There was a time when the folks who ran the Olympic Games believed that the only true champion was an amateur. In 1912 Jim Thorpe won two gold medals in Stockholm and the King of Sweden called him “the greatest athlete in the world”.

But not long after, it was discovered that he had once accepted $25 to play baseball and his medals were confiscated and the records and his name erased. He was “contaminated” as a professional.

That rule continued for many years. The only true champion was an amateur, untainted by commerce. No basketball dream team, no NHL hockey players, nobody who had ever stooped so low as to play for money.

Now, of course, nobody cares about that, and the amateur myth has died of its own absurdity. However, it has been replaced by another far-fetched obsession, that medallists should be “natural” athletes, untainted by technology. Along with the 10,500 athletes, Beijing hosted 180 scientists and staff conducting 4,500 drug tests around-the-clock over the course of the games.

So here is my question. What if we let athletes do whatever they wanted, in order to excel?

I think the Olympic motto is “Faster, Higher, Stronger”. And there is all that hogwash about athletes competing on a “level playing field”. Well, let me tell you something. There is no level playing field and never has been. Every athlete looks for an edge that the other guy doesn’t have.

I’ll give you some examples.

A few years ago some coaches designed an experiment to test whether it was best for a marathoner to wear a mesh shirt, a solid shirt, or no shirt. They weighed each athlete before and after, to calculate lost sweat. They also tracked body temperature with a rectal thermometer. (I won’t describe this technique, but they had a helluva time keeping it in while the guy was running). Anyway, the results indicated that a mesh shirt was best, followed by a solid shirt, then no shirt. So, should such ”technology” be banned?

Some runners or swimmers shave all the hair off their bodies on the chance that it will reduce drag by a hundredth of a second. And have you noticed over the years that every time Speedo comes up with a new bathing suit design, world records begin falling like autumn leaves. As you saw, the newest swimwear products are full body suits that squeeze the body into a torpedo shape and repel water. Should they be banned?

How about altitude training? Some athletes like to train at high elevations because in thin air the liver and kidneys respond by making more erythropoietin, a hormone that stimulates the production of red blood cells. It’s basically the same as taking EPO, the injection of synthetic erythropoietin, the blood-doping method of choice among many endurance athletes. When somebody gets an injection of EPO, he gains the benefits of high altitude training without actually living in the mountains.

Some athletes sleep in a sealed tent that circulates thin air. It seems athletes can’t use them in the Olympic Village and The World Anti-Doping Agency considered banning them but finally relented. I mean, what are they going to do, ban altitude?

Authorities can’t possibly keep up with the accelerating advances in biology. And authorities will have even less chance of catching athletes who move beyond drugs and hormones to “gene doping” – inserting genes into their DNA to increase strength and endurance.

In the British Medical Journal last month, more than 30 scholars signed a statement supporting an article co-authored by Dr. Bengt Kayser, director of a sports medicine institute at the University of Geneva, calling the current system a failure and in need of change. He criticized medical authorities as using “prophylactic lies” that exaggerate the dangers of drugs like anabolic steroids based “on scant evidence tainted by a misguided moralistic motivation to protect sports”.    

I think we should come up with a policy that recognizes the facts of modern life.

Are athletes going to be the only ones who can’t use modern technology to enhance their performance? After all, everybody else does it. Let’s see… we have laser-corrected eyes, chemically whitened teeth, surgically enhanced anatomy, as well as Botox.

And I haven’t even mentioned that best-selling performance enhancer, Viagra.

Categories: Appointment with Polhman, Columns
Tags: