Uber-Athletes: Some say that performance-enhancing drugs should be legalized and supervised for professional athletes since they're all using them anyway. Then we could have separate leagues for the enhanced vs. the unenhanced:
To be sure, monitoring all this would be tricky. Balancing benefits and costs is hard. So for pharmco Luddites who want a simpler world, where performance enhancers don't transform competitions and the cult of the natural still thrives, I have an answer: Create one league for the genetically engineered home-run hitter and another for the human-scale slugger. One event for the sprinter pumped up on growth hormones and another for the free-range slowpoke. One tour for the supercharged cyclist and another for the antidoping racer.
Personally, I'm more impressed by athletic accomplishments when they happen naturally rather than from pharmacological enhancements, but to be sure, the natural league would probably be less spectacular than the enhanced league. It's hard to get behind this, though. Specters of the East German athletes still haunt. Although it isn't likely that children will be secretly given performance enhancing drugs, there would be even greater pressure for them to take them than there is now if they aspire to the "big leagues."
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