Enhanced Games were an ugly but honest dud |
Alarm screeches. Hit snooze button to optimise sleep recovery. Yawn to improve airflow. Chemically adjust mood with double shot of caffeine. Brush teeth with whitening toothpaste. Apply deodorant to improve social acceptability.
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Smear moisturiser on bald head in overly optimistic attempt to slow visible signs of decay. Shave unsightly white whiskers. Gulp water to maintain hydration levels. Don "slim fit" T-shirt in vain bid to display upper body anatomy in admirable proportions.
Feel rather ... enhanced. Improved. Ready to confront a judgmental world. Then turn on the news. Sneering commentators in heavy make-up and carefully-styled hair are rolling their eyes.
The object of their contempt? The Enhanced Games, the first competition permitting athletes to use performance enhancing drugs. Appropriately staged in Las Vegas, that global headquarters for artificiality.
Nod agreeably with the commentators. Vulgar? Absolutely. Crass? No arguments here. But then a commentator mocks the event as "morally bankrupt". A clarifying thought crosses my sharply caffeinated mind. Hang on there. That's going too far, isn't it? People in glass houses really shouldn't ...
Where, precisely, do we draw the moral line when enhancement of the human form is no longer a fringe activity confined to East German laboratories and shady locker rooms? Upgrading our bodies, after all, has become one of the key principles driving modern life.
Lips are inflated, stomachs flattened, skin tightened and breasts enlarged. Foreheads are injected, temporarily immobilising the passage of time and, unfortunately, facial expressions. Tech billionaires microdose on psychedelics to improve creativity. Protein powders fill supermarket aisles. Influencers post selfies using filters powerful enough to make garden rakes resemble supermodels.
The natural world has become an out of control pharmaceutical experiment. Last weekend's Enhanced Games may have been a shallow marketing exercise organised by billionaires hoping to sell more supplements. But didn't that charming fiction about sports being the last bastion of the unadulterated body vanish long ago?
Elite athletes owe much of their supremacy to altitude chambers, hyperbaric oxygen therapy, customised nutrition plans, biochemical analysis and support teams of scientists and physiotherapists employing cutting-edge technology to measure every millimetre and microsecond.
The Enhanced Games - rightly regarded as an anticlimactic dud after only one world record was broken - simply removed the hypocrisy that has surrounded high-level sport for decades.
Sure, there was something unsettling about watching heavily-enhanced athletes parading their manufactured physiques at poolside and trackside in Las Vegas. It felt like having a ringside seat at a professional wrestling contest instead of watching an elite athletic competition aspiring to Olympic Games status.
Retired Australian swimmer James Magnussen, an eight-times gold medallist and former 100m........