Enhanced Games?

One of the more recent hillarious attempts at making athletics more entertaining has been the entry of the Enhanced Games. The hillarious part? Athletes have been ducking, dodging, diving and otherwise evading testing for performance enhancers in all different kinds of sports all over the world for a very long time. The silliness of these games in particular was the assumption that we were going to witness outright wildness. Super peaked feats of freaky strength and athletic ability would be seen because of course now the athletes would be allowed to use as much hot sauce as they want.

So what happened?

Were all the record books rewritten?

The 100 meter dash WR remains unchallenged.

The deadlift WR stays secure.

In fact that the only WR that changed was a swimming WR and it was by only 7 hundredths of a second should tells us something.

THE JUICE IS LOOSE!!

Lance Armstrong was never caught in an actual drug test. Keep that in mind here.

Also, retrospective testing of former Olympians are pretty revealing in regards to drug taking. They may not be caught on the current band substance list but they are definitely taking things not on the list to enhance performance. So really what we are talking about here is that all games are enhanced games. The only games that are not are probably grade school PE games. Everything else from high school on up is suspect.

Like it or not this is more or less how the world works. Charlie Francis wrote about this reality in his book the Speed Trap(1991). To be honest it's a tough read because it breaks apart the perception that athletics has individuals with drug problems instead of drugs being a necessity to compete at the most elite levels of sport. I highly recommend reading it though if you are suffering from seeing the world through rose colored glasses involving athletics.

It's a dark truth that we are going to slowly get more and more exposure to with each successive games. Sports are dirty. How dirty? Kind of like using a dumpster as a boat to travel across a sewer filled with radioactive waste. They are that dirty. So whether you enjoyed the enhanced games or thought they were a silly exhibition the great irony is that the performances in a lot of cases weren't any better than the ones in the "clean games". So what will slowly be revealed here is the fact that sports are dirty and the only distinction is who wins and who loses regardless of which kind of games the athletes are competing in.