There's some scary stories from 80s when EPO usage was essentialy untested, teams and individuals pushed it to such extremes that athletes had to wake up in the middle of the night to stop their heart rate dropping too low as their blood was so viscous cardiac arrest was a real concern.
If it's permitted, then it becomes obligatory. In sports where doping was tacitly permitted, chances are that it was unthinkable for a player to even be a contender for the elite level without doping.
If obligatory, then it starts killing people. Consider football and concussions.
And then there's marketing. A certain amount of risk is accepted in sports, and is part of what makes it attractive to fans and sponsors. But when someone actually dies at an event, it overshadows everything else that happens. If that becomes a regular occurrence, fans and sponsors who pay for the coverage will begin to lose interest.
Part of the reason for rules in sports is to make a sport interesting for the fans, e.g., by preventing each match from being decided by a single factor that is predictable ahead of time. Financial sports already have financial rules. Pharmacological sports need pharmacological rules.
_Wintermute|3 years ago
analog31|3 years ago
If obligatory, then it starts killing people. Consider football and concussions.
And then there's marketing. A certain amount of risk is accepted in sports, and is part of what makes it attractive to fans and sponsors. But when someone actually dies at an event, it overshadows everything else that happens. If that becomes a regular occurrence, fans and sponsors who pay for the coverage will begin to lose interest.
Part of the reason for rules in sports is to make a sport interesting for the fans, e.g., by preventing each match from being decided by a single factor that is predictable ahead of time. Financial sports already have financial rules. Pharmacological sports need pharmacological rules.
FDSGSG|3 years ago
> chances are that it was unthinkable for a player to even be a contender for the elite level without doping.
Which is really the case for most sports today.