Malcolm Gladwell
I only know Malcolm Gladwell through his New Yorker writings, nothing against the popular books, I just don’t think I would enjoy them that much. I did however, recently discover his blog and these two great posts on performance enhancing drugs in professional sports. I enjoy watching and playing sports, but this leads to personal frustration at what Mr. Gladwell accurately calls the “intellectual sloppiness” behind the current movement to ban steroids and their numerous offspring from being used by professional athletes.
It is clear that Barry Bonds unnaturally altered his physique in order to hit more home runs and I think that was wrong. But at an intellectual level is it really that different from Tiger Woods getting laser eye surgery to improve his vision? I say no, but the larger issues to me is the hypocrisy surrounding the idea of purity in professional sports in the United States. Little is pure about baseball, football, or basketball in America. Yet they all rely heavily upon the illusion of purity and fairness in each game, and as a result Barry Bonds has been pursued with a venom and persistence usually reserved for war criminals while Tiger Woods was rewarded with his own line of crappy Gatorade.
I find myself watching sports less and less, not because I dislike them but because greed has eleminated any illusion of parity.
Gatorade is not crappy! I liked the point you made, but yes, we are treating different things in here. Doing a laser surgery to correct an impairment is the same as wearing contact lenses to correct the same impairment. Taking a drug to be able to run faster is cheating.
Is the same way I feel about neuroenhancers that are widespread used in Universities, by both college students AND our fellow researchers. Taking a prescription drug to perform better in a test is cheating to me as well. It gives an advantage to people that are willing to put their health at risk over their fellows.
I would agree about the “purity” of the sports, but that is not only in America. In Brazil we had huge controversies over athletes that were caught in anti-doping exams, and they too were treated like criminals.