Wednesday 5 October, 6.30pm until 8.30pm, The Millennium Room, The Carriageworks, Millennium Square, Leeds LS2 3AD
Tickets: £5 (£3 concessions) per person. Tickets are available on the door: email Leeds Salon for more information.
With only a few months remaining before the London 2012 Olympic Games, British athletes are preparing hard in pursuit of a record haul of medals. To help them better the 47 won at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, an army of coaches, doctors and psychologists is at hand, along with a thriving sports technology industry, all backed by an unprecedented level of public and private investment. National ambitions aside, we all want to see exceptional performances from the world’s best athletes, such as Usain Bolt’s record-smashing sprints. Yet sometimes we are uneasy when athletes shatter old records, fearing it is artificial aids, and not the athlete’s individual effort, that accounts for the achievement. We seem to be hanging in a precarious balance between expecting a superhuman performance and fearing the crossing of nature’s boundaries.
When particular technologies have been ‘too successful’, such as Graeme Obree’s bicycle and riding position, or polyurethane-coated swimsuits, they have been banned for giving an unfair advantage. Some, like Rebecca Adlington refused to use the new swimsuits for ethical reasons even before they were banned, claiming they are a form of ‘technological doping’. And with such high stakes to play for and constant advances in medicine, the temptation of actual chemical doping looms as large as ever, and it is hard to demarcate precisely the line between legitimate medical treatment and unfair artificial advantage. Many take such a hard line against doping, calling for life bans from the Olympics for athletes like Dwain Chambers, who has long served his sentence. Others point out that sport is a very unnatural pursuit, and the intensity of training and competition has become such that no doping techniques are as dangerous for the athlete’s body as the sport itself, many ‘doping’ techniques being necessary to restore the athletes’ body to a healthy state. Some argue that, as enhancement technologies become part of everyday life and the line between medicine and body enhancement is blurred, it will become increasingly difficult to keep them out of sport. They believe we should allow all sorts of enhancement technologies provided they are safe.
So where should we draw the line between the artificial and the natural in sport, between effective sports equipment and ‘technological doping’, between legitimate medical therapies and illegitimate, performance enhancement treatments, between the struggle to excel and the need to have fair and balanced competition, between the urge to go beyond the boundaries of human nature and the fear of losing our humanity?
Dr David James senior lecturer, sports engineering, Sheffield Hallam University | |
Professor Andy Miah chair in science communication & digital media, University of Salford | |
Dr Jim Parry visiting professor of philosophy, Charles University, Prague; visiting professor of Olympic studies 2012, Gresham College, London | |
Chair: | |
Michele Ledda
coordinator, Civitas Supplementary Schools Project, Yorkshire; co-organiser, Leeds Salon |
Cleaning and security staff will be tasked with informing on doping cheats during next summer's Olympics games.
Matt McGrath, BBC News, 4 October 2011The anti-doping crusade has led to an appalling denigration of athletes’ rights. Why is there no uproar about it?
Klaus Wivel, spiked, 14 September 2011The most obvious solution has always been to legalize those drugs that work, and to experimentally monitor new entrants, including dietary supplements, for both efficacy and safety. Biological improvement would be treated much as athletic equipment like baseball bats and running shoes.
Matthew Herper, Forbes, 21 May 2011The cynics will claim that complete eradication of doping in sports is an impossibility, so embrace what is known, and educate athletes to use the substances responsibly. The idealist will recall that sports are beloved because they allow humans to go far beyond the potential that most people see in themselves, and in others.
Jennifer Gibson, BrainBlogger, 11 March 2011The use of performance-enhancing substances or methods is prohibited because it is unfair, potentially dangerous to health, and violates the spirit of sport. The issue matters to society because whatever our values are, we should live by them in every facet of our lives.
Caroline K. Hatton, Christian Science Monitor, 24 November 2010The legalisation of drugs in sport may be fairer and safer
J Savulescu, B Foddy and M Clayton, British Journal of Sports Medicine 38:666-670, 2004