I mean, you’ll find people using PEDs in any sport, despite the risk of bans and everything. Steroid use is also rampant among bodybuilders.
There is an “obvious market”, but why do such sport leagues or federations that openly allow those drugs exist?
I can imagine that such a thing existing would create an immediate and widespread health problem with lots of people, athletes or not, using those performance enhancers and accidentally fucking themselves. But what else could be a problem?
I feel like your last sentence is a pretty big problem that doesn’t require a “what else?”
We should be trying to make sports safer for the people being exploited, not less.
This just in: Weekend Update: Kevin Nealon on the All-Drug Olympics - SNL: https://yewtu.be/watch?v=jAdG-iTilWU
The US pro leagues already are full of PED use. While discouraged, the leagues only target egregious use.
I think there should be an alternative sports league where performance enhancing drugs are mandatory. That shit would be fun to watch!
Another take is that sports are all about rules. The goal of hockey isn’t just to get the puck in the net. There are other rules that turn this minimal task into a game. Otherwise players would just come on the ice and fire the puck via a rail-gun. To make an entertaining sport you need a goal and a set of rules that make and interesting challenge.
To some degree if you allow performance enchaining drugs at least some of the focus moves away from physical skill, reactions and strategy into pharmaceuticals. Don’t get me wrong, finding the best drug cocktail to play hockey is a very interesting challenge, but it seems interesting to a very different audience than that which appreciates the other aspects of the challenge.
They’d be opening themselves to civil and criminal liability as well as fighting an uphill battle of public acceptance.
Just because it hasn’t been said yet, this already exists in bodybuilding. The professional league, the IFBB, which hosts the Mr. Olympia competition, does not prohibit drugs and they are de facto required. Essentially every IFBB bodybuilder uses steroids, and it’s a very open secret.
Something that does need to be considered here is that not all sports necessarily benefit from steroids, at least not nearly as much as bodybuilding. More muscle isn’t necessarily always a good thing if it makes you heavier or less mobile, so there’s already some limited regulatory effect from that as well.
One reason could be that most of the audience doesn’t want to watch them if it feels like what they’re doing is artificial or inauthentic.
Might be a terrible analogy, but since people cheat on video games, why don’t they have an esports league where aimbots, wallhacks, speedhacks, etc are all allowed? It might be a novelty for 2 minutes, but most people wouldn’t want to watch that. It isn’t how the games were meant to be played. It’s not that it’s cheating anymore if the rules allow it. It’s that it isn’t a good showcase for talent because it becomes about who bought the best cheats.
the audience doesn’t want to watch them if it feels like what they’re doing is artificial or inauthentic.
I highly doubt that’s the reason. There’s definitely an audience out there for people with chemical and surgical alterations to perform at superhuman levels.
This analogy doesn’t work for me. First of all, I’d absolutely watch coked esports. Secondly, glitched speedruns are absolutely a popular form of competitive cheating. Nobody would watch a aimbot competition because that specifically would be boring, it’d just be cameras jumping around and death screens. There’s no real competition happening.
Glitches aren’t cheating. They’re using knowledge about the game’s internal workings. This is how the combo system that became the core of fighting games came about.
Maybe you could argue TAS (tool assisted speedrun), but I’ve always gathered thats more for proof of concept
And it’s probably worth mentioning that glitches still need to be fun. There have been speedrun scenes hurt because the most optimal method made the game less fun to play.
There have been speedrun scenes hurt because the most optimal method made the game less fun to play.
Armored Core on the PSX immediately comes to mind, the optimal route just skips all missions, so you’re effectively watching nothing going on for ~10 minutes. Wonder Boy 3 (Master System) has an optimal route that is grinding for money to unlock the final door, not fun. Many “game end glitch” runs also tend to fall in that category.
Well, the problem with the glitches I was thinking of was basically:
-You have to play a worse version of the game. This was a majora’s mask glitch. It relied on a bug that allowed you to “wrong warp” to the Japanese Debug Menu. The problem was basically it required you to increment a hidden index to over 8000. Which crashed the N64 version. The second issue is the debug menu requires the directional pad, which isn’t mapped correctly on the Wii version. Which basically meant playing on the Wii U version which has input lag among other issues that make it…not very fun to play when speed running. Basically it doesn’t play right.
-The other was an RNG glitch in Ocarina of Time. It worked on trying to get a bottle by the deku tree, which allowed you to do a very broken glitch that brought you right to Ganon to fight the final boss. The problem with that one is that it required you to trigger a pickup sequence in a specific way that allowed an enemy to knock you out of it. The only enemy drop that does this is the first deku seed of the game, and the enemies that were found using this method…had a low rate of dropping the deku seed. In theory it was the fastest run at the time, but on it’s first showcase it went over the allotted time because the seeds didn’t drop correctly until 30m into the run.
So in one case you had to use a version of the game that played awful to increment a hidden table 8000 times. And in another case you had to hope glitch went off without a hitch or you started over. And aside from the drop rate for the second glitch, it could also fail if the deku seed just dropped in the wrong place.
Cheaters battle each other all the time, deliberately, in private matches. The reason it’s not a sport with spectators is likely because if you’re a known cheater then you’re stuck with that label forever no matter what you do.
The analogy with esports fails only because real people would still be limited by their own bodies, there’s only so many drugs anyone can take before the body starts failing, not to mention that they don’t make people godlike as some cheats do.
Depending on the speedhack allowed and the game, it could be entertaining to watch, it’d become a game of human reflexes.
They tried this back in the1980’s, it didn’t go well…
A lot of the drugs used generally requires a prescription and is only available legally for therapeutic purposes.
Most of the testing done by sports leagues is done because they would rather handle the issue internally than get the government involved. Even then, a lot of the internal regulations are usually only done to get the public off the leagues’ back.
