“Natural” Athletic Performance or a Level Playing Field? You Can't Have Both

"“Natural” Athletic Performance or a Level Playing Field? You Can't Have Both." The American Journal of Bioethics, 18(6), pp. 30–31

This article refers to:

Performance-Enhancing Drugs, Sport, and the Ideal of Natural Athletic Performance

Notes

1. Granted, this view is not universal. Others will freely admit that athletes cannot claim responsibility for their natural gifts and that luck may therefore be a significant factor underlying their success, yet they nonetheless regard this as a perfectly acceptable aspect of competitive sport. Such people, however, will also typically reject FEO as stated by Loland.

2. Although I take it that recognizing the relevance of the spirit of sport for rule-making need not entail a single-minded commitment to the naturalness ideal. While everyone would agree that allowing the use of motorbikes in the Tour de France would contradict the very essence of cycling, since riding a motorbike is clearly incompatible with engaging in the sport of cycling, it is at least not obvious that the same can be said of the use of PEDs.