How should the athletic community regard performance-enhancing drugs?
Asked by
Jayne (
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February 1st, 2009
I would prefer, for the sake of argument, to ignore the negative physical effects of existing drugs. Let us pretend that a steroid sans peanut testicles has been formulated.
This question necessarily raises the question of the proper role of sports. It seems that if sports are simply entertainment, then such drugs will do little more than improve that entertainment. If sports provide some kind of forum to prove who is the more dedicated athlete, steroids, which only increase the gain for a certain amount of effort, will not hinder that purpose (if they are readily available); indeed, they would level the playing field by allowing the hard-working but under-endowed athlete to get ahead. At worst, they could provide an economic barrier to professional sports, but a committed player could surely find a sponsor.
What do you guys think? If performance-enhancing drugs did not harm their users, should they be accepted, or even embraced, by the sporting community?
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5 Answers
We discussed this in PE.
We came to the conclusion that the best answer to this is to create a separate drugs-allowed games.
If you want to take drugs, thats fine, enter the separate competition. could you imagine how much money that would create! Like create a second olympics, then times by 10 thanks to the performance of the athletes.
People will be against it sure, but then again it’s not them who are taking it and it’s not like the athletes are going “YOU MUST TAKE THIS KIDS!!!” Sponsorship would be easy because it would be the drugs themselves, but for them to be made legal they would have to carry warning labels and so on anyway, just like cigarette packaging and advertising.
I think a separate games would be amazing.
Oh and about embracing them if they don’t do harm…
They do.
Creatine!
In both your scenario and, to a greater extent, in mine, athletes would be forced, essentially, to take drugs; if two systems were created, I would imagine that the ‘natural’ sports would ultimately become something of a fringe, and the ambitious athlete would have no choice but to enhance their bodies. So the question, I suppose, is if sports still have the same meaning if all athletes are artificially enhanced.
Compare the incredible popularity of collegiate wrestling to the complete lack of interest in professional wrestling, and I think you’ll see the main problem with having parallel sports where one allows performance enhancing drugs and one does not.
And @Jayne, it really depends on what you think the meaning of sports is in the first place. For most people, sports seem to be about identifying with a team more than anything else, and I don’t think that meaning will go away. And televised sports events—those have the same meaning (i.e., very little, aside from entertainment value) whether there are performance-enhancing drugs or not. And amateur sports, that people participate in for the fun of it—there, I can see separate leagues, just as you have the 20something men’s basketball league and the over-40 men’s basketball league, but the meaning there is what the participants get out of the activity, and I don’t see that changing.
i guess sports drinks at one time were considered performance enhancing drugs
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