When We're All Cyborgs, We'll Still Care About Sports
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When We're All Cyborgs, We'll Still Care About Sports

Whether it's pills, needles, or robot arms, human enhancement will continue to influence the sports world.

Now and forever we will likely always need some kind of humanity, or a connection to the living, to consider something sports. An audience will demand competitors who live and breathe, emote and feel loss and anxiety about victory, even if these qualities are beyond the capsule of an actual body.

Our definition of sports may change along with how our definition of what is considered human or living will change; whatever version remains of our chemically, genetically, mechanically enhanced bodies that doesn't turn us into robotic bipeds.

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"It's inevitable, and you can't really say whether it's good or bad, it's just going to come," said Dr. Don Catlin, a UCLA researcher for more than 40 years, who is considered one of the fathers of modern sport performance enhancing drug testing. "You have to learn to live with it. If you don't like the way it's changing things, then you're going to have to move out somewhere. Things are going to come. There's no doubt in my mind."

At this point we can't even fathom how sports will evolve—quite literally, since we are not capable of knowing how advances in technology will change the way we think or how it will expand our imaginations. We may be looking at future enhancements that border on the metaphysical: superhero type skills and traits—perhaps the ability of flight, or thought doping—that will require us to radically alter the rules of our games.

But these changes don't have mean the end of sports, not if we look at these enhancements as just a natural evolution of what science and medicine can do for humanity. We don't have to abandon our human bodies to progress. We only have to aim to improve the ways we feel, move, and heal—the very qualities that give us life. Enhancing the way we experience those things doesn't make us less human. It may end up making us more human, more sporting.

It's substantially telling, and stunning, that a person like the 76-year-old Catlin—who has spent his entire career trying to thwart doping in sports—essentially believes that all his work will eventually be for naught. But Catlin is realistic. He knows people will continue to develop versions of chemical enhancers that will elude all the tests he's developed. It's a cat and mouse game that can't exist forever. Enhancement in sports is already a reality, and further enhancement is on the way.

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In addition to altering the existing forms of doping that are prevalent in sport—anabolic steroids, human growth hormone, and the like—labs all around the world are already developing ways in which we can combat aging; ways in how we can change our genetic coding to make us faster and stronger; ways in how we can use our own blood to improve our stamina and performance. Applications of these techniques will undoubtedly reach the sports world, legally or illegally, which will bring a whole new set of questions about what role sports will play in human evolution.

Will we be willing to subject our sports stars to genetic manipulation that carries the burden of possible irreversible side effects? What about anti-aging treatments that would mean longer careers for athletes at the cost of shattering some of the long-standing records we all hold dear, or the use of mechanically-enhanced equipment that would likely reduce the risk of injuries but might edge us closer to being robots?

On the other hand, our sports fields may end up becoming the testing grounds for new science because we may initially see our athletes as the only ones physically capable of handling such dramatic changes.

"Sports is a perverse enterprise, and sports intentionally makes things harder," said Dr. Tom Murray of the Hastings Center, who is also the chair of the Ethical Issues Review Panel of the World Anti Doping Agency (WADA). "If the particular sport is wise they will ask themselves, 'What do we believe our sport is about? What kinds of challenges does it allow for, and what kinds excellences does it in fact value?'"

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One of the biggest concerns with enhancement in sports is that athletes will eventually end up as some freakish version of the Monstars—and unenhanced athletes won't be able to compete.

"Any change—and it's not just drugs, it's equipment and the rules of the sport—any change you want to make to the sport should be judged in terms of what the sport really thinks it's about, what it cares about and what it wants to reward in the people who play the sport," he continued.

Public perceptions that already exist about enhancement in sports are also likely to evolve. Detectable forms of steroids and human growth hormones have been banned by most leagues and sports testing agencies around the world. But there are those who believe this is simply a result of ignorance—the more we find out about these chemicals the less we will be scared by their use in sports.

But attitudes won't change quickly because sports fans, after almost 40 years of doping scandals, have been conditioned to believe that enhancement is bad.

The 1976 Olympics were marred by accusations that many of the Eastern European teams—particularly the East German women's swim team—were using steroids. Ben Johnson was famously stripped of his 1988 Olympic gold medal after testing positive for stanozolol. Baseball's Mitchell Report and BALCO scandal, and then the subsequent Biogenesis scandal, showed that players had been doping before and then after baseball had banned performance enhancing drugs. Nearly every sport—including chess—has been hit with some kind of doping scandal.

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"Let's remember why we have these policies," Murray said. "It's not because sports officials get their jollies out of it… But it's because other athletes want a fair chance to compete and win based on whatever it is the sport thinks is important in that sport."

But the legislation of these substances is random at best. The science has not yet been completely determined. Currently, athletes bear the burden of proof to show that any chemical is not performance enhancing instead of having the legislating organization prove that it is. It stands to reason that WADA—an independent worldwide testing and researching agency funded by countries from around the world that sets a doping code followed by organizations such as the International Olympic Committee—should be basing their decisions on actual scientific fact instead of innuendo or fear.

"They should, but they're really not designed to do that," Catlin said. "They can't do studies very well. They just take a look at a substance, human growth hormone being a good example, and say 'Well, we could see how this would enhance human performance, therefore it's bad, therefore we're going to ban it.'"

If, like many enhancement advocates believe, scientific research of some of these chemicals eventually show minimal, if any, health risks, then the argument for using something that improves how the human body functions without losing one's humanity will become even greater. While the dangers of heavy use of anabolic steroids has been well documented, the long term effects of human growth hormone usage are less clear.

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"We've got to stop using the word 'drug' when it comes to say testosterone and growth hormone"

Fans fret about doping because they worry it threatens to ruin the best aspects of competition: a winner who's assured she won on her natural ability, a devastated loser who suffers for all the hard work he deems wasted—emotions critics say the super enhanced couldn't feel. Can sports matter if the winner or loser feels nothing at all or whether we are too doped up to care? But proponents argue that science might eventually show that the proper use of enhancements would not necessarily turn us into robots or addicts, but instead make us better functioning humans.

Australian doctor Robin Willcourt, a leading advocate for the responsible use of chemical enhancement, said he regularly administers human growth hormone to clients with deficiencies without any negative side effects.

"We've got to stop using the word 'drug' when it comes to say testosterone and growth hormone," Willcourt said. "We have to let everyone know they're naturally occurring substances without which men and women could not function properly. Once we get that into the dialogue, we're starting to get somewhere. And then we have to say that there is no proof that these agents are performance enhancing. Where is the proof? We can't just have WADA saying, 'We said so.'"

US taxpayers pay about $9 million per year to fund the U.S. Anti Doping Agency (USADA), WADA's American counterpart that oversees testing for all of the country's Olympic athletes. (Additionally, the US gives almost $2 million per year to help fund WADA.)

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USADA falls under the control of the Office of National Drug Control Policy. As attitudes toward drugs, in general, shift—an example being more and more states advocating the legalization of marijuana, something seemingly unheard of 30 years ago—USADA's role may also shift, or vanish altogether.

Enthusiasm for funding such an organization might already be fading.

"I think eventually, their days are pretty much limited," Catlin said of USADA and WADA. "They're law enforcement people and in general the public doesn't like to have law enforcement hanging around sport. They'd like it to be self propelled and on it's own."

There will be less of a need for such agencies as more advanced enhancements are developed. Eventually, Catlin can even see a time when enhancement will happen through the transfer of thoughts, which would have its own perils.

For example, one person who has the confidence to believe he or she can run faster than anyone else will be able to transfer those thoughts through a cable, or even wirelessly, to a physically capable athlete who may lack the will to compete at a high level. And then those thoughts will actually help the athlete run faster. Something like that would seemingly be impossible for a place like WADA to control.

"How are you going to detect a thought?" Catlin said.

If science accepts the inevitability of enhancement, and if the administrative governmental sentiment is headed toward a reorganization—if not complete overhaul—of the war on drugs, then the eventuality of doping in sports—or whatever the term for it will be, perhaps one that invokes a less negative connotation—in the future becomes much more compelling and realistic.

Ultimately, the question is not when it will happen, but just how far we will be willing to go. The likely answer depends on just what we will eventually define as human.

Goodbye, Meatbags is a series on Motherboard about the waning relevance of the human physical form. Follow along here.