Thursday, July 26, 2007

Is Athletic sports a fair competition?

I came across a post expressing an unusual perspective on doping issue in Sports, wherein it is perceived that nothing essentially wrong with taking performance-enhancing drugs. Hmm... this unusually different perspective motivated me to write a post on this! I believe most of the individual level sports in a sense is an unfair competition. Let me express why it is? Assuming all the competitors from different parts of the world have equal opportunity to have high quality nourishment and best training facilities for a particular sport, then the only denominator/edge left with to compete is one's genetic potential. This is becoming more obvious from gradual predominance of African Americans/Africans, who seem to have better genetic advantages in many of the sports. Reminds me of the sheer physical power used by Williams sisters to dominate in Tennis arena and the height advantage (genetic) in basket ball, etc. I do appreciate for the efforts of the players in sharpening their skills where mental strategy is involved, say like tennis, but I don't see much of any mental role involved in athletic competitions.

Now talking of the possibility to permit performance enhancing drugs (presuming it works), do we want to allow all participants to use those drugs at either equal or unequal doses and see how best they can outperform each other and award the winner? which I believe as a testing and trying out to pick up the best interaction effect between the drug and individuals with unique body physiology (as expressed by their genes, assuming that nourishment and training were equal at its best). It also leads me to think, assume if I own a billion dollar company and using a single sportsman to promote my products with a deal worth of millions of dollars with him. I can throw some more bucks to carry out exclusive research to develop new drugs for performance enhancement and use it to my advantage. I can even manipulate which sportsman I want to be the winner. I might choose a sportsman with Tom Cruise like appearance over a naturally good sportsman with less appealing face for my purpose. And one can come up with many more possibilities of even to the level of genetic engineering the person to tailor him to the needs of the sport.

Let us wait and watch how things evolve in sports world to work around human limits!

3 comments:

B. Ramana said...

Hi! Looks like finally you understood something I said, eh? ;-)
Thanks for the link. Do come again!

Thiru said...

RAMANA

Well...! you still believe that I didn't understand you earlier?!

You are welcome. keep visiting!

Unknown said...

stop fighting boys !

ROTFL !