One writer questions where sports and doping may go – and it probably isn’t where you think.
We take you behind the scenes this month with our timely Vancouver Games Blog, an insider perspective on sport medicine and science headlines, talking points, statistical data and emerging trends.
In a Huffington Post article today writer Andy Miah lays out where he sees the performance enhancer debate ultimately headed :
Beyond sports, we are becoming a global community defined by our pursuit of biological self-experimentation, where we embrace body and mind modifications to aspire to an improvement in our lives. In such an age, will people still care about what athletes are using to boost their performances? Will it really matter if an athlete took a nasal decongestant that contained a tiny amount of a banned substance, given that their other technological apparatus – psychologists, nutritionists, physiotherapists, etc – will have provided a far greater performance advantage?
These two eras of sport are united by a mutual appreciation for sporting excellence; the difficulty is that they differ in how they define and evaluate this term. For the former, technology compromises and overshadows natural excellence, though at times allows for a more representative appraisal of athletic ability. Consider how running shoes protect the otherwise quite vulnerable ankle joint. For the latter, technology is constitutive of the natural athlete and becomes even more necessary as humanity approaches its natural biological limits. Time will tell which version of sport prevails, but I suspect that history will side on the latter.
Read the full post here.
