NY Times: "Let the Games Be Doped"

From The NY Times. Nartker wrote on a different angle of doping or PEDs or whatever. No "blueberries in their shorts" analogies. Unfortunate:
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http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/12/science/12tier.html?8dpc

Let the Games Be Doped

By JOHN TIERNEY
August 11, 2008

Once upon a time, the lords of the Olympic Games believed that the only true champion was an amateur, a gentleman hobbyist untainted by commerce. Today they enforce a different ideal. The winners of the gold medals are supposed to be natural athletes, untainted by technology. After enough “scandals,” the amateur myth eventually died of its own absurdity. The natural myth is still alive in Beijing, but it’s becoming so far-fetched — and potentially dangerous — that some scientists and ethicists would like to abandon it, too.

What if we let athletes do whatever they wanted to excel?

Before you dismiss this notion, consider what we’re stuck with today. The system is ostensibly designed to create a level playing field, protect athletes’ health and set an example for children, but it fails on all counts.

The journal Nature, in an editorial in the current issue, complains that “antidoping authorities have fostered a sporting culture of suspicion, secrecy and fear” by relying on unscientifically calibrated tests, like the unreliable test for synthetic testosterone that cost Floyd Landis his 2006 Tour de France victory. Even if the authorities manage to correct their tests, they can’t possibly keep up with the accelerating advances in biology. Some athletes are already considering new drugs like Aicar and GW1516, which made news recently when researchers at the Salk Institute used them to quickly turn couch-potato mice into treadmill champions with new, strong muscles.

“There’s a possibility that athletes in this Olympics will be using these drugs,” said Ronald Evans, the leader of the team at Salk, who has been fending off inquiries from athletes about these drugs. He has advised the antidoping authorities on how to detect these drugs, but whether they’ll be able do it competently this Olympics is far from clear.

The authorities will have even less of a chance of catching athletes who move beyond drugs and hormones to “gene doping” — inserting genes in their DNA that could increase strength and endurance without leaving telltale chemicals in the bloodstream.

There’s no proof that this would work, but that won’t stop competitors. As Science News reported, a track coach in Germany was caught looking for Repoxygen, an experimental virus used to insert a gene into DNA.

So what we have now is not a level playing field. The system punishes some innocent athletes and rewards others with the savvy and the connections not to get caught. The more that the authorities crack down on known forms of enhancement, the more incentive athletes have to experiment with new ones — and to get their advice from black-market dealers instead of doctors.

If athletes didn’t have to cheat to win, they and society would be better off, says Bengt Kayser, the director of a sports medicine institute at the University of Geneva. In a 2005 article in The Lancet, he and two bioethicists argued that legalizing doping would “encourage more sensible, informed use of drugs in amateur sport, leading to an overall decline in the rate of health problems associated with doping.”

In the British Medical Journal last month, more than 30 scholars signed a statement supporting an article co-authored by Dr. Kayser calling the current system a failure that needs to be changed. The article also criticized the medical authorities for undermining their credibility with “prophylactic lies” that exaggerate the dangers of drugs like anabolic steroids based “on scant evidence tainted by a misguided moralistic motivation to protect sports.”

No one denies that there are risks in taking drugs like anabolic steroids, and there is wide agreement that minors shouldn’t be allowed to take them (or other performance drugs). But the popular fear of steroid use by adults is based in large part on a few sensationalized cases, like the news articles blaming steroids for the fatal brain tumor of Lyle Alzado, the former football player.

“You’d be on firmer scientific ground blaming his brain cancer on beer drinking,” said Norman Fost, a professor of pediatrics and bioethics at the University of Wisconsin. “The claims of the common fatal or irreversible harms of anabolic steroids are without any medical foundation. There’s no reason to think the risk of injury or death is as high as the risk from simply playing sports like football or baseball.”

It’s possible, of course, that gene doping or other techniques could turn out to be much riskier. But is that a reason to ban them? Society has always allowed explorers and adventurers to take risks in exchange for glory. The climbers who died on K2 this month ascended it knowing that one climber dies for every four who scale it.

If elite adult athletes were allowed to push the limits of human performance in return for glory, they might point the way for lesser mortals to coax more out of their bodies. If a 50-year-old sprinter could figure out how to run as fast as her 25-year-old self, that could be useful to aging weekend warriors — or any aging couch potato.

I’d like to see what would happen if someone started a new anything-goes competition for athletes over 25. If you have any ideas for how to run it or what to call it — MaxMatch? UltraSports? Mutant Games? — submit them at nytimes.com/tierneylab. Maybe fans would object to these “unnatural” athletes. But maybe not. The fans, after all, include people with laser-corrected eyes, chemically whitened teeth and surgically enhanced anatomies. Not to mention the pharmacopeia coursing through our veins.

We all know the body can be improved. We all know Olympic athletes have the highest-functioning bodies in the world. They can call themselves natural, just as they used to call themselves amateurs, but at some point that claim may seem the most unnatural thing of all.

A Level Playing Field

I think it’s time to see how high man can really jump; or if a human being can physically break 9 seconds in the 100 meters. I would love to know if the 3:20 mile would actually make a man’s heart stop working like all the “experts” said would happen to the first man to break 4:00. (I’m fairly confident it worked out ok for that Roger Bannister guy. . .) Even that crazy redneck family in the backwoods of nowhere would slip off the couch to adjust the bunny ears if they knew that every conceivable athletic record was about to be shattered by today’s best athletes.

How would this happen, you say? By the governing bodies of sport stepping up to the plate to stop the butt injecting, pill swallowing, blood transfusing, clear and cream rubbing suckers that are ruining fair competition, that’s how. Let’s pick a date. My son Dallin’s 3 year birthday is fast approaching on August 1, so that’s my pick. On August 1, 2008 all banned substance lists will be abolished and every PED on the market (open or black) is now completely legal. No more wasted money on testing; no more inconvenient raids on athlete’s houses out of season to catch them with their pants down; no more perjury cases. All is fair in athletic competition.

The people with the scrilla -- which happens to be the ones competing -- will always stay a few steps ahead of the ones doing the testing. What’s the point!? Marion Jones and Barry Bonds never tested positive for anything other than snaggle teeth and arrogance respectively, but who’s going to bet their monthly salary, let alone their lunch money, that this duo wasn’t taking? I’m an avid American cyclist, yet I don’t know that I can look anyone in the eye and say that Lance and Floyd (tangent . . . who on earth names their kid Floyd anyway . . . can a baby actually look like a Floyd coming out of the womb?) never juiced up in some fashion to win a combined 8 Tour de France titles.

I would venture to say that a large majority of professional athletes have a, “I will do anything to win” attitude. You will not stop the cheating by drug testing and suspensions. As Mr. Conte from BALCO alluded to a few years back, there will always be another chemist brewing up some magic, undetectable substance that will give athletes the edge they are looking for.

The only way to truly level the playing field is to open the flood gates to new world records. Bring em on! Can you say entertaining television? Who wouldn’t want to see some freak of nature with blueberries in his pants line up to run the 200 meters faster than a motorcycle? Count me in. Have them sign a waiver admitting their stupidity for risking their life for money and glory, and let the games begin! Make sure their families have good life insurance and IRAs maturing and let’s call up Guinness to make it official.

I think it’s time to give the public what they deserve, a level playing field.