Re:Doped athletics is not athletics. (Score 1)

Engineering does not supplant skill, or the athlete. Think for a second about what would actually happen if NASCAR permitted any sort of engine conceivable. The upper limit of performance would still be determined by driver. Why? Because winning is still about reaction time and focus. If you allow increasingly faster engines, you still have to rely on the ability of the driver to maneuver the vehicle. Thus, no matter how fast the car is goes, the end result will still be directly linked to the man behind the wheel. The competition would be different, but the determining factor (the factor that is being measured) - the skill of the driver - would remain unchanged.

You can take it one step further and imagine that NASCAR allowed drivers to snort lines of ritalin before the race. Could we then say that "it was the ritalin" and not the person that won the race? Of course not. Taking ritalin does not substitute for practice and natural talent. All it does is prolong the length of time that you can efficiently execute certain mental skills acquired beforehand. In short, increasing endurance (which is really what all PEDs do) does not magically increase skill (look at the other side of the coin: if you deprived a chess champion of sleep for three days and then asked him to compete, no one would claim that he was exhibiting the full range of his talents).

The argument against PEDs really only applies to a very narrow subset of sports: those that rely totally on endurance or strength. In reality these "sports" are few and far between - the only ones I can think of are weightlifting and some track sports, mostly running. In a way these sports are are barely sports at all, since they are almost totally determined by the chance physical characteristics of the competitors. For example, Michael Phelps has feet that are about 3 inches wider than mine, so if even if we both took as many steroids as we wanted (and all else being even), he would still beat me.

Sports have rules in order to identify the competitor which best exhibits some arbitrary ability. The consistent introduction of PEDs to this sort of framework does little to change this. think of it as adding a fixed constant to a wide range of different functions.