Drug-enhanced sports: 'Clown show' or the future?
More than 40 athletes, most using performance-enhancing drugs, will compete in the Enhanced Games in a competition that seeks to upend sporting norms.
Shania Collins, a 29-year-old American sprinter, was initially nervous about competing in the Enhanced Games. The competition debuting this weekend would upend a seemingly inviolable sport doctrine: the ban on performance-enhancing drugs. Substances such as steroids, amphetamines and growth hormone would not only be allowed, but encouraged.
The International Olympic Committee and World Anti-Doping Agency called it a dangerous "betrayal" of sports integrity. Critics dubbed it the “doping Olympics. ” But it also came with training stipends and prizes of up to $1 million that were rare in her sport – along with medical guidance for using the kinds of drugs Collins believed some competitors had long secretly taken anyway.
Still, when she sought an agent’s advice, Collins said she was asking “for a friend. ” The response? It would ruin the person’s reputation and ability to participate in sporting competitions.
Complicating matters – her parents worked in federal drug enforcement. She said she was asking for a friend with them, too. “Their first question was, ‘Is it legal?
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