Citius, altius, roidius

Last Friday, the Summer Olympics began in Sydney, Australia. At the opening ceremonies, there was pomp and circumstance, there was spectacle—and there was profound sentimentality, from the insipid flying girl, pouting to the world, to NBC's Bob Costas and company extolling the emoto-therapo-spiritual virtue of sport. So commenced another Olympics marked less by competition between superhuman athletes than by hagiographies of all-too-human personalities. "Faster, higher, stronger"? More like "Slower, sappier, softer."

On Wed., Sept. 6, China dropped 27 athletes from its roster, many of them for drug violations. And on Wed., Aug. 2, Olympic organizers announced testing for EPO, a synthetic hormone that increases red blood cell count. These measures were taken in the name of sportsmanship. But bans on steroids, growth hormones, and EPO fly in the face of sport. Cast sentiment aside: When the Olympics proclaim "Faster, higher, stronger," they should mean it. They should legalize performance-enhancing drugs.

The biggest lie the Olympics perpetrate is that sport is a fundamentally human endeavor. Perhaps it was an archetype of humanity in the state of nature, when naked cavemen ran wind-sprints 10 minutes after eating their babies, their nether regions flapping in the wind. But since then, sport has become extra-human: space-age running shoes, micro-tweaked diets, computer-aerodynamicized groin twitches. In Finland, athletes stay in nitrogen-infused hotel rooms that allow them to "live at altitude" while training at sea level, mimicking the effects of EPO without drugs [NY Times, 1/7/98]. Last month, 33-year-old swimmer Dana Torres won the 50-meter freestyle at the Olympic trials. During training, she retained a nutritionist, two masseuses, a lymph system manipulator, two stretching experts—12 people in all for a six-hour-a-day regimen outside of the pool [NY Times 8/17/00].

At this level, athletes are as much machine as human. It's impossible to separate the humanity from the artificiality of their performances. We engineer athletes like we engineer race cars. They know that their bodies weren't made for this kind of punishment, that they'll retire with dangerously enlarged hearts and arthritic knees. But they keep on pushing the limits because momentary triumph—faster, higher, stronger—is what matters to them, not the ultimate humanity of it all.

The Aug. 21 issue of the New Yorker reported that 38 of 96 Tour de France urine samples tested positive for corticosteroids and salbutamol. And that pervasiveness is nothing new—before steroids, riders used to load up on booze and, later, amphetamines to get themselves through an inhuman contest. As rider Jacques Anteil said in 1967, "You'd have to be an imbecile or a hypocrite to imagine that a professional cyclist who rides 235 days a year can hold himself together without stimulants." To perform at the ever-increasing levels we expect of them, athletes need every little edge, be it wind tunnels and two-way heart monitors or meth and EPO. We're fooling ourselves—and disrespecting them—to think we know better than athletes what they need for their bodies to perform at their best.

To draw the line at certain chemicals is absurd—drugs are just another way to vanquish human frailty. There's no qualitative difference between the red blood cells grown by EPO and those grown by altitude housing and actual altitude training. And that's why athletes have no right to compete in a world without drugs. Would we grant nostalgics the right to banish Speedos from the Olympics in favor of cotton bathing costumes, just 'cause swimming's meant to be that way? Of course not—advances that don't alter the fundamental nature of a sport are always fair, because unmediated, natural sport never existed. Legalizing steroids won't change the reality of modern sports.

One might raise safety issues about a steroidal future, but in a world where up to 30 percent of Olympic athletes use drugs under the table [NY Times 12/26/98] without the possibility of quality-control or analysis of side-effects, I'd be more concerned about the steroidal now. Legalize performance-enhancers and do real scientific testing on safe dosages and age limits.

Some say that allowing steroids will alienate the fans. But the cheap sentiment of human interest stories isn't going anywhere. And for those who think that sport is about "pure competition," or a story of human perfectibility that we can quantify in the record books, a steroidal Olympics will open the door to ever more perfect performances—and eventually, to fastest, highest, strongest.

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