Fairness in Athletics Redux
alie...@gmail.com
is being spectacularly unhelpful)
So, we've pretty much agreed that steroids are right out for pro
sports and the Olympics because they confer an unfair, temporary
advantage, but are hereditary advantages OK?
Biomechanists (nifty job title, that) at Penn State have determined
that champion sprinters typically have longer toes and "a unique ankle
structure" that permits greater acceleration. Specifically, sprinters
have shorter Achilles tendons:
http://live.psu.edu/story/42668/rss68
We short-toes can take solace in the fact that we're better adapted
for distance running.
Mark L. Fergerson
A.G.McDowell
s.com>, nu...@bid.nes <alie...@gmail.com> writes
and I suspect influences your chances of being a successful jockey or
basketball player. So far, at least, there have been no signs of damage
to athlete's health due to selective breeding by nations seeking olympic
glory, so there is a clean dividing line between heredity and
performance-enhancing drugs. (Who knows - a scheme in the Soviet Union
in response to the Berlin Olympics might easily arrange matings in 1936.
56. 76, and 96, and perhaps place an athlete at 2012).
If you want a corner case, try the treatment of female athletes who have
some inborn condition that renders them, in some sense, less female than
others. I suspect that the reason that this disqualifies them from
competitive sport is not that there is a clean line between their makeup
and the makeup of e.g. a cyclist with an unusually competent
cardiovascular system, but that these conditions are just common enough
that, if they were allowed to compete, the medal podiums would be
routinely filled by female athletes who don't look female, thus, as the
weasel words have it, "bringing the reputation of the sport into
disrepute."
--
A.G.McDowell
Brian Davis
>> are hereditary advantages OK?
>>
>> Biomechanists (nifty job title, that) at Penn State have determined
>> that champion sprinters typically have longer toes and "a unique ankle
>> structure" that permits greater acceleration.
>
> I don't think this is news - height is commonly held to run in families...
I agree - there are already a huge number of genetic advantages that
certain folks have over others in terms of different activities. I
think the question may come down to how those genetic differences are
generated... and what we value in the way of entertainment.
Mostly the 2nd. I'm not sure I know of an organized sport that doesn't
have some sort of arbitrary, artificially imposed limits. No doping?
No sandpaper on the ball? No steroids? No erythropoietin (but training
at altitude is OK)? Or moving into even more arbitrary rules, look at
car racing (stock? fins? ground effect? internal combustion engine?
fuel?). The limits have been imposed externally, to limit the sport in
some way (safer for the fans, safer for the athletes, or most likely
just more interesting... watching a high-performance jet outdistance
an Indy car would seem rather silly).
When the tasks are arbitrary, it's rather hard to see clear-cut
rational limits.
> Who knows - a scheme in the Soviet Union in response to the Berlin
> Olympics might easily arrange matings in 1936. 56. 76, and 96, and
> perhaps place an athlete at 2012).
They've already done that, in a sense, as have a lot of others - if
you have a bunch of people training intensely for an activity, you
house them together... which will tend to increase the potential
inbreeding within the group. The fact that it's a weak isolation
effect doesn't change the fact that it's there (OT: how strong an
isolation effect do you need to start seeing "significant" (whatever
that means) changes in a specified number of generations?).
--
Brian Davis
Erik Max Francis
> (I'm fairly sure the original thread was here, but Google's archive
> is being spectacularly unhelpful)
I'm not sure it was here; I only remember performance-enhancing drugs
coming up in the context of professional sports tangentially.
> So, we've pretty much agreed that steroids are right out for pro
> sports and the Olympics because they confer an unfair, temporary
> advantage, ...
I doubt you'd even find that much of a consensus. Take baseball, for
instance (a game I personally find completely boring so I have no "skin
in the game," if you will, on the subject). I know people passionate
about baseball who are adamant against steroid/HGH/etc. abuse and very
angry about it, those who are indifferent, and those that think it's all
stupid and everything should be allowed.
What seems to be the obvious current problem with the current rule --
whatever you think of performance-enhancing drugs -- is the inherent
conflict of interest of those who are supposed to enforce the
prohibition and the revenues they receive from people abusing them. It
leads to a cause where lots of people are breaking the rules, pretty
much everyone knows it, that creates incentives for others to also break
the rules to compete, and since everybody's rolling in dough because of
it a few high-profile cheaters are taken to task for it from time to
time again to make it look good, when all the while the metagame continues.
> ... but are hereditary advantages OK?
Well, they are obviously there, and nobody complains about them, so the
answer is obviously yes.
--
Erik Max Francis && m...@alcyone.com && http://www.alcyone.com/max/
San Jose, CA, USA && 37 18 N 121 57 W && AIM/Y!M/Skype erikmaxfrancis
Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes.
-- Oscar Wilde