“Data control and IBM
Science is mankind’s brother
But all I see is drainin’ me
On my plastic fantastic lover”
— from “Plastic Fantastic Lover” by Jefferson Airplane
Sure, the lyrics up above refer to a song about television but you can certainly make a case that the second line—”Science is mankind’s brother”—epitomizes sports more than any other facet of life right now. We all have high-speed Internet access at home and at work; a lot of us having Blackberries or iPhones or some other equivalent smartphone; some of our fridges have LCDs on them; some of our picture frames are digital slideshows; our video game consoles have wi-fi access; all of this represents technological advancements but we do not have a team of people working side by side with us advising us on how to use our technology. We buy an iPhone, we use it, if it dies before the expiration of the warranty we replace it, otherwise, we buy a new one; repeat. Additionally, we all are smarter about what we eat but we don’t have direct access to people who will tell us when to eat certain vegetables in combination with certain vitamins. Athletes, on the other hand, now have a cadre of people advising and working with them on everything from diet to workout regiment to which hypoxic tent is really the best to buy. More than ever, sports really have become Hollywood-type entertainment—we marvel at the finished product while denying what actually goes in to its production. While there is no scripting in sporting events (at least, not that we know of), there are certainly handlers and men and women who, from their nondescript buildings many miles away, help refine and turn athletes into the one thing we all used to make fun of: an updated version of the East German women’s Olympic team.
To be sure, I am not saying that today’s athlete is treated like the East German girls were. The girls were loaded up with steroids from a very early age and it wreaked havoc on their bodies. It was morally and ethically wrong. Nowadays, though, we have become smarter about how to get our athletes to perform at the highest level possible. Steroids are bad for your body if injected directly, how about some human growth hormones instead? Get fatigued during a game or race? Don’t take speed, let’s go into the lab and see if a hypoxic tent is more suitable for your performance.
To you and I, athletes have always been put on pedestals, starting with Jesse Owens, Jim Thorpe, Red Grange, “Babe” Didrikson Zaharias, “Babe” Ruth, or Joe Louis. Part of why we adore our athletes comes from the natural feeling that what they can do what we cannot. To want to be a boxer when you are a kid is a far cry from actually putting forth all the years of hard work and energy to have been able to fight Joe Louis. It was easier to watch Joe Louis from a distance than stand five feet away from him trying to figure out when you would catch a hook. Because most of us are watchers rather than participants we started to read sports columns and magazines more and more and we even christened some “experts” along the way. There is nothing wrong with that as sports eventually became like any other type of art in that you had critics who wanted to be seen as larger than the athletes or sports that they cover. It is a natural progression.
Another natural progression was that athletes started to resent the media and its critics. The fallout from this was that more and more stars became less accessible to the fans and a chasm widened between the two to the point that sports radio has become way more intense than normal (see: Bonds, Barry and Clemens, Roger). The typical star athlete wanted their championship performances to be the exclamation point of their history. This sounds simple enough until you realize that before the late ’80′s the trumped-up significance was kind of a non-issue. Sure, George Gervin and Dan Fouts never won championships but most everyone agreed that they were really good. Nowadays, Fouts might have needed three tries to get in to the Hall of Fame because he never sniffed the Super Bowl and his interception rate was high.
Which brings me to Michael Phelps.
Phelps broke Mark Spitz’s longtime Olympic record of seven Gold Medals recently and everyone is talking about every facet of this. What I find funny about this is Phelps, while it is impressive, ultimately broke all of those records due to a myriad of performance-enhancing factors on his side. Yes, it is certainly reasonable to agree that he probably didn’t use performance-enhancing drugs but look at this list of things that did help him. You and I (and the media) don’t think about measuring lactic acid buildup or the physics of friction in a shallow pool versus a deep pool but there are a lot of people who do; people behind the scenes who will never be interviewed by ESPN.
The most comical thing, to me, about Phelps (and about the Olympics in general) is that we all pretend to care very deeply about it as it’s happening, only to forget about it in the weeks following the closing ceremony. Phelps will most likely be different because his agent(s) and handler(s) will demand his face time be very public in the next year or so. It certainly helps that Phelps is white and has a kid-like smile but are his accomplishments legitimate? You can’t damn Barry Bonds while praising someone else who used everything other than injected drugs. Isn’t cheating always supposed to be classified as cheating? If there are people who want an asterisk near Bonds’s home run record then there should be asterisks next to Phelps’s records and almost every other Olympic record of the last eight years.
And if you don’t think there should be any asterisks near any of the Olympic records then don’t complain about what goes on in baseball, basketball, football, or hockey because if you think any of the Olympic sports are “pure” you are indescribably misguided. Every single sport has been touched and hacked by science and the days of the natural athlete have gone the way of rotary phones and AOL. It is time to see athletes the way they really are: one man or one woman who has been sculpted by a team of scientists and engineers (just like the long-time running national joke, the East Germans).
I bring all of this up because another natural progression in sports is that peeking right around the corner at us is our collective disillusionment with it. We will eventually tire of watching records fall at an accelerated rate, of seeing 390 lb. men run as fast as the 275 lb. men can now, of seeing women die prematurely or have complications later in life because they are trying to be like the boys. In the ultimate irony, it will be science and not religion that will cause the next Dark Ages because as much as we think we like watching perfection we don’t. We will get bored by it and yearn for the days when a Wheaties box was Sports Center.
And swimming will just be swimming and not an overhyped event wherein all of the participants are loaded to the nines with advantages that their heroes and predecessors never had access to.