Sport is full of supposedly progressive ideas. Some have been transformational, while others have never taken off.
However, none have been quite so grotesque as this latest idea to reshape sport. An Australian entrepreneur is launching an Olympic-styled competition for drug-taking athletes.
The concept, which has been dreamt up by Melbourne-born, London-based businessman Aron D’Souza, is called the “Enhanced Games” with the inaugural staging in December next year.
D’Souza is the president of these Games with a coalition of athletes, doctors and scientists also involved in the event which will take place with no drug testing. Whatever substance an athlete believes will make them run faster, jump higher or throw further, they can take. Steroids? Fine. EPO? No problem. Testosterone? Take as much as you want.
It’s certainly different.
These alternative Games are being launched to challenge the Olympics which, says D’Souza, are a broken model.
“The IOC [International Olympic Committee] has effectively been a one-party state running the world of sport for 100 years,” D’Souza said. “And now the opposition party is here. We are ready for a fight. I know they are going to play dirty. I know they are going to threaten us. But ultimately we know that we are morally correct.”
He continued: “Athletes are adults, and they have a right to do with their body what they wish – my body, my choice; your body, your choice. And no government, no paternalistic sports federation, should be making those decisions for athletes, particularly around products that are FDA regulated and approved.”
It is a fascinating development.
The idea has long been mooted that since at least some athletes are doping, why shouldn’t the playing field be levelled and allow everyone to take performance-enhancing drugs?
Certainly the war against doping at the Olympic Games is not being won. London 2012 was touted as the cleanest Olympics, but just over a decade on, that claim has been debunked, with more than 150 athletes having been found to have cheated and there is the suspicion that many more did and got away with it.
To this day, there remains huge suspicion around any athlete who produces an outstanding performance. And so, in theory, taking away the unfair advantage dopers have makes sense.
But in reality, this suggestion of a dopers Olympics, or these “Enhanced Games” – which will include athletics, swimming, weightlifting, gymnastics and, alarmingly, combat sports – is crazy.
It cannot, and will not work. The danger is massive. There are countless tales of athletes who doped during their career who then died young.
There are dozens of stories from East German women in particular, having been part of a state-sponsored doping regime in the 1970s and 80s, of the issues that adversely affect them to this day as a direct result of the drugs they took during their career.
And then there is the issue of how much interest there will be in the Enhanced Games.
Despite its plethora of challenges, the Olympics remain the biggest sporting event on the planet. Competing at a Games remains the primary goal for millions of athletes.
Certainly, the current state of the Olympics does little to suggest they are clean. Take athletics. Of the top six fastest men in history, only one – Usain Bolt – has never served a drugs ban or been stripped of medals following positive tests.
So there is little dispute that something needs to be done to clean up sport. But opening the floodgates for all performance-enhancing drugs is not the answer.
Yes, the scepticism surrounding the Olympics Games, and modern sport as a whole, is far from ideal, but I refuse to accept there is an appetite for watching doped-up human robots compete against each other.
Bolt’s 100m world record stands at 9.58 seconds but D’Souza claims he has an athlete who can run 9.49 seconds.
Okay, it is marginally faster than Bolt, but the appeal of watching the Jamaican and his peers at an Olympic Games, is witnessing just what the human body can do when pushed to its limit.
However safe doping can be made, and D’Souza insists it can be if monitored correctly, it removes the entire essence of what sport is.
Sport is human beings making the impossible, possible. If a cocktail of performance-enhancing drugs is introduced, the limits of human performance no longer exist and so the remarkable spectacle that is the boundaries of human achievement being pushed no longer exists.
And where does this end?
If one pill makes an individual faster safely, the likelihood is that the next person will want to take four pills to get four times the benefit.
The concept is fatally flawed.
There is, we can all agree, a problem with drug in elite sport. But allowing everyone to become a doper is never the answer.
The Enhanced Games have no future in the world of sport.
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