Politics and the Olympic Games

[Sybarite]

... I am less agreeable to your many absolutes like "There isn't. There never has been. There's not a sportsperson in the world who has a 'natural diet.' The only thing that should matter is the health of the athletes." There's some philosophical and semantical issues in there that I see no point in arguing.

Okay. I'll start with the first section of that quote.

Sport is not natural. It is not what human beings have evolved for. Whether it's running the 100m or working on the rings in gymnastics, this is going beyond what the human body has evolved to do. To do such things, one has to reach what is described as athletic fitness – not the sort of general fitness that a doctor would want their patients to aspire to on a day-to-day basis, but a different level of fitness.

As I mentioned, if a woman is athletically fit, then she will most often either not see (or barely see) her monthly period. That can hardly be described as 'natural'.

So what an athlete does is not 'natural' – it is beyond natural, if you will.

And in order to facilitate that, an athlete eats differently to a non-athlete. It isn't about health – there are plenty of arguments that eating theories in different sports do not actually provide what our doctor might describe as a balanced diet. Athletes also have to consume considerably more food than most 'normal' people. No human being could become athletically fit and maintain that extreme physical state if they ate what could generally be described as a 'normal' healthy diet. You need additional protein (and not just any protein) to help develop muscle, for instance. You don't want fat, so you eat loads of egg whites, throwing away and wasting the yolk so as to avoid 'pointless' calories.

Many, many athletes use supplements – protein and energy and electrolite drinks, for instance. That's not 'natural'. A 'normal', healthy human being, eating a healthy, balanced diet, does not require such things. So the minute that an athlete takes a supplement, no matter that that supplement happens to be 'legal' and breaks no rules, it's still not 'natural'.

A normal, healthy diet provides all the nutrients that a normal, healthy human being needs. So it has to follow that, if someone is pouring lots of additional vitamins and minerals etc into their body, it is not 'natural'. More than that, such things are, quite simply, substances that are taken in order to enhance training and performance.

One could take a different tack – is it 'natural' for small girls to become Olympic gymnasts?

I read once that, because of the impact nature of the sport and the damage to the body, Rugby League players' lives tend on average to be five years shorter than comparable males. Is that 'natural'? No. Is it arguably stupid? Possibly.

But none of this detracts from our enjoyment of sport: indeed, an appreciation of the specialness – the very unnaturalness – of what sportsmen and women do is part of what informs our pleasure. So what, therefore, is the philosophical difference?

Drugs policy in sport has become so utterly and completely screwed up – mostly by Cold War politics (the issue effectively acted as a proxy war in the Cold War).

Because sport and athletic fitness are not natural, that doesn't mean that they're bad – it's not a judgment, just an objective fact.

The battle against drugs in sport is a losing one and, therefore, a silly one.

The drugs, as you say, might be more effective. So is the testing. So, therefore, is the masking technology.

And it's worth noting that we are not talking about drugs that are being made in tiny backroom labs in the slums of big cities. These are incredibly complex and sophisticated drugs. They're being made by sophisticated companies. As are the masking technologies that help athletes avoid detection. Either that or the testing procedures (setting aside their flawed nature for a moment) are so good that all athletes who have used performancing-enhancing substances have been caught.

We get antsy about drugs in sport primarily for one reason – because we have been educated, as part of Cold War propaganda, to fret about the issue.

 

[joderu95]

There is so much more in there than I want to address. The semantical differences we have with the word "natural" and all its variations is one of the problems though.

Whether or not the human body has evolved to do sports is very much questionable. Read.

Plus evolution is an ongoing process and we are currently using our bodies for sports right?

I read once that, because of the impact nature of the sport and the damage to the body, Rugby League players' lives tend on average to be five years shorter than comparable males. Is that 'natural'?

I would argue that, yes that is natural. If your body is going to undergo constant physical punishment of this sort it makes perfect sense that it should not last as long as a body that does not.

Because sport and athletic fitness are not natural, that doesn't mean that they're bad – it's not a judgment, just an objective fact.

An objective fact that "sport and athletic fitness are not natural?" That is in itself a judgment.