Tag: Olympics

Performance Enhancing Swimsuits — and Why Not Ban Lance?

It’s kind of hard to understand the justification for banning performance enhancing drugs but allowing all sorts of other performance enhancing technologies. If the major concern is the “integrity of the game,” then high tech swimsuits that reduce drag far more than was possible at previous competitions seems just as unfair as some drug that increases available oxygen. This is why, for example, Major League Baseball has so far resisted using aluminum bats, even though such bats can apparently be configured to have very close to the same properties as wooden bats.

The real kicker there are Nike’s non-goggles — lenses that are affixed to the eye sockets with medical adhesive, eliminating both the protruding nature of goggles as well as the band connecting them to the head. Why not make them permanent and have a Bruce Sterling Olympics?

One of the fascinating things I learned about traditional performance enhancement is how elite cyclists such as Lance Armstrong can actually alter their physiological reaction to lactic acid. As you exercise, lactic acid builds up in your muscles and eventually causes that pain you feel in muscles if you sustain an intense workout.

But using intensive training methods, you can actually raise your body’s tolerance for lactic acid. A number of web sites and news reports suggest that through training Lance Armstrong has an extremely high tolerance of lactic acid — apparently significantly higher than other cyclists (presumably there must be some sort of genetic component to one’s ultimate lactic acid tolerance).

Suppose that tomorrow I invented a completely safe compound whose only major side effect was that it increased your tolerance to lactic acid to the maximum that your genotype allows. Should such a compound be banned? What if I come up with a genetic modification that will push your or Lance Armstrong’s tolerance for lactic acid even further (though not into unsafe ranges)? Would that be cheating?

Perhaps the best answer is a compromise suggested by Gizmodo a few week ago — adding an enhanced category to competitions. So you’d keep the current regimen for non-enhanced athletes, but add an enhanced category without drug or genetic testing and anything goes.

Source:

Suit changes take swimmers to new heights. The Associated Press, August 2, 2004.

The Future Is Right Now for Performance Enhancing Drugs

The BBC had a story about performance enhancing drugs which addresses some of the issues raised a couple years ago in this thread at Seth’s web site about the use of PEDs in cycling (if you don’t follow cycling, the short version is that the sport has had a series of high profile scandals involving the use of performance enhancing drugs).

The main problem with existing PEDs, in my opinion, is that they are not safe. But at the same time, most sports governing bodies also ban drugs that are barely PEDs and that are perfectly safe (like stupidly disqualifying gymnasts because they took OTC cold remedies).

The BBC reports on the International Olympic Committee’s concession that it will not have a test in places before the 2004 Olympics to detect athletes who are using Humane Growth Hormone to enhance their performance. The BBC quotes Olivier Rabin, science director of the World Anti-Dopin Agency, as saying,

HGH is one of the main concerns we have. It’s quite a challenge. There are currently six different countries working on the detection of HGH. We would like to have something in place for the Olympics, but this (attemt at) detection has been going on for years. History has shown that you cannot always get tests ready on time, because science does not move forward smoothly.

In fact, the WADA was supposed to have an HGH test ready for the Sydney Olympics in 2000.

I do not know if HGH can be used safely by athletes to improve their performance, but if it can why should we even try to ban its use anymore than we should try to ban any of the other high tech devices and methods that are used to push human performance well beyond what would have been possible 40 or 50 years ago?

One objection is that if PEDs use is widely distributed, then all the competitors end up at the same relative position afterward. So, for example, if a PED increases a runner’s speed in a 10k race by 15 seconds, then all the competitors will take the drug and end up going 15 seconds faster without much of a shakeout in the order of finishing.

But, again, this seems like an objection that could be levelled at almost any sports innovation. Using 300 lb. linemen in the NFL gave the teams who initially adopted that practice a huge (pun intended) advantage. Today everybody uses 300 lbs. linemen and the relative advantage has disappeared.

Similarly, baseball teams whose players began serious weight training likely enjoyed a small advantage over their competitors, but now that weight training and other conditioning methods are widespread, the relative advantage has disappeared (i.e., all teams — except our pathetic Detroit Tigers — hit home runs today at a level above previous generations, though home runs are still distributed in similar ways between teams).

The bottom line is that people watch sports, in part, to see other human beings reaching and even exceeding their potential. People want to see the baseball star who can hit one or two more home runs in a season than anyone else ever has, or who can run 100 meter just a tenth of a second faster than anyone else in the world has.

Why should we hamper such athletes by banning the use of safe performance enhancing drugs, especially given that the future is likely to see treatments that are a) increasingly safe, b) increasingly effective, and b) like HGH, increasingly hard to detect.

Genetically Enhanced Athletes

The BBC ran a pretty much content free report a few days ago about the dangers of ‘super athletes.’ Apparently some sports scientists (?) at a conference predicted that by 2012, athletes competing in the Olympics could be using genetic engineering to enhance their performance. Of course the sports scientists (oddly enough) advocated for more research to discover these cheaters.

There was a long thread this summer at Seth Dillingham‘s site about the issue of performance enhancing drugs, including the possibility (more likely inevitability) of using genetic engineering to improve sports performance.

For the most part, I don’t see much wrong with performance enhancing drugs and there is no way the Olympics or any other sport is going to be able to keep out genetically engineered athletes for every long. And why should they?

Take a look at the average athlete today in a sport such as football or basketball or cycling, and compare them to the folks who were in those sports as professionals in the 1920s or 1930s. For the most part its no contest — athletes today are far better than they were early in the 20th century due largely to scientific advances.

The next step in improving humanity’s lot is certainly going to involve genetic engineering and will inevitably impact the sports world.

IOC Says Internet Not Ready for Prime Time

Apparently before the Olympic games began, the International Olympic Committee forecasted that 35 million people would visit the official Olympics web site. According to the BBC, only about 15 million people did. The BBC reported that “They [IOC Marketing spokespersons] said the figures showed that the Internet still had a long way to go before it could rival television as a mainstream broadcasting medium.”

This is a backward way of putting it. If I want my site to get half a million visits a month and it tops out at 350,000 visits a month, typically I look to things that I could have done differently: was the content not up to par? Were there other marketing methods I could have used to reach my target market?

The IOC, however, turns around and says “sheesh — the Internet turns out to be just a bunch of hype” (and I don’t mean to pick on the IOC because I think this is not an uncommon attitude). One of the things that would be interesting would be to find out the Olympics-oriented hits that major news and sports web sites received.

Personally I checked out the results of many events online, but only went to the IOC site once, before the games. I suspect many sports fans rather than visiting the official site got their Olympics update along with other sports news from CNN, ESPN, the BBC, or other news oriented web sites, since the IOC site really didn’t add anything to the experience beyond what you could get in a straight sports news site (in fact in this case, sports news outlets typically had added value thanks to the commentary and analysis which I didn’t see a lot of at the IOC site).

Just How Bad Is The Olympics Coverage?

Apparently so bad that it’s driving viewers to the SciFi channel. According to SciFi.Com,

The SCI FI Channel reported a 25 percent increase in household ratings in competition against the Olympic Games on NBC. SCI FI said it also captured the highest concentration of adults aged 25-54 of any network, broadcast or cable during the Olympics and posted a 31 percent household ratings gain among such adults.

SCI FI reported a 25 percent increase in September ratings compared with the same month last year. The cable network said it is on track to finish the third quarter of 2000 with a 0.9 household rating, a quarterly record and a 13 percent improvement over the same quarter last year.

That’s pretty amazing considering the crap that the SciFi channel tends to run. Tonight they’re showing “Species II” and I swear they have to hold the record for repeated showings of the horrible Puppet Masters films. Sure they run Babylon 5 and Star Trek: TOS, but they really play a lot of horrible movies.

Olympic Travesty: Give Andreea Raducan Her Medal Back

An arbitrator yesterday ruled against Romanian gymnast Andreea Raducan, meaning she won’t get her gold medal back after it was stripped by Olympics officials when Raducan failed a drug tests. This whole affair represents the mean-spiritedness and tyrannical bureaucracy of the Olympics committee at its worst.

Raducan tested positive for pseudoephedrine, a common ingredient in cold medicine — Raducan was given a cold pill that contained the drug by a trainer. Stripping a gold medal for this makes no sense when you consider that,

  • Raducan had no idea she was even taking a drug containing pseudoephedrine
  • the trainer who gave it to her probably didn’t realize it was banned, since no other gymnastics competition bans pseudoephedrine — had she tested positive for the drug at the world championships rather than the Olympics, the result wouldn’t have even been announced
  • the reason it’s not banned anywhere but the Olympics, at least for gymnastics, is that even the Olympic folks conceded there is no performance enhancing benefit from taking pseudoephedrine for a gymnast

This appears to be a case of simply banning a drug because the IOC can, and robbing a talented young woman of the gold medal she deserves. Shame on the IOC.