Perhaps the whole distraction-story about steroid use in professional sports is even less about the drugs than I supposed. Perhaps, it’s all about surveillance–of the doped athletes and the duped fans alike.
Microchips anyone?
The entire spectacle surrounding Barry Bonds and, more recently, Roger Clemens in particular and steroid/human-growth hormone use in general among professional athletes has never struck me as a real story. Seems to me, those trumpeting such things act cynically or from a nanny-State mentality or with a view to legislate their particular schizophrenic morality into law.
The spectators/consumers of sports distractions want to see home runs and no-hitters, touchdowns and other feats of athletic daring-do. They want to see records get broken and want to feel the vicarious thrill of “being there” when these super human bodily feats occur. The owners of the sports teams, the leagues, the venues and of the merchandising concerns surrounding professional sports, want to see this stuff happen, too–because it leads to more money.
Implicitly, the athletes feel added pressure to deliver new feats, beyond the regular human desire to excel or do better and better at something, because they have monetary profits at stake, too. That this results in athletes who use drugs to get or maintain an edge over the competition is no surprise.
There is a tension between the love of the game and the love of the money of the game. If the players and the owners and the cynical politicians were honest about that, this would be no issue. Whoever chose to use performance enhancing drugs would do so knowing that they are trading years off their lives in the form of cancer, shrunken dicks, lost relationships with their loved ones, etc., in exchange for the adrenaline rush of another season as a sports god and another dozen mill in their bank accounts. The spectators would watch knowing that their obsession with sports feeds into this sort of crazy millionaire behavior and would have to accept responsibility for being their own role models rather than expecting athletes to be the icons of personal integrity and honest effort that they, the spectators, have chosen not to be for themselves. And perhaps the franchise owners, merchandisers and promoters of professional sports teams and events would, in turn, have to be honest about how they benefit from doped-up athletes without all the plausible deniability they enjoy when the focus is solely on the guys out on the field, the court or the track.
This, seems to me, a less evil outcome than what a couple of Swedish athletes are proposing, which is a further evolution of our current techno-fascist Spectacle.
I’ll ask again: microchips anyone?
From The Local,, an English-language Swedish news site (emphasis added):
Klüft touts computer chip implants
Published: 19 Dec 07 12:59 CET
Online: http://www.thelocal.se/9454/Swedish athletes Carolina Klüft and Stefan Holm have caused a stir on the home front by proposing radical measures to ensure that top level competitors refrain from taking performance-enhancing drugs.
Klüft and Holm, reigning Olympic champions in the heptathlon and high-jump events, both agreed that competitors at the highest level should either have computer chips implanted into their skin or GPS transmitters attached to their training bags to help keep track of their movements at all times.
According to Klüft, today’s system - whereby athletes provide quarterly advance reports of their probable whereabouts - is not sufficient to tackle the sport’s problems with doping.
“I have previously proposed that we should have computer chips surgically implanted into our skin. But it might be just as good if everybody at a certain level had a key ring with a GPS transmitter on their training bags. That way everybody involved knows where we are at all times and can find us for tests,” Klüft told Svenska Dagbladet.
“I wouldn’t have any complaints about surveillance of this kind. In fact, I think we have an obligation to go along with most things. Doping is terrible, which means it is important we have an open mind and are brave enough to discuss and debate the issue,” she added.
The Swedish superstar, who has not lost a single heptathlon or pentathlon event since 2002, also revealed that the mere thought of consuming a banned substance filled her with dread. If ever she failed a doping test, Klüft said that her life would not be worth living and she would have to leave Sweden.
Stefan Holm, gold medal winner in the high jump event at the 2004 Olympics, said he was open to his compatriot’s suggestions.
“Honestly, why not? [A GPS transmitter] might be radical and it sounds brutal but sometimes it feels like a good solution to avoid being treated with suspicion for no reason. But it’s hard to be one hundred percent sure without having a chip surgically implanted into the skin,” he told Svenska Dagbladet.
Since athletes are already observed very closely, Holm argued that increased surveillance in the form of a computer chip would make little difference to the top performers.
“They really do want to know where we are at any given moment and in a way it would be the easiest way to keep track of us athletes, however science fiction and absurd it may sound,” Holm added.
I like how Dagbladet suggest that the only way not to have someone suspect you of bad behavior unnecessarily is to be chipped, as if the suspicious paranoids in charge have no control over their own thoughts, assumptions and conclusions. I find it creepy though that Ms. Kluft believes we have an “obligation to go along with most things”–talk about having a cop in one’s head: her kind of sentiment seems to me to lead down the happy road to totalitarianism.
But maybe not?
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Shout outs to Josh Isley over at Realm of Connections for the heads up on the above article.
