The physical capabilities of athletes are an integral part of success in sport and in attracting crowds.
Naturally, and not so naturally, modern competitors have bodies that would make their old heroes blush.
Athletes caught taking steroids and other banned substances have said the pressure to perform was their reason, but what about the ones that improve themselves without breaking the rules?
They have found the holy grail of modern sport, a means of gaining an edge without consequences.
Drugs to improve the mind are commonplace, but in sport they have not received the same attention as their muscle-building cousins. Headlines scream in baseball about “tainted” players and records, but what does it really mean to be a pure athlete anymore?
Since stimulants were banned in baseball there has been a sudden rise in players diagnosed with Attention-Deficit Disorder.
Roughly eight per cent of major-leaguers now have “therapeutic use exemptions” for stimulants like Ritalin, Adderall and other drugs that increase focus.
Use of Ritalin has become popular among healthy students, truckers and poker players for the same reason.
We live in a society that yearns for self-improvement and all too often considers drugs to be the answer.
Does your five-year-old have trouble focusing for extended periods of time? Get pills.
Are you too scrawny? Get a pill, a powder, an injection.
Too fat? Diet Pills.
Tiredness? Pills.
Nausea? Pills.
Can’t get it up? Check your inbox.
So what do you expect the next generation of drugs to do for society and for athletes? We know the drugs will make money, and the ones that are most useful and marketable to healthy people will make the most. Sick people are a niche market, time to expand.
Is it unrealistic to expect drugs designed for people with Alzheimer’s to be used by athletes and others for memory? Treatments for other conditions will surely have similar uses that could provide advantages to athletes in varying sports with “therapeutic use exemptions.”
It is going to happen; that is how we got this far. Anabolic steroids have been used to help people with cancer and AIDS retain muscle mass, and these drugs and their newest versions will continue to be tempting for athletes.
Similarly, Human Growth Hormone [HGH] is used to treat conditions of shortness, but athletes have used it to get bigger muscles and recover from injuries.
George Mitchell said in his report on drugs in baseball that players were increasingly turning to HGH because no urine test can catch it.
Any competitive advantage that can be gained without punishment will be attractive to athletes and prohibitions will never be able to keep up with producers.
Mark McGwire is an obvious example as his record-breaking 70 home run season in 1998 has been written off as tainted.
He admitted to taking steroid-precursor androstenedione, an over-the-counter muscle enhancement product, which was allowed by baseball at the time. It had already been banned by the World Anti-Doping Agency.
His record has since been broken by Barry Bonds who has also been “tainted” with steroid use accusations.
Today’s players continue looking for all the current allowable advantages. Surely, players cannot be expected to follow the rules of the future.
No one raised a furor over McGwire’s contact lenses that improved his vision to 20/10. This was, and still is, “allowable” to the purists? No one has called Tiger Woods a fraud for his superhuman sight either.
Athletes are under no obligation to admit eye-surgery though Mike Weir, Jose Cruz Jr., Greg Maddux, Larry Walker, Amare Stoudemire, Tiki Barber and countless others have. They better hope Congress or some other legislative body does not retroactively deem the surgery unethical.
While Congress is poised to pass a bill cracking down on HGH, don’t expect it to similarly follow suit with “unnatural” vision.
Tom Davis, the Republican chairman of the House Committee on Government Reform, has led the baseball witch hunt thus far. But Davis himself has acted as a spokesman for the Eye Center in his state of Virginia after his own eye surgery.
As legislators continue to attack baseball about a societal obsession with self-improvement they will only ignore the issue and expose their own hypocrisy.