Crash Bang Wallace

The Olympics is meant to be about human performance at its finest – faster, higher, stronger, as the Olympic motto puts it.

Every four years we see people who have dedicated their lives to training heir bodies and perfecting their skill, celebrating and receiving due recognition for their remarkable achievements.

But there’s also the inevitable dingy underbelly – the drug cheats who are banned, the embarrassing need to feature “reject doping” messages even in the Opening Ceremony speeches and, most distastefully, the accusations that are thrown at the best performers.

This latter trend has come out in a particularly ugly way in the case of Ye Shiwen. The Chinese swimmer has wiped the floor with more established opponents, prompting some to accuse her of doping without a shred of evidence other than her staggering performances. It is outrageous that even before any retrospective test results come back, and having passed previous tests with apparently flying colours, her name should be dragged through the mud like this.

While some are unduly slandered, others of course do cheat and some presumably get away with it. Particular sports like cycling have historically been notorious for being riddled with performance enhancing drugs.

Isn’t there a better way than our current approach to reduce these problems?

Why not introduce a new layer of the Olympics – the Augmented Olympics?

We would still have the main event, the Natural Olympics, where you compete unaided by drugs or excessive technology. But we would also have another contest, where you can take all the performance enhancing, eyesight sharpening, foot enlarging drugs you like, and you can wear swimsuits made of the latest nanotechnology or carbon fibre springs.

Just as the Paralympics is separated into different categories for each event, you could have chemically, biologically and mechanically augmented events.

As well as making it far more attractive for today’s drug cheats to opt out of the current Olympics and enter something where they are not risking their entire careers by cheating, thus making things fairer for the honest athletes, this would also have beneficial effects in terms of technological and medical development.

Just as Formula 1 produces cars that aren’t intended for the roads but generates huge technological trickle down performance, efficiency and safety improvements in the mass market, the Augmented Olympics would do the same.

Experiments in increasing lung capacity or oxygen absorption in swimmers offer clear benefits for those with breathing problems or lungs that have been removed due to cancer. Bionic exoskeletons for weightlifting would undoubtedlybe useful to increase capacity and safety in the military and heavy industries. Exploring safe ways to boost muscle growth or speed up reaction times could have all sorts of applications from the recreational to the medical.

The incentives offered by the potential of such research and development would surely be likely to attract more private sector sponsorship for sport, too.

The temptation to cheat will never go away, and those too weak to resist it will always be with us. That is the nature of the human condition. But if there is a way to reduce that temptation, and unlock wider benefits for science and society at the same time, we should consider it.