7 ms·

We seem to take it very much case by case. Running efficiency augments are controversial. Drugs are verboten. But better bicycles are OK, and football players c

by gascan 8y ago

We seem to take it very much case by case. Running efficiency augments are controversial. Drugs are verboten. But better bicycles are OK, and football players can wear eyeblack and grip-enhancing gloves. The closer a sport is to pure human performance, though, the more sensitive we seem to be about it. Perhaps out of a sense of continuity through the ages. Yeah, we train better than Athenian athletes. But we still run the same way with the same air and the same gravity. I'm not terribly worried about stunting development of augments; it's practically the DoD's charter to develop and productize unfair advantages.

my_username_is_ 8y ago
As another example of equipment that is banned because its technological advancements are deemed to give an unfair advantage, take a look at golf. Equipment manufacturers need to get their products tested & approved by the USGA in order to be allowed in many tournaments. Clubs or balls that fly too far when you hit them do not get the required approval.
- matwood 8y ago
  And the USGA actually took away the stomach/gut putter.
- danieltillett 8y ago
  In golf this makes sense as it is far easier to replace your clubs than make a new course.
slg 8y ago
Swimming had this exact same issue a few years ago with the new full body suits that reduce drag too much. Each sports handles this differently and most decisions seem completely arbitrary with the biggest deciding factor simply being tradition. For example, no one cares that swimmers have always shaved their entire body and/or worn a cap to prevent drag. However the new suits just provided too big of a single jump to not require an immediate response. One of the weirdest arbitrary decisions is the difference between almost universally banned "blood doping" and almost universally allowed "platelet-rich plasma therapy". You can draw a patient's blood and put it in a centrifuge to separate out the red blood cells from the platelets. Reinjecting the red blood cells is doping while reinjecting the platelets is an acceptable medical treatment.
- sopooneo 8y ago
  One point that surprised me about those banned suits is that the drag reduction they provide is largely indirect. Instead, they're buoyant. They make the swimmers float higher in the water leaving less of them in the pool to be dragged on. So for roughly the same reason you can't compete in the freestyle paddling on a surfboard, you can't use those suits. Apparently they worked by other mechanisms as well, but the floaty aspect alone seems a reasonable justification for the ban. https://www.thedailybeast.com/why-ban-full-body-olympics-swimsuits-a-scientist-explains-polyurethane https://www.thedailybeast.com/why-ban-full-body-olympics-swi...
  - zhte415 8y ago
    Your comment reminded me of the 80s movie Running Man. There are no rules, there is only winning. Which is the antithesis to principles of competing fairly. And in Running Man there were undiscovered rules, but only ones to game the sport which came crashing down resulting in a loss of trust of the institution. Transparency is key for trust in sport and thus continuality of the larger body.
    - specialist 8y ago
      I thought the only rule was to boost ratings.
lojack 8y ago
> But better bicycles are OK UCI has lots of rules around the size, geometry, and weight of equipment that can limit how much better you can make a bike. They even explicitly don't allow new innovations without their prior approval. Manufacturers find ways around the rules but to a large degree better bikes are actually not OK.
- blt 8y ago
  @mathgladiator sometimes such rules are aimed at limiting the advantage you can buy with money. Not sure if this is the true motivation here. Or in Formula 1, the restrictions are generally for the safety of the drivers. Anyway, engineering within constraints can still be competitive. (I don't feel strongly about this personally, just listing some of the counterpoints)
- mathgladiator 8y ago
  This is strange to me and basically says the engineers are not allowed to compete...
  - bmj 8y ago
    This is similar to the limit imposed on various motorsports. It's not that engineers aren't allowed to compete (they most definitely do, within the limitations imposed by the sport's governing body)--the rules exist to level the playing the field a bit between teams and companies with radically different budgets.
    - mirkules 8y ago
      My favorite example of forbidden ingenuity is the "sucker car" (Chapparal 2J) which used a plastic skirt to seal the car to the ground, and pump that sucked the air from underneath the car, producing an insane amount of downforce. It was outlawed of course after blowing away the competition. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaparral_Cars#2J https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaparral_Cars#2J
      - 8y ago
cortesoft 8y ago
Grip enhancing gloves are definitely not without controversy.
Alex3917 8y ago
> We seem to take it very much case by case. The principle is very consistent: You can't do something that gives you an unfair advantage over other competitors. Everything banned basically falls into one of three categories: - It would be prohibitively expensive for others to adopt the technology. This is why you have weight minimums for bikes, boats, etc. - Others would have to risk their health to compete. This is why you have bans of performance enhancing drugs, blood doping, etc. - Others would have to break the law to compete. This is why you have bans on illegal drugs, even if they're not necessarily performance enhancing. Occasionally things are also banned to preserve comparability to current records or to preserve the aesthetic sense of the sport, but for the most part when something is banned it's for one of the three enumerated reasons.
- ekianjo 8y ago
  "unfair advantage" is particularly hard to define. We are not born equals, so there are already folks among us who have unfair advantage due to their genes, their upbringing, their social background, etc... I would say the definition is still blur. What if you have a medical condition that impairs you in some ways but make you stronger for doing one type of tasks? Is that unfair?
  - hahajk 8y ago
    It's reasonable that amputees with prosthetic legs would be banned from normal competitions because they weren't born with those legs; they were manufactured. But what if it was discovered that people born without an appendix somehow performed better? Would they be banned? It would seem unfair to ban them. But it could lead to competitors surgically removing their organs, which would go against the spirit of the sport. But allowing them to compete might also create a class of appendix-less "mutants" who dominate a sport.
    - URSpider94 8y ago
      I heard a podcast recently about a wrestler who was born without legs. He was almost unbeatable at the high school level, due in part to (a) his very low center of gravity, (b) the ineffectiveness of many common moves on him, and (c) the fact that he could carry much more upper body muscle into the same weight class. The other parents in the state were teaming up to try to get him banned for unfair advantage (!)
hinkley 8y ago
When aero gear was introduced to cycling there was quite a bit of turmoil. Not the least of which was the fact that Greg Lemond used it to demolish Laurent Fignon in the last time trail, and jump what seemed to be a comfortable gap and win the Tour. By six seconds. I can still picture Fignon laying on the ground at the finish line, hands clenched in fists wondering where it all went wrong. There were limits then and there have been limits since. No fairings. How long your helmet can be. I have a vague recollection about them banning inserts in your clothes (no teardrops for your calves, no articulated helmets or dorsal fins). [edit: and apparently disc brakes were just approved last season] These days Lemond is watchdogging for electric motors hidden in the bikes. Which is a side effect of trying to fix two other problems. First, PEDs aka doping. Second, paying to win. The exotic materials some teams could afford resulted in light bikes that other teams couldn’t approach. They set a minimum weight for bikes, which meant you either put heavier equipment on the bike (eg, torque gauges in the rear hub) or you loaded weights into it. Or you hid a flashlight battery and a tiny 20 watt motor in the bottom bracket...
- ekianjo 8y ago
  The easiest way to remedy all the cheating with bikes and equipment in cycling would be to PROVIDE official bikes the equipment every single day, and make it rotate randomly. Otherwise, you are always playing catching up to discover the latest tricks they devised.
  - nradov 8y ago
    That would wreck the economics of pro cycling because most of the teams are partly sponsored by bike manufactures. Those manufacturers want to be exclusively associated with particular winning teams for marketing purposes.
    - ekianjo 8y ago
      So what? We have to be afraid of changing stuff because the current statu quo of pro cycling would be affected? That's a pretty weak argument.
notatoad 8y ago
it's case-by case, and also sport-by-sport. each sport is governed by their own organization that decides which technical advantages are fair and which aren't. and it's interesting that you mention better bicycles being okay, because for the most part they aren't. UCI rules state "no technical innovation regarding anything used, worn or carried by any rider or license holder during a competition (bicycles, equipment mounted on them, accessories, helmets, clothing, means of communication, etc.) may be used until approved by the UCI executive bureau." the full ruleset for what constitutes a race-legal bicycle is here: http://www.uci.ch/mm/Document/News/Rulesandregulation/16/51/86/materielprotocole-ENG_English.PDF http://www.uci.ch/mm/Document/News/Rulesandregulation/16/51/...
tzs 8y ago
Since your comment has spawned a lot of responses bringing up examples of how various sports have dealt with equipment innovation, this seems a good place to post this article, "The Boat That Almost Was" [1], about a project to design a better boat for the America's Cup yacht race. [1] http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/3541/1/Clauser.pdf http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/3541/1/Clauser.pdf
bagacrap 8y ago
Better bicycles are ok? There are all sorts of restrictions for UCI events. Recumbents are immensely faster than upright bikes --- banned. Beam bikes (like trek y-foil) are a bit faster --- banned. There's a lower limit for bike weight. You can't add fairings. You can't add motors or energy storage mechanisms. The stated goal is to maintain the primacy of man over machine and to some extent rider safety. Of course bikes do slowly change over time in ways that are presumably advantageous to their riders, but you aren't allowed to make huge leaps all at once, which makes some sense as it's fine if everyone has the same advantage (but also, pointless and expensive for amateurs).

by gascan 8y ago

my_username_is_ 8y ago

As another example of equipment that is banned because its technological advancements are deemed to give an unfair advantage, take a look at golf. Equipment manufacturers need to get their products tested & approved by the USGA in order to be allowed in many tournaments. Clubs or balls that fly too far when you hit them do not get the required approval.

matwood 8y ago
And the USGA actually took away the stomach/gut putter.
danieltillett 8y ago
In golf this makes sense as it is far easier to replace your clubs than make a new course.

slg 8y ago

Swimming had this exact same issue a few years ago with the new full body suits that reduce drag too much. Each sports handles this differently and most decisions seem completely arbitrary with the biggest deciding factor simply being tradition. For example, no one cares that swimmers have always shaved their entire body and/or worn a cap to prevent drag. However the new suits just provided too big of a single jump to not require an immediate response. One of the weirdest arbitrary decisions is the difference between almost universally banned "blood doping" and almost universally allowed "platelet-rich plasma therapy". You can draw a patient's blood and put it in a centrifuge to separate out the red blood cells from the platelets. Reinjecting the red blood cells is doping while reinjecting the platelets is an acceptable medical treatment.

sopooneo 8y ago
One point that surprised me about those banned suits is that the drag reduction they provide is largely indirect. Instead, they're buoyant. They make the swimmers float higher in the water leaving less of them in the pool to be dragged on. So for roughly the same reason you can't compete in the freestyle paddling on a surfboard, you can't use those suits. Apparently they worked by other mechanisms as well, but the floaty aspect alone seems a reasonable justification for the ban. https://www.thedailybeast.com/why-ban-full-body-olympics-swimsuits-a-scientist-explains-polyurethane https://www.thedailybeast.com/why-ban-full-body-olympics-swi...
- zhte415 8y ago
  Your comment reminded me of the 80s movie Running Man. There are no rules, there is only winning. Which is the antithesis to principles of competing fairly. And in Running Man there were undiscovered rules, but only ones to game the sport which came crashing down resulting in a loss of trust of the institution. Transparency is key for trust in sport and thus continuality of the larger body.
  - specialist 8y ago
    I thought the only rule was to boost ratings.

lojack 8y ago

> But better bicycles are OK UCI has lots of rules around the size, geometry, and weight of equipment that can limit how much better you can make a bike. They even explicitly don't allow new innovations without their prior approval. Manufacturers find ways around the rules but to a large degree better bikes are actually not OK.

blt 8y ago
@mathgladiator sometimes such rules are aimed at limiting the advantage you can buy with money. Not sure if this is the true motivation here. Or in Formula 1, the restrictions are generally for the safety of the drivers. Anyway, engineering within constraints can still be competitive. (I don't feel strongly about this personally, just listing some of the counterpoints)
mathgladiator 8y ago
This is strange to me and basically says the engineers are not allowed to compete...
- bmj 8y ago
  This is similar to the limit imposed on various motorsports. It's not that engineers aren't allowed to compete (they most definitely do, within the limitations imposed by the sport's governing body)--the rules exist to level the playing the field a bit between teams and companies with radically different budgets.
  - mirkules 8y ago
    My favorite example of forbidden ingenuity is the "sucker car" (Chapparal 2J) which used a plastic skirt to seal the car to the ground, and pump that sucked the air from underneath the car, producing an insane amount of downforce. It was outlawed of course after blowing away the competition. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaparral_Cars#2J https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaparral_Cars#2J
    - 8y ago

cortesoft 8y ago

Grip enhancing gloves are definitely not without controversy.

Alex3917 8y ago

> We seem to take it very much case by case. The principle is very consistent: You can't do something that gives you an unfair advantage over other competitors. Everything banned basically falls into one of three categories: - It would be prohibitively expensive for others to adopt the technology. This is why you have weight minimums for bikes, boats, etc. - Others would have to risk their health to compete. This is why you have bans of performance enhancing drugs, blood doping, etc. - Others would have to break the law to compete. This is why you have bans on illegal drugs, even if they're not necessarily performance enhancing. Occasionally things are also banned to preserve comparability to current records or to preserve the aesthetic sense of the sport, but for the most part when something is banned it's for one of the three enumerated reasons.

ekianjo 8y ago
"unfair advantage" is particularly hard to define. We are not born equals, so there are already folks among us who have unfair advantage due to their genes, their upbringing, their social background, etc... I would say the definition is still blur. What if you have a medical condition that impairs you in some ways but make you stronger for doing one type of tasks? Is that unfair?
- hahajk 8y ago
  It's reasonable that amputees with prosthetic legs would be banned from normal competitions because they weren't born with those legs; they were manufactured. But what if it was discovered that people born without an appendix somehow performed better? Would they be banned? It would seem unfair to ban them. But it could lead to competitors surgically removing their organs, which would go against the spirit of the sport. But allowing them to compete might also create a class of appendix-less "mutants" who dominate a sport.
  - URSpider94 8y ago
    I heard a podcast recently about a wrestler who was born without legs. He was almost unbeatable at the high school level, due in part to (a) his very low center of gravity, (b) the ineffectiveness of many common moves on him, and (c) the fact that he could carry much more upper body muscle into the same weight class. The other parents in the state were teaming up to try to get him banned for unfair advantage (!)

hinkley 8y ago

When aero gear was introduced to cycling there was quite a bit of turmoil. Not the least of which was the fact that Greg Lemond used it to demolish Laurent Fignon in the last time trail, and jump what seemed to be a comfortable gap and win the Tour. By six seconds. I can still picture Fignon laying on the ground at the finish line, hands clenched in fists wondering where it all went wrong. There were limits then and there have been limits since. No fairings. How long your helmet can be. I have a vague recollection about them banning inserts in your clothes (no teardrops for your calves, no articulated helmets or dorsal fins). [edit: and apparently disc brakes were just approved last season] These days Lemond is watchdogging for electric motors hidden in the bikes. Which is a side effect of trying to fix two other problems. First, PEDs aka doping. Second, paying to win. The exotic materials some teams could afford resulted in light bikes that other teams couldn’t approach. They set a minimum weight for bikes, which meant you either put heavier equipment on the bike (eg, torque gauges in the rear hub) or you loaded weights into it. Or you hid a flashlight battery and a tiny 20 watt motor in the bottom bracket...

ekianjo 8y ago
The easiest way to remedy all the cheating with bikes and equipment in cycling would be to PROVIDE official bikes the equipment every single day, and make it rotate randomly. Otherwise, you are always playing catching up to discover the latest tricks they devised.
- nradov 8y ago
  That would wreck the economics of pro cycling because most of the teams are partly sponsored by bike manufactures. Those manufacturers want to be exclusively associated with particular winning teams for marketing purposes.
  - ekianjo 8y ago
    So what? We have to be afraid of changing stuff because the current statu quo of pro cycling would be affected? That's a pretty weak argument.

notatoad 8y ago

it's case-by case, and also sport-by-sport. each sport is governed by their own organization that decides which technical advantages are fair and which aren't. and it's interesting that you mention better bicycles being okay, because for the most part they aren't. UCI rules state "no technical innovation regarding anything used, worn or carried by any rider or license holder during a competition (bicycles, equipment mounted on them, accessories, helmets, clothing, means of communication, etc.) may be used until approved by the UCI executive bureau." the full ruleset for what constitutes a race-legal bicycle is here: http://www.uci.ch/mm/Document/News/Rulesandregulation/16/51/86/materielprotocole-ENG_English.PDF http://www.uci.ch/mm/Document/News/Rulesandregulation/16/51/...

tzs 8y ago

Since your comment has spawned a lot of responses bringing up examples of how various sports have dealt with equipment innovation, this seems a good place to post this article, "The Boat That Almost Was" [1], about a project to design a better boat for the America's Cup yacht race. [1] http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/3541/1/Clauser.pdf http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/3541/1/Clauser.pdf

bagacrap 8y ago

Better bicycles are ok? There are all sorts of restrictions for UCI events. Recumbents are immensely faster than upright bikes --- banned. Beam bikes (like trek y-foil) are a bit faster --- banned. There's a lower limit for bike weight. You can't add fairings. You can't add motors or energy storage mechanisms. The stated goal is to maintain the primacy of man over machine and to some extent rider safety. Of course bikes do slowly change over time in ways that are presumably advantageous to their riders, but you aren't allowed to make huge leaps all at once, which makes some sense as it's fine if everyone has the same advantage (but also, pointless and expensive for amateurs).