The Winter Olympics scheduled for Vancouver in 2010 are in danger of becoming the most boring games so far. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) seems to have gotten it in their business-naive heads to ban secret performance-enhancing drugs such as THG that winning athletes have been using for years.
By the time the Vancouver games arrive, athletes’ muscles will have atrophied back to normal wimpy proportions. The physiques, along with the records, will be back to boring size.
That’s hard to sell.
Using modern pharmaceutical technology, stars such as Ben Johnson and Mark McGwire brought new attention to otherwise dull sporting events. It’s time we admit that modern tastes have changed, and without the participation of drugged Frankenpeople, sports can’t compete for consumers’ attention – especially in the vital five- to 12-year-old demographic.
The Olympic movement needs to recognize that the exciting World Wrestling Entertainment is stepping on its growth potential by grabbing so many young viewers. The Olympic slogan is not “fairer, nicer, kinder,” it’s “faster, higher, stronger.” It’s time the IOC recognizes that drugs are necessary for modern sports to succeed financially. Without them, Vancouver is danger of hosting the fairest show on Earth (yawn).
The relationship between sensational and spectacular record-setting Games is hard to dispute. You’ll never see “least-tainted Games ever” in 100-point headlines. Over the past three decades, the use of performance-enhancing drugs brought new and younger viewers into the Olympic tent, as records were smashed and normal athletes turned into super-fast or super-sized gladiators.
There is a direct correlation between the growth of the Olympics as an industry and the increase of drug use in the 1970s and 1980s.
No one but a few specialists watched weight lifting before the Soviet-bloc countries made it a national priority to use science to turn their strongmen into real-life supermen. Of course, the athlete-to-smite-all-athletes, Arnold Schwarzenegger, an admitted steroid user, turned bodybuilding into a world-famous sport in that same era.
I had never watched sprinting before steroid-filled Ben Johnson came along. And even outside the Olympics, it was supplement-taking Barry Bonds and bat-corking Sammy Sosa battling it out to beat Babe Ruth’s home-run record who first brought me into the baseball tent.
By the time I had learned that McGwire’s and Johnson’s accomplishments deserved an asterisk, it was too late, I had latched on to their respective sports.
Drug use, therefore, is a great way to lure new viewers, who bring dollars with them. Drugs can catapult sports to new heights of public awareness, making the business a profit machine.
Yet despite all this evidence, the IOC came up with the misguided World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), chaired by Canada’s own Dick Pound, a few years ago. WADA’s mandate was and is to eliminate the use of performance-enhancing drugs and related bio-chemical techniques from all sports. They might as well dub themselves Wimps Against Dramatic Athletics.
Chemists should be embraced as a valuable asset for any athlete’s entourage.
I don’t want to hear any crap about doping being cheating. If you want to talk about justice, it’s not fair that modern Olympians should have to compete with records that were set during the doping heydays.
Officials in the Olympics should learn from managers in the large professional sports leagues, who are compelled by law to maximize shareholder value under their leagues’ for-profit status.
In the National Hockey League, for example, officials say, that performance-enhancing drugs do not benefit their athletes.
This way, no expensive testing programs need to happen, and there is zero chance of someone being caught “cheating,” since performance-enhancing drugs are not illegal.
Following that lead, the IOC simply needs to allow drug use, and as long as everyone’s doing it, no one has an advantage.
Of course, they will need to establish a program or subsidy for poorer, developing nations, which can’t afford the requisite pharmacological investment (suggested name: DUPE – Doping Underprivileged People Everywhere).
But DUPE could be funded from the unquestionably vast improvements in games’ revenue that will follow.
Detractors of this open-floodgates idea point out that drugs have adverse health effects, and so responsible parents will forbid their children from choosing a sport infested with doped-up athletes.
But Canada is living proof that this is a mistaken assumption.
We need to look no further than our national game to see a few broken backs, loss of an eye or two and hundreds of instances of serious (potentially brain-damaging) concussions have never hurt hockey’s marketability to Canadian parents and children alike. Don Cherry said it best: Only wimps wear visors.
But even if Cherry’s wrong, there is no better way to encourage a kid to do something than to forbid it. The more dangerous a game, the more alluring it will be.
(Ian van de Burgt, while not obviously athletic, can provide medical evidence that he possesses at least one athlete’s foot.)
