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.