godspiral

Managed blood chemistry sports would offer major pharma sponsorship opportunities, and let us monitor long term effects of various PEDs. Some heavily monitored health preserving limits should still exist, IMO.

It would make sports expensive and health deteriorating, but cost of PEDs would be brought down by letting pharma market them to employers of manual labour.

Is this a project for the Yes men, or big money opportunity that will eventually take over competitive sport?

yellowjeep

hum..... tour of ca anyone?

godspiral

I guess there is an ethical problem with developing pharma that improves humans instead of just healing them. There's also usually a presumption that any short term improvement causes long term harm, but HGH is pretty marketable already.

The Current TdF/UCI process could be mostly successful. But the superstars of the sport will be able to afford circumventing controls, and young talent might cheat its way into the UCI.

I actually thought these were the "real rules" all along... but the Rasmussen dismissal changes that completely. Basically, Ras is gone because he had a situation that made it POSSIBLE for him to cheat, instead of actually being caught doing so, and this is a surprisingly strict standard, but one the superstars can still beat (just more expensively).

godspiral

It boils down to,

would you prefer a system where only the winners can afford to dope, but there is a strict moral facade against doping, or a system where everyone is allowed to dope just a little bit?

islandboy

A very few have travelled in space, yet the technological benifits for the average joe abound. The idea has merit from the perspective that it beats plague/war/trauma as a driver for pharma investment. Simply apply short enough "patent" rights to bring advances to the mainstream sooner than later. The question of healing vs. improving is answered in the idea of preventative medicine strategies.

godspiral

While shorter patent rights might well be a good thing, its not going to come at pharma's suggestion.

Also, no matter how many liability waivers you'd make the athletes sign, if any doping is legal, health consequences are likely to result in lawsuits.