I’ve been a fan of cycling for quite a while and the Tour de France is undoubtedly the highlight of the cycle racing calendar for me. Unfortunately, even if you aren’t into cyclesport the Tour may be familiar to you now. Over the last few years it has made the mainstream press as the subject of performance enhancing doping. Personally I think that has more to do with cycling undertaking more stringent testing than other sports rather than harbouring a greater proportion of drug cheats.

Whether this is the case is not the issue of this post. Being a technophile my interest is in the use of drugs to enhance human performance. This could easily be taken as an example of the dark side of technology, but that might be missing the point. Whichever way you look at it the decision as to whether or not a technology is good or bad is taken from the consensus view of an interested society.

It’s cheating.

Yes! When a sportsperson is claiming their performance to be entirely due to natural ability enhanced by hard work, whilst supplementing this with methods banned by the rules of their sport it is most definitely cheating. But this is due to the agreed rulebook not the methods in themselves. The technology is not intrinsically bad.

It’s dangerous.

This is less certain. Many of the banned methods and substances can be shown to be life threatening and damaging to the long term health of the individual. This is also true for a lot of other human activities, including the intensive training require to succeed in top level sport. Research periodically leads to accepted and legal practices being banned for this reason. Many banned substances are legal up to a specified dosage and this dose has not necessarily been historically static.

How to make sport fair?

This is where society has to play it’s part. There are two extremes with the usual spectrum of solutions lying between.

Extreme number one: Ban the use of all practices and substances! This would be difficult to accomplish since eating and drinking are kind of necessary for all of us and athletes are no exception. Therefore, this extreme would require the abandonment of all sporting activity. Yeah, right!

Extreme number two: Legalize the use of any methodology or substance. This is in fact the most practical approach since policing is not an issue. However, wouldn’t it compel aspiring athletes to adopt unsafe practices if they ever hoped to succeed? The answer is almost certainly yes, but sadly that might be the price of success take it or leave it. Remember though that sport doesn’t take place in a vacuum, yet… give it time, and wide acceptance of drug use might have unfortunate results for Society in general.

In between lies the current world of the doping arms race with scientists on both sides development measures and counter-measures. It’s good for the press and lawyers, so we should all be happy. Right?

But what’s really interesting for a technophile?

The biological and now genetic research involved in developing performance enhancing effects is impressive. It should also be remembered that much of the research is conducted for beneficial medical application. It’s a shame these talented individuals should have their work wasted on sport, but that’s money for you!

Formula One racing has become a development environment for the automotive industry, with only the driver remaining largely unchanged. It sets limits to reduce performance to ’safe’ levels and then the teams promptly develop new technology to push is back up to where they started. Could you also argue that todays F1 driver needs to be fitter than his equivalent of a couple of decades ago?

Maybe, in a similar manner, athletic sport is destined to become a prototype development ground for the human frame. Maybe it already is? The only difference is that we are not engineering a non-sentient machine. Society finds this fundamentally disturbing and may be it should.

Science fiction is full of mechanically, pharmaceutically and genetically enhanced humans. These people are capable of much higher levels of operational efficiently and of surviving plagues and huge levels of physical damage, which can be regenerated later of course! On the flip-side are terrifying mutants and eugenic wars, such as those in Star Trek.

Could this future ever be realized and would it be as good or bad, depending on who you read, as it is portrayed? There have already been wars fought on the basis of a belief in genetic superiority. In the end, as with all technological advance, whether it is beneficial or harmful is dependent not on the technology but our ability to sociologically develop at a rate that can keep pace.