jasimon wrote:Interesting article in The New Yorker about PEDs. Asks why we accept some forms of performance enhancement and not others. Has a discussion of Lance at the end as well:
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/a ... ntPage=all" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
.... Underlying question: What is it we value about sporting competition? Finding the best genetics? Finding the best work ethic? And how do these interact with the forms of performance enhancement that are considered legitimate and the forms of performance enhancement that are illegitimate?
Don't know about the baseball ligament surgery if it is allowed in cases where there has been no injury. Baseball and a many professional sports where athletes are commanding multi-million dollar contracts extending into their late thirties are hardly likely to be PED free. So enhancement surgery might be in their arsenal of cheating tools too.
But it's too long a bow to suggest that correcting dietary deficiencies with iodine supplementation is "performance enhancing". It's no moreso than suggesting eating is performance enhancing.
Gladwell makes a serious error when suggesting that laser correction surgery is performance enhancing for a baseball player. Epstein points out the key genetic advantage most baseball batters have is extremely high visual accuity. That has to do with the cells on their retina and optic nerve, and no amount of laser surgery of the lens can produce that outcome.
Having read both The Sports Gene and The Secret Race, I can't find any justification for PED's in either book. Epstein points out that genetic manipulation (doping) has proven much more complex and difficult to achieve than expected - and is unlikely to become commonplace. While most Olympic level athletes are likely to be genetic outliers like Eero Mäntyranta, that is the result of thousands of years of natural selection.
A careful reading of The Sports Gene will show that it's central argument is that sporting success is the result of a combination of genetic talent and dedicated training. Gladwell has completely missed this when he concludes
Gladwell wrote:
Hamilton and Armstrong may simply be athletes who regard this kind of achievement as worthier than the gold medals of a man with the dumb luck to be born with a random genetic mutation.
It's not dumb luck in any of the cases discussed in The Sports Gene. Rather, as Seneca, a Roman from around 1 AD, put it:
Seneca wrote:Luck is when preparation meets opportunity
That's what I value about PED free sporting competition - it tests whether preparation has met opportunity.