The "Enhanced Games" -- should performance-enhancing drugs be allowed in sports

[Innula Zenovka]

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Long and thoughtful discussion of the issues involved. It's more complex than you might think.

To its critics, the Enhanced Games are a grotesquely unethical abomination that makes a mockery of the integrity, fair play, and human ingenuity that make sports worth watching. Who would want to watch the Tour de France if everyone was Lance Armstrong?

Others argue it’s exploitative late-stage capitalism at its worst, turning elite athletes starved for cash into freakish guinea pigs, with unknown long-term health effects. Would Gkolomeev have signed up if he had made a decent living from “clean” competition in the first place?

But proponents of the Enhanced Games push back hard, arguing it’ll be a great experiment into the limits of our species. Plus, they insist, sport is about testing people on a level playing field. It doesn’t matter if a runner wears super shoes, they argue, so long as anyone in the field can wear the same ones. Rather than having “clean” athletes compete against some who dope and get away with it, why not just make sure that everyone has the same set of advantages?

 

[Bartholomew Gallacher]

I am pretty sure that most cyclists of the Tour de France are doping themselves. Why? Because all others do it as well, so if you even want to have the slightest chance of winning you need to do it, too. When you are not doping, you are an outlier and either dumb or not wanting to win.

It is just all still happening behind the curtain so to speak. But this means we don't have to introduce such things, because the Tour de France has been practicing that since decades.

 

[GoblinCampFollower]

It's just a reality of many sports that people will dope whenever they can get away with it. The sports I followed the closest are bodybuilding and strength sports like strongman/woman and power lifting. The steroid use in those sports is pretty much an open secret. At this point the results are so built into what audiences expect to see, that we can't go back. You can always tell when someone is new to those sports because they act like it's a shocking revelation that they are all on drugs!!!!

I've even gotten to know a few competitive bodybuilders and power lifters well enough so they'd just tell me what they were taking (men and women).

I've also heard a lot of rumors about how big, wealthy countries like the USA and UK will use legal maneuvers to bury it whenever one of their Olympians fails a drug test. For example, Lance Amstrong technically failed at least 2 drug tests in 1999 and 2001 but managed to argue they weren't conclusive.

What I'm getting at is that we know doping is rampant, and that's probably something learned people need to accept. ....but I don't think the public at large would ever accept open doping. Especially for the sake of trying to keep kids off of it. I'm strongly opposed to an openly enhanced league. I think it's important to maintain that thin curtain of legitimacy even if we all kind of know they are on it.

 

[Argent Stonecutter]

Just another torment nexus.

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