Sports doping: a modest proposal

I was chatting the other day with a friend with kids active in high school sports. He was quite concerned about the temptations of performance-enhancing drugs -- something we really didn't have to think about in our time (performance-detracting drugs, yes. . . )

For some time I've wondered why drug testing of athletes doesn't include retention of samples. Too expensive, surely, at the high school level, but when one gets up to world-class competition, this might well be the only way to discourage use of doping regimens that cannot be detected by existing tests.

Certainly in the Olympics, there is ample precedent for retroactive stripping of medals (most recently, cross-country skiing medalists from the 2002 Winter Games); and though some might argue that delayed justice would not offer sufficient disincentive, I would think that the prospect of losing all one's professional prospects even several years down the line would be fairly daunting.

Meanwhile, Olympic officials have been considering liberalizing classification of transsexuals as well as those who haven't had surgery -- allowing a man who has "lived as a woman" for two years to compete as a woman.

Posted by David on March 6, 2004 8:03 PM