Doping would turn sport into a race to concoct the most powerful drug

The argument

If you allowed cyclists in the Tour de France to use a motorcycle if they so desired, the competition would no longer be about athletic endurance, but about a team’s ability to craft the fastest motorcycle. In exactly the same way, if you allow performance-enhancing drugs to be used freely in sport, it would no longer be an arena for testing athletic ability, but an arena for drugmakers to compete against other drug manufacturers over who produced the best drug. Not only would such a competition be at the expense of an individual's health, but such a proposition jeopardizes the authenticity and integrity that all professional sports are built upon. Our whole societal conception of sports is as a competition between opponents. One that is well-rested upon a sense of human nature. The winner of such a battle is one who puts in the most effort, sweat, and determination. Not the individual who can afford the latest, most powerful, and most expensive PED. By creating a space such as this, the pharmaceutical industry would be in competition with itself to provide the strongest medication it could. All the while athletes will suffer the consequences. Sports would no longer rotate around true human competition, instead, it would simply be a harmful manmade construct.

Context

Without drugs, sport is a test of athleticism, strategy, technique, talent, and hard work. If you allow drugs to be used freely, it would drastically alter the nature of sport by turning it into a race to produce the most powerful drug.

Premises

Counter-arguments

What's the difference in terms of crafting lighter bicycles, or any athletic equipment that makes it easier to compete in a sport. As training, coaching, nutrition, and equipment are increasingly perfected, the best times of the best athletes have been increasing at a slower rate and slower rate. Eventually, athletes will hit a wall. Now we are faced with the question as to how we can keep sports entertaining. Yes, we could start measuring the 100m race to the thousandth of a second, but how would these sports remain interesting and engaging if the winner of every race was decided by margins undetectable to the naked eye? A possible solution is found in doping. And according to Julian Savulescu, an ethics professor at the Oxford Centre of Neuroethics, "The war on doping has failed... Lance Armstrong never failed a doping test, despite being subjected to thousands. Nearly every recent winner of the Tour de France has been implicated in doping. About 80 percent of 100-meter finalists are or will be implicated in doping. The fact is that blood doping and use of growth hormones have not been possible to detect, and because doping mimics normal physiological process it will always be possible to beat the test. Thus, we should embrace the inevitable, and control doping as best we can." It is through regulation that sports can still be a test of athletic ability. Moreover, why is it an issue for pharmaceutical companies to face competition as well? By creating competition in the pharmaceutical industry, sports are ensured to never hit a wall. People still need to train to make the most of their drugs.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The analogy substitutes a machine for the athlete, which drugs do not: a doped athlete still trains, competes and can lose. As the counter-argument notes, sport already permits engineered equipment, managed nutrition and altitude training without ceasing to test ability. [Rejecting P2] That a pharmaceutical race would displace athletic competition is asserted rather than argued, and the health objection is a separate point that tells against unregulated use rather than against permitted and supervised use. [Rejecting P3] Cost and access are already features of elite sport, where facilities, coaching and sports medicine are unevenly distributed, so the premise identifies nothing distinctive to doping. The counter-argument adds the practical point the argument never engages: prohibition has not prevented the practice, only pushed it beyond supervision.