The English Channel has been swum more than 600 times, Everest has been climbed more than 800 times, and so on and so forth. Since superfit athletes are evidently so common, fame seekers and record breakers must either think of something tougher, or make existing feats harder.

Robert Garside is planning to swim around the world, while Stuart Boreham is going to row across the Atlantic with cerebral palsy. Pretty impressive, but Douglas Adams was there first:

The major problem which the medical profession in the most advanced sectors of the galaxy had to tackle after cures had been found for all the major diseases, and instant repair systems had been invented for all physical injuries and disablements except some of the more advanced forms of death, was that of employment.

Planets full of bronzed healthy clean limbed individuals merrily prancing through their lives meant that the only doctors still in business were the psychiatrists, simple because no one had discovered a cure for the Universe as a whole - or rather the only one that did exist had been abolished by the medical doctors.

Then it was noticed, like most forms of medical treatment, total cures had a lot of unpleasant side effects. Boredom, listlessness, lack of…well anything very much, and with these conditions came the realisation that nothing turned say, a slightly talented musicain into a towering genius faster than the problem of encroaching deafness, and nothing turned a perfectly normal healthy individual into a great political or military leader better than irreversible brain damage. Suddenly, everything changed. Previously best selling books such as How I survived an hour with a sprained finger were swept away in a flood of titles such as How I scaled the North face of the MegaPurna with a perfectly healthy finger but everything else sprained, broken or bitten off by a pack of mad yaks.

And so doctors were back in business recreating all the diseases and injuries they had abolished in popular easy to use forms. Thus, given the right and instantly available types of disability even something as simple as turning on the three-d TV could become a major challenge, and, when all the programmes on all the channels actually were made by actors with cleft pallettes speaking lines by dyslexic writers filmed by blind cameramen instead of merely seeming like that, it somehow made the whole thing more worthwhile.

Why are performance-enhancing drugs banned in sports competitions? I can think of two reasons:

• They can have dangerous or nasty side effects
• They convey an unfair advantage

Compare these with the current acceptable method of performance enhancement: exercise.

It’s not uncommon for athletes to spend 8 hours a day training. Why is this more acceptable than spending 8 hours a day chomping steroids? Drugs will consume your life, but so does extreme exercise and the single-minded pursuit of physical perfection. Taking drugs is considered a shortcut, bypassing the effort required to make your body faster, stronger, fitter, (more productive), etc, but since when was sport a test of effort? Some people are born with athletic bodies. Are they cheats for not having to put the effort in like their comparatively disadvantaged competitors?

Sport would be a pretty sick endeavour if it required you to spend 100% of your life training. I don’t know if there’s anyone who actually does that, but if they do, it’s no better than doping. It’s reminiscent of MMORPGs, where the person who can spend more time online will be the person that ‘wins’. Very sad.

Highly developed undetectable drugs and genetic engineering will conspire to make competetive sport obsolete, starting with the first basketball player engineered to be 10 feet tall. Red Dwarf has something to say on the subject:

Not all breeds of genetically-engineered athletes were accepted. For the 2224 World Cup, Scotland fielded a goalkeeper who was a human oblong of flesh, twenty four foot by eight, that filled the entire goal. Somehow they still failed to qualify for the second round.

Life as a human oblong may seem bleak, but it’s not so bad if you’re given the choice, and I hardly see how it’s worse than the life of constant iron pumping and designer diets that athletes put themselves through right now.

- Whaddya know about stopping Bush?

- I dunno, my memory ain’t so great.

- Maybe this‘ll help…

- I dunno, it’s still kinda hazy…

- How about this?

The word on the street says there’s going to be a mass walkout of lectures tomorrow lunchtime in aid of Stopping Bush. Not sure what that’s going to achieve, except, as O says, preventing us learning stuff, and thus furthering the pro-ignorance agenda common to every totalitarian state in history’s Big Book of Lessons, which Bush seems to have had removed from public libraries. Just in case The Terrorists get one, of course.