[ExI] organic olympics, was: RE: the myth of the US "liberal media"

[Kelly Anderson]

On Sat, Jul 16, 2011 at 12:20 PM, spike <spike66 at att.net> wrote:
>
> On 16 July 2011 09:43, Kelly Anderson <kellycoinguy at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> The recent 60 minutes story on the East German's use of steroids and
> other medications to cheat at the Olympics showed what was typical...
>
>>..."Cheat"? Rather a strange POV for a transhumanist... :-)  -- Stefano Vaj
> _______________________________________________
>
>
> Ja.  I propose we have two separate classes of competition.  The regular
> Olympics, anything goes, any kind of performance enhancing whatever they
> want, all is welcome.  Then as a separate class of competition, we keep the
> old school notion of not using anything, perhaps taking it to the extreme of
> disallowing exercise or practice, so the athletes are not pumped or sculpted
> wonders of bodybuilding magnificence, but rather just natures gifts only.
> Those competitions cost more to attend, with a much smaller audience and no
> world records, but it's all natural, the way evolution intended.
>
> Propose calling that the Organic Olympics.

One thing that seems sure, no matter what, is that
1) Making the rules for the future Olympics is going to get much
harder (Do you allow genetic alteration via "naturalish" evolution?
Can anyone with gene XYZ compete in the high jump? Only if their
parents have the gene? Do you X? Do you Y?)
2) Enforcing those rules is also going to get a lot harder. Detection
of things is going to get harder. Nanobots that die at the end of the
competition prior to testing, etc.

The questions are two fold. Will anyone still care? And can they make
rules of fair play and enforce them well enough that people will
continue to care?

When sports like baseball have their steroid conflicts, it turns some
people off to the sport. I doubt it attracted very many new adherents.
So the trend would seem to be... athletes will continue to cheat...
they'll occasionally get caught... the size of the crowd interested in
any given sport will decrease.

At the same time the number of sports is likely to increase! New
equipment gives rise to X-Games type sports, which are very
interesting, novel, and fun. I just LOVE the new heavy duty pogo
sticks! That looks like some ride!

-Kelly