancement and purity, it's a line that divides some enhancements from others."

"But safety? Steriods can warp and kill."

"Sure. But if the rulers of sports were only concerned with danger, then why isn't the line between the dangerous and the non-dangerous. If I have got the cold from hell on race day, I can't take pseudofed to clear my sinuses. What is there to respect in that?

And on it goes.

I'm not trying to discount the problems of ethics or the problems of health. They are real. But they are real because, from the perspective of athletes, the lines drawn don't always make a lot of sense.