Drugs + Sports.

Was the new suit unavailable to her?

no, she is not sponsored by speedo so she doesn't get one.

Well that's just mean.

Nick wrote:

Marc wrote:Was the new suit unavailable to her?

no, she is not sponsored by speedo so she doesn't get one.

Yea—I mean, No—I mean... stop confusing me, you two. The suit was not available, or was unavailable, depending on your preference, for the reasons stated by Nick.

If only she had had some drugs to level the playing field... when will people learn.

http://news.smh.com.au/italians-dig-for-truth-over-swim-suits/20080430-29le.html

It's really kicking up quite a storm.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/01/15/2138311.htm

Not entirely straight on topic, but somewhat related.

http://www.avclub.com/content/cinema/bigger_stronger_faster

Review of a new documentary about this subject.

Andrew.C wrote:http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/01/15/2138311.htm

Not entirely straight on topic, but somewhat related.

The paralympian debate is always one that has interested me. I'm not sure exactly how they work it, but when you have, say, 10 competitors in a 100m sprint, they work out your disabilities based on a point system and they factor that into your final time. For example, it is very difficult to have a level playing ground in the paralympics when you have a guy with no legs (see article) competing against a guy with, eg, only one hand.

This is all well and good for the paralympics, but can I ask you Andy, is this the sort of thing you would like to see in all athletic competition? For example, the Finnish skier with 50% more blood cells should have 10 seconds added to his time for having a different advantage over everyone else. If you're keen to make steroid use legal to level the playing field, why stop there? Eventually when everyone is identical on the playing field, what are they actually competing against? If you ask me, I would say that competition should be based on natural gifts and talents (also called 'mutations' in this thread, if you so desire that term), combined with dedicated training.

The other point that I'd like to propose is sort of in line with the swimming suit topic. Many people are pretty upset over certain athletes getting access to these suits, and they believe that they get an unfair advantage because of them. I'm not sure how effective they are, but even if they grant the slightest advantage, then the argument is valid. Why is it only some athletes have access to these suits? Are they patented by a certain company? Is it not foreseeable that the same outcome could come from drug use? You could have the Australian swim team sponsored by a pharmaceutical company, having access to incredible new drugs that others don't have access to. Then you have the astronomical cost of some drugs. Human Growth Hormone costs thousands of dollars for a short course, and is arguably the most effective performance enhancer. What of athletes that can't afford it? I'm not just talking about Olympic/professional level here, either. Remember that people have to work their way up to olympic level. Could we say that the greatest athletes should come from the families that can afford to supply them with the best drugs during their amateur career? There's a little room for the argument of regulation here, but there's too many holes for me to consider it. For example, why haven't the swim suits been regulated yet? Is it not reasonable to assume that the same thing could happen with designer steroids? Secondly, the attempted regulation of drugs now (the regulation being the total ban) still isn't 100% effective. It is a big call to presume that allowing a certain amount of drugs, strictly regulated, would stop athletes from breaking that regulation.

Also, if you want to allow drug use in sports, then you have to remember that people STILL wont be equal to one another. Firstly, there are people who naturally respond better to the application of various drugs. I'm sure I don't need to find a reference article for that, it's common medical knowledge. Even if you do say 'Every athlete is now allowed 500ml of Steroid XYZ' there will be people who will respond very strongly to that drug, and their performance will skyrocket. Alternatively, there will be athletes who have very little or nil response. There may even be athletes that have a negative response. This is, as I'm sure you'll agree, a possible hypothetical, and all it is doing is making some athletes skyrocket to new heights, making the playing field significantly less even.

Thats just what I think.

Ah, this is what I like to see. One big, article-length, fuck-off response. Sweet.

My opinion since the first posts may have somewhat changed as I’ve had chances for more discussions over it with Nick & Marc & others, which unfortunately didn’t get put on the forum because Nick doesn’t like to talk on the forum or some crap, and I also didn’t have a Dictaphone handy (I gotta get me one of them. Note to self, get... damnit!)

The expense of drugs could certainly contribute to a greater inequality but I think the important point is that money already plays a huge role in how well an athlete will do, at least in terms of the nation he/she comes from. The example that springs to mind is that swimmer guy from some African nation (excuse my ignorance) who was, to put it simply, woeful. Why? Because apparently he’d never seen a pool in his life! Because his country had better things to do than to waste money on swimming pools? No. It was because they had to focus their countries resources on more prosaic things like food + shelter. This may seem a bit far off the mark, and perhaps it is, but I think my point is that drugs are the one thing that have the potential to become dirt cheap, and therefore one factor that can be eliminated as a source of inequality (though there’s problems with that that will be addressed next). It seems that the other much more significant factors – such as the country you were born in – will perhaps never be eliminated, but the distribution of drugs, I think, does have the potential to be equal.

We’re still left with the problems of athletes not following regulation and regulation not meaning anything. The first one is the situation where athletes take more drugs than they’re allowed. This could definitely be a problem since I find it hard to imagine no athletes being tempted to over use. But, it’s a problem that already exists and so isn’t being introduced by removing the ban on drugs, and has, potentially, the ability to limit the excessive use of drugs as it would be well documented and open to all athletes just how much of the drug was safe to take, rather than being hushed up as it is now. That may dissuade some athletes from taking extreme amounts if it was shown that it was actually dangerous. Plus there’s the possible fact that the larger the amount of drugs that you take the less effective they become, leading to diminishing returns and another dissuasion from high doses (though I’m not sure if that happens). Now on to the regulation being meaningless. This could also be a problem, and I hear your point about people responding to drugs in different ways. What I think would help to minimise this would be instead of regulating the amount of drug allowed they would regulate the amount of effect produced by that drug in the athletes e.g. the amount of Red Blood Cell count, however they produced it. This, I believe, is the method that some have been proposing.

The point method they use in the Paralympics that you mentioned sounds interesting, and I wouldn’t be opposed to seeing that introduced to the normal Olympics. The opinion that the Olympics/sport should be based on ‘Natural’ talent is a common one (I think Nick was of this opinion) and I understand where it stems from, and feel it is kinda persuasive. The problem that I find is that this clearly isn’t the case at the moment and we can’t pretend otherwise and we can’t pretend that the introduction of drugs will sully the previously untainted format, and that’s not even to mention the difficulties involved with defining what is ‘natural’.

It's an interesting concept to suggest that they should measure the effectiveness of those drugs, but I don't really see how it can work. Take one VERY common steroid as an example: Deca-Durabolin. It's my understanding that this steroid is as far from an Androgenic (Synthetic testosterone) as you can get while still retaining many Anabolic effects (Increase in muscle mass + fibre density). This steroid works by increasing the level of nitrogen in your blood, which means that your muscles consumes protien at a much higher rate, and hence repair themselves much quicker. The point that I'm getting to is, the actual effect of the drugs IMMEDIATE effect (nitrogen) is balanced by how much blood you have to begin with, the size + density of your muscle fibre, your bodies natural ability to break down protein, what kind of exercise you're doing, what you're eating, and a variety of other factors. As far as I'm aware, (which to be truthful isn't at all) there would be no way of even measuring the immediate effect of the increase in nitrogen, at least not without draining all of your blood. The steroid is slow moving and I've read stories of bodybuilders with massive differences in muscle mass at the site of the injection.

I totally agree with you that the most significant differences will probably never be eliminated, but I'm completely opposed to the idea of implementing a points system into the regular Olympics. You could argue that the Finnish skier should have the equivalent of a golfers handicap because he has a genetic condition that allows him to excel. But where does the argument end? Next they will be arguing that all Africans should be handicapped because they genetically have a superior physical structure for sprinting. Should a high jumper be handicapped because he is genetically small and light? From there why not take the leap into superior physical structure other than genetics? Example: 'He only won the race because he has bigger leg muscles'. Start making these points and it's forseeable that I could walk into the Olympic games and join the water polo team, a game that I played once in high school, safe in the knowledge that everyone else will be handicapped down to my level due to their superiority in a sport caused by having trained and worked hard for it.

While we're on the concept of equal opportunity, another hypothetical: Should a person who has a university degree in accounting be given a 'points handicap' when applying for a job as an accountant, to make sure that he doesn't have an unfair advantage over someone with no degree?

The whole purpose of the Olympic games is to determine who is the BEST. If you were born with an ability to build muscle at an abnormal rate and you decide to become a weightlifter, why should anyone stop you? Steroids are banned in sports because they're dangerous, and because they're insulting to the spirit of the games. Take a fairly simple sport such as weightlifting. Although I can't say for certain, I would say that physical strength is the main objective of this sport, rather than any amount of skill or technique (before I'm shot, I'm sure that there is skill and technique involved, I'm just saying that it would take a back seat to your physical strength. Look at the other end of the scale, a sport like 10 pin bowling, which is primarily skill and technique, with little physical conditioning required). If you hypothetically had unlimited funds and full access to drugs, it is amazing how quickly you could pack on muscle. Given the same situation, it's not unreasonable to assume that I could compete in the Olympic games as a weightlifter in under a year, having never trained for it previously in my life.

The effectiveness of certain drugs being incomparable is a good point; I didn’t really think about steroids and the like. Having said that, this need not rule out the idea completely. Some sports have little (or less) use for drugs like steroids in comparison to others like EPO, which apparently do have measurable effects in terms of RBC count, because endurance is a more advantageous trait to enhance.

Where will it all end? Yes, indeed, this is quite the slippery slope you’ve constructed and finagled me to the edge of, but I think this maybe more illuminates the slightly absurd nature of the Olympic Games (I’ll return to this at the end, kinda).

‘Olympics is about who is best. ‘
‘The spirit of the Olympics. ‘
These are respectable ideas, but they are, in my opinion, romantic ideas. Sure, maybe in Ancient Greece however many thousands of years ago, you could say that the Olympics pitted bare-chested, sandal wearing, loin-cloth clad Men against one another with nothing but their God given talents. But Gimbles is gone, long gone (Ancient Greece is Gimbles). Technology, perhaps always there from the start, has been increasing at such an increasing pace that its presence is becoming, and has become, more noticeable and powerful. Doesn’t technology assist/enhance athletes natural talents already? And could we not look at drugs as doing the same, after all it doesn’t change what you already have, it merely assists/enhances what’s already there in a manner that we haven’t yet been able to do (it’s interesting to speculate on whether enhancements that we take for granted now were seen as ‘corrupting’ some spirit before)?

Why should anyone stop someone who has an inborn advantage? I guess they shouldn’t. But what if I, a sufferer of a physiological abnormality characterised by a total inability to put on muscle mass, be not allowed (choice of words appropriate; let’s be honest, no amount of training will matter) to compete? Maybe all we can say is “Well yeah, you can’t. The game is about finding who’s best, and you isn’t.” I guess I can accept that – though it seems kinda wrong – but I think that distils out what the Olympic Games really is all about; games. And we define their rules rather arbitrarily and if you abide by them you're allowed to compete; if not, you can't. If we don't like where allowing drugs may take us then I guess we can just put up the barrier anywhere to stop it, but I don't think anyone can try and claim that it's somehow the 'right' thing to do, rather than just being a feeling of not wanting to go there. My point may not come across so well, and I feel somewhat limited due to not wanting to create a post that's far too long, at least that's what my excuse is...

Short post:

You just attempted to counter my romantic ideas of 'the spirit of the games' with the romantic idea that 'all men are equal', which unfortunately is just not true.