Performance Enhancers in Sports

Belsky starts by asking, "Where do you draw the line where enhancement is acceptable?" Verstegen begins by taking about technology is producing better equipment, better technology and specifically discusses how the swimsuit used by athletes in Beijing allowed swimmers to shatter all kinds of records. The organizing body for international swimmers has decided that they're prohibiting some of these suits. "They're taking a big step backwards," Verstegen says. He notes that swimming was never more popular than it was last summer and that the record-breaking had a lot to do with the public's embrace of the sport. He also recounts a conversation he had with his 10-year-old daughter who asked, "Does everyone get the same suit? Then it's fair."

This is from the report on the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference last Saturday. Here's more:

[Steve] Kerr says that the NBA does a good job of enforcing PEDs [performance enhancing drugs] and that its problem is regulating recreational drugs, a comment that draws a laugh. Players get a letter from the league about six weeks before the season starts telling them, "You're going to get tested for drugs, including marijuana, on October 1. Remember that the drug stays in your system for 30 days."

And finally:

Kerr makes an interesting distinction between the public's willingness to tolerate PEDs in the hallowed game of baseball ("your grandfather's sports") and football. "Football is a barbaric sport," Kerr says. "The public is like, 'whatever you have to do, go ahead.'"

Belsky: "My grandfather's sport was running from Cossacks."

European history might have been played out differently if there were [sic] PED dealers in the shtetl!

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