Last Word: Against the established order
The fastest 50m freestyle time trial was set by a Greek swimmer recently. The world record has stood for 16 years — and will continue to stand for a while yet. For the swimmer, Kristian Gkolomeev, had begun taking drugs after signing up for the Enhanced Games to be held next year. This is the Olympics on steroids — literally. Drugs are allowed, and so is enhanced equipment, shoes, cycles, swimsuits that are banned in regular competition.
Even if it weren’t for the drugs, the fact that it is to be held in Las Vegas and is part-sponsored by Donald Trump Jr ought to be enough to warn people that this is something out of the ordinary, and perhaps even against the established order. And with the latter’s father the President of the United States when the Olympics are to be held in Los Angeles in 1928 — a sporting extravaganza that hopes to be free of drugs — it makes for an intriguing discussion in the interim. We cannot dismiss that as a side issue, although no Executive Order can make drug-taking legal at the Olympics. Or maybe it can. Like the rest of the world, I am confused too.
Using science to overcome the limits set by nature is an old strategy. It has led to the development of better boots, superior cycles, focused training, and artificial turf. The key word is ‘limit’.
Like a sonnet or a haiku, sporting events have limits within which they must be conducted. A sonnet is of 14 lines, and in the iambic pentameter if it is Shakespearean with the last two lines rhyming. You can’t ‘enhance’ it by reducing it to 10 lines in free verse with the last two lines in Morse code.
The argument that we try to find the fastest athlete or the strongest at the Olympics and not the most morally upright athlete who takes no drugs has sometimes been used to philosophically justify drug abuse in sport. Television loves villains as much as it loves heroes. There might be an attraction in watching someone collapse on the track due to drug abuse in a sporting competition. It may not happen in Las Vegas at the Enhanced Games, but the possibility exists. Every record-breaker will get a million dollars, and that’s an incentive too, even if World Athletics President Sebastian Coe says, “No one within athletics takes the Enhanced Games seriously.”
But there will be enough athletes, and possibly enough curiosity value to make television a packet of money, which, after all is what this is all about.
Australian businessman Aron D’Souza, whose brainchild this is, calls the International Olympic Committee corrupt and greedy and the World Anti-Doping Agency an “anti-science police force for the IOC.” He may be right.
But an anti-Olympics is hardly the appropriate response. He argues that the drugs — only cocaine and heroin are banned — will be taken under medical supervision and are therefore safe and out in the open. Ah! But is it sport?
