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This is another reason why I've stopped watching baseball and will probably never follow competitive cycling, even though I enjoy cycling myself. What's the po

This is another reason why I've stopped watching baseball and will probably never follow competitive cycling, even though I enjoy cycling myself. 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.

amyjess 11y ago
> 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. 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..
- joshuapants 11y ago
  > I just want to see the most impressive things the human body can pull off 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?
Retra 11y ago
Personally, I don't see any reason to be bothered by doping; it's just another form of performance technology. To me, it isn't any different from eating a high-protein diet. Or having a genetic anomaly that makes your muscles slightly more efficient. 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.
- grogen 11y ago
  I have tended to feel the same way but arguments can be made that allowing unrestricted doping would force those who want to compete to take something potentially/increasingly dangerous to their long term health in order to do so at the top tiers (as if you didn't, there would certainly be someone who would be willing to burn the candle at both ends for the fame and money). 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).
- amyjess 11y ago
  Yes, advances in nutrition are why you see world records continue to be broken. It's especially visible in running, where sprinting world records never last long thanks to new knowledge of nutrition.
  - meatysnapper 11y ago
    Which explains why, in the early 90s, all endurance sports records dropped like a rock, because of a major nutritional breakthrough.... wait, it was just the introduction of EPO.
- roymurdock 11y ago
  I'm not arguing that people shouldn't be allowed to dope if they want to. Nor am I arguing that unnatural or transhumanist athletes should be "hunted down" by goon squads. 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.

amyjess 11y ago

> 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. 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..

joshuapants 11y ago
> I just want to see the most impressive things the human body can pull off 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?

Retra 11y ago

Personally, I don't see any reason to be bothered by doping; it's just another form of performance technology. To me, it isn't any different from eating a high-protein diet. Or having a genetic anomaly that makes your muscles slightly more efficient. 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.

grogen 11y ago
I have tended to feel the same way but arguments can be made that allowing unrestricted doping would force those who want to compete to take something potentially/increasingly dangerous to their long term health in order to do so at the top tiers (as if you didn't, there would certainly be someone who would be willing to burn the candle at both ends for the fame and money). 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).
amyjess 11y ago
Yes, advances in nutrition are why you see world records continue to be broken. It's especially visible in running, where sprinting world records never last long thanks to new knowledge of nutrition.
- meatysnapper 11y ago
  Which explains why, in the early 90s, all endurance sports records dropped like a rock, because of a major nutritional breakthrough.... wait, it was just the introduction of EPO.
roymurdock 11y ago
I'm not arguing that people shouldn't be allowed to dope if they want to. Nor am I arguing that unnatural or transhumanist athletes should be "hunted down" by goon squads. 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.