It’s a fairly straightfrward argument, I think. Professional athletes have jobs for one reason only: they keep the rest of us couch-potatoes entertained. Sure, we all like to think that our own little precious baby could one day become a Major League star, the next Pele (assuming he’s still revered…I’m old, see?), the next Great One, possibly the boxer who could unquestionably have beaten Muhammed Ali at his peak. But the truth is, for every middling professional player, there are probably 100,000 bankers, bottle-washers and builders. I can say with certainty that the world of professional athletics is beyond the grasp of any of my children.
So then, why do we restrict the entertainers from entertaining? Why not allow top-tier athletes to tease the utmost potential out of their every fiber whatever the cost provided it’s willingly done? Let them be reminiscent of the ancient heroes in form and deed without having to hide shamefully behind lies and denials. No bionic limbs or artificial organs–just their own natural bodies pushed to redline by science. They would represent the apex of humanity in form, drive, technology and discipline. And yeah, they’d probably pay for the experience with their lives, but at the top of their game.
Shit. And please give me a pass on the spelling errors…this is a rare serious post for me.
I am in favor of allowing any and all performance-enhancing substances, genetic modifications, training regimens, and pretty anything else for those interested in entertaining me more fully (although I confess the only actual “sport” I watch is golf, which can apparently be played well by fat, hard-drinking, hard-partying “athletes,” so I’m not sure it counts as a “sport”).
There is no practical way to draw a distinction between what is “fair” and what is not fair, with perhaps the exception that the performance enhancing method cannot include an external appliance such as an mechanical limb.
Mother nature is unfair. We are not all given the same genes. Life is unfair. We are not all born to the same circumstance and opportunity. There’s no unfairness in trying to equalize opportunity, is there?
The purpose of professional sports is to entertain, and athletes already ruin their bodies and futures in exchange for glory and money. That is their choice, and it seems to me they should be allowed to make it.
I am cognizant of a single drawback in my libertarian world: permitting performance-enhancing drugs for adults will promote an ever-younger population to use such agents, and I am opposed to allowing children to use potentially dangerous substances. However I am not convinced that the whole career-train for talented young children is not net harmful anyway, so this does not seem to me to be a deal-breaker. For every successful NBA player, a thousand are left on the wanna-be sidelines whose devotion to basketball was wasted and whose time would have been better spent on an education. So if we are going to argue against performance drugs because it might ruin children, we have to look equally critically against athletic emphasis in general ruining children.
There is a secondary gain, usually not mentioned, to making performance-enhancing drugs legal: we can get better at using them and make them even safer to use. It’s my general impression that they are probably already safer than most people realize; if they were all that dangerous I suspect most modern high-performance athletes in almost every field would be dropping like flies, along with the wealthy and connected who use similar sorts of chemicals to retard aging.
Can people start using cars on the football field? You know, to help them run touchdowns in faster? (And to punch through that defensive line, of course.)
When you add in performance enhancing equipment or suppliments of various kinds, you change the game. So in my opinion, you should acknowledge that fact at an official level, by making separate leagues and whatnot for ‘basteroidketball’ and the like, distinct from the existing leagues and games.
A car is neither a bionic limb or an artificial organ.
That noted, why not bionic limbs and artificial organs? Which is better, to redline a body and watch it fail decades early, or to use nifty 22nd century technology to swap in safe, reliable body parts that will not fail early due to this treatment? As an added perk, you could standardize the bionic parts, the same way we standardize other sporting equipment; leveling the physical playing field and returning it to a contest of skill.
For the sake of argument, why should the athlete’s safety be of concern to anyone but the athlete and his/her management? The athlete would, presumably, understand the risks of the enhancement–perhaps there is a sworn statement to that effect outlining the specific known risks–and the management would be ill-advised to expose their investment to risks which would likely result in the loss of their asset.
I understand your point, but what I’m suggesting is squeezing the utmost performance out of human meat. If we want battlebot sports I guess that’s a different league.
And I think that steroidbots are also a different league, or rather should be if we allow them at all.
And I don’t see a philosophical difference between roiding up and arming up - it’s just a matter of what enhancement tools you have, are allowed, and can afford. And the varying levels of damage to the athlete’s body of course.
Just speaking for me, I don’t want to watch some roided out freak hit 115 home runs a year.
I would rather see a guy hit 50 HRs a year and know that he did it from hard work at the gym, dedication to the sport, and, sure, a hell of a lot of natural talent. But we could build a machine to stand at home plate at knock every pitch over the fence. That doesn’t do it for me.
Plus, and I never, ever have said this before, but would someone please think of the children!?! Do you want your kid watching Barry Bonds Jr. hit 2,000 HRs and then juice up so that he can be just like him?
Their body, their choice. If they think potentially harming their health is worth the short term gain, more power to them. I’d rather athletes use tested and approved supplements than underground horse tranqs from Bolivia. Allowing them would arguably make them safer.
“I think pro-athletes should be forced to use steroids. I think we as fans deserve the greatest athletes science can create! Let’s go! Anything that will make you run faster, jump higher! I have High-Definition TV! I want my athletes like my video games! Let’s go! I could care less if you die at 40. You hate life after sports anyways. I’m doing you a favor.” --Daniel Tosh
The guy that hits 115 home runs is working just as hard, if not harder than the natural guy. Most PEDs help your body recover so you can work out more.
Why use people like toilet tissue and then flush them down the toilet because we want to be entertained?
And why not since our own children would most likely NOT be harmed in the process?
Performance enhancing is an euphemism for cheating. It is also an euphemism used to mask the ugliness of what happens to an athletes body from abuse of dangerous chemicals.
But I guess in a world where we are all individuals looking out only for ourselves, it;s a good deal to go for it.
It’s just like when one bank started making shitty loans a few years back. Every other bank had the choice to make shitty loans and rake in loads of dough in the short term (compete), or stand their ground and grow cobwebs on their doors and telephones. Guess what they all did? Oh, I’m sure you heard.
I don’t want every single kid and Joe Wannabe out there trying to take more juice than the next guy just for the chance to compete. Sure, in the short term we might get to see Brock Lesnar spike someone into an unknown dimension (which would admittedly be cool as fuck), but pretty soon everyone loses.
Nah, “cheating” is breaking rules. No laws, no crimes. If the use of drugs, hormones, blood packing, etc. are not against the rules, then there is no cheat because every player has the same right to do what needs to be done to compete for the job heshe has voluntarily selected. Don’t want to go toxic and die 40 years early? Don’t play in that league. You make it sound like doped jocks are gladiatorial slaves, they’re not. They just have different values. But gladiators on 'roids…who wouldn’t watch that!
Pardon? We are speaking about now. Right now the euphemism ‘performance enhancing’ covers up lots of crimes and rule breaking. You are saying get rid of the rules and laws. I was speaking to what it is all about right now. You want to decriminalize law breaking. That’s okay.
And you have glossed over the points that address your selfish perceptions of what life and society is about.
The idiotic market philosophy that people aren’t slaves and they know what they are getting into is sophomoric bs or at best, juvenile silliness.
In the real world, deception, deceit and downright bs would become the driving forces behind any market without regulations. It is why we regulate most things. When we don’t we get adults being ripped off. You may excuse bad behavior with an attitude that buyer beware, but most mature adults who are not blindly selfish, do not support unregulated markets. and before you play the juvie card, there are always exceptions that prove the rule.
Hence, separate roid leagues. If anything the presence of a separate legal roid league would tend to draw roid users out of the normal leagues due to there being an alternative where they can strut their stuff without fear of being caught.
If you allow PEDs in professional sports, how do you stop it from showing up in the “minor” leagues?
It is also possible they are more dangerous and the ones that have a stronger tolerance for them are the ones we see on the field. The ones most affected, which could be a large percentage of the population, never make it to the professional level because the PEDs have removed them from the pool.
