Sometimes the hardest part about watching elite, Olympic level sports, especially in things like track and swimming, is the lingering doubt about whether athletes are competing clean. If you have even an ounce of skepticism in your soul, you can’t help but wonder if that win or record is purely human or some mix of man and pharmaceutical. Well, if that uncertainty ruins your sports viewing experience, there’s one sporting event to cure that ill and remove any lingering doubt about the truth of what you’re watching.
It’s called the Enhanced Games, a sporting festival recently held in Las Vegas, of course, where athletes in track and swimming and weightlifting were allowed to use pretty much the whole medicine chest of PED’s in training and competition.
The main requirement was you needed to work with a doctor and everything was approved by the US FDA. But according to event organizers, more than 90% used some kind of testosterone, almost 80% use human growth hormone, around 40% used EPO, and up and down a who’s who list of sports’ most wanted. The alleged idea of the event, beyond pure voyeurism, was to see what athletes were capable of if we just let them take advantage of the wonders of science. That was the idea at least, and event organizers predicted a long list of fake world records forthcoming.
I’ll skip to the ending, because contrary to overly optimistic predictions, only one world mark would have been broken - in the men’s 50-meter swim. And perhaps worse, both the women’s and men’s 100-meter track sprint were won by someone competing clean. So generally speaking, the results didn’t suggest some wild step forward in human imagination.
There’s a bunch of reasons for that, most notably that no one at the peak of elite sports would complete in something like this, even with $1 million prize offered for records. Beyond the health risks, it’s pretty much a career ender, some odd version of saying the quiet part out loud.
There’s a lot more overall money in clean sport – or at least sport that appears clean – than something proudly tainted. People may say they want honesty, but that’s not really true. We actually want the impossible to be true, which is what sport largely sells. It should be noted that a good number of athletes in the enhanced games set personal records, and a lot competed past their prime ages.
So don’t take the results as some repudiation of what unbridled science can do.
The bigger question in this event’s wake isn’t whether PED’s work – because they do – or whether it’s safe – because it isn’t -- but rather whether there’s a market for this kind of entertainment.
The early returns suggest no, an assessment reinforced by a significant drop in market valuation by the parent company running this thing. And I’d agree that most of the sports viewing public would rather not have the all-drugged Olympics, a concept parodied in an SNL skit in the 80s, right at the peak of the Ben Johnson steroid era. But it’s probably a bit more nuanced than that.
Not long ago, we saw our first sub two-hour marathon, a mark aided by carbon plated running shoes that act as something of a springboard. And middle distance endurance athletes are all caught up in taking sodium bicarbonate – basically baking soda – because it seems to enhance performance by reducing lactic acid. Unlike steroids or synthetics, it’s not banned because it’s naturally occurring and apparently doesn’t have an ill medical effect, other than a possible upset stomach.
So it’s allowed, along with a bunch of other stuff that gives the top .1% every possible edge against the other .1%ers. It’s a nuanced distinction - what’s a PED and what isn’t - even though I’m certain medical professionals can offer a far more rational explanation. Part of that includes the ethics of letting athletes take something that might harm or kill them, an argument that loses steam when you consider sanctioning sports like boxing and mixed martial arts. So it’s complicated.
I suppose what I’m trying to say is that while the Enhanced Games seem to miss, don’t confuse that with a public ambivalence for pushing athletes to the next frontier. It’s just that contrary to the premise of this business experiment, fans don’t actually want full transparency. Perhaps in the end, we’d rather just live with reasonable doubt.
Keith Strudler is the Dean of the College of Communication and Media at Montclair State University. You can follow him at @KeithStrudler.
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