The Civilisation Games

Oh Lance, what have you done?You’ve broken the heart of the World.You took drugs. That’s just soooo bad. And you got caught. That’s far worse. We can never forgive you that. It’s unpopular, but actually I feel a bit sorry for him. We’re all flawed frauds to a degree. It took Hegel to explain “No man’s a hero to his valet.”

I suspect the truth is that just about everyone in his (Armstrong’s not Hegel’s) major races - with a handful of back-of-field exceptions - was using performance enhancing drugs of one kind or another. To compete on their steep but proverbially level playing field chemical augmentation was imperative. Those clean boys at the back of the peloton are working in insurance now, struggling to pay a mortgage. Lance still has his mansions and a nine-digit deposit account.

In retrospect would the disgraced cyclist choose to drug-up or lag the field? Maybe even after all the angst of exposure he’d elect the former, after all his contrition centred on getting caught, not the awfulness of cheating.

The first person banned from the Olympics for using a banned substance was Swedish pistol shooter Hans-Gunnar Lijenwall in Mexico, 1968. He’d had a couple of beers.

But things have gotten out of hand: money, the illusory benefits of celebrity and the humble desire to be seen to be the best have swamped the antiquated notion of sportsmanship.

A majority of power lifters and major league baseball players admit to using drugs. Cyclists, jumpers, hurdlers, swimmers’ distance runners and sprinters conceal them, but are caught more regularly than buses. Wrestlers, boxers, basket ballers and most certainly horses have a long history of overuse.

It is a rare professional athlete that has not used, or considered using banned substances.Can we swim against this tide?I think not.What say we don’t? Let’s just surrender.

What we need, in today’s better world, are tournaments where competitors can take anything they want, the more drugs the merrier. Faster, stronger, better. Games where not only pushbikes belt at Ducatian speeds, but over-muscled sprinters bound the 100 metres in five seconds, eat a lap in thirty, swim like Evinrudes or hurdle a four metre bar only to see the next chap dismissively vault five.

We need races where Oscar Pretorius can bounce forlornly behind teens with bigger blades, where squeaky-voiced giants with the jaunty gait of a Jaguar outbolt Usain. Where a hop, skip and jump event demands being held outside the confines of a stadium for fear of athletes crashing into spectators and a discus competition must alert air traffic control.

Kerry Packer did it with cricket. He took the most tedious of sports and reduced it to a jus. Readers Digest did it with literature, Disney with morality.

Is it beyond us to allow sports that celebrate the most mankind can achieve?

It would offer a whole new world of heroic overt involvement to laboratories, doctors and leading edge scientists. It would draw on the magnificent advances of our entire civilisation rather than celebrating the tiresome genetic advantage distributed to so few, augmented by mind-sapping training. That mind-numbing muscle accumulation is just so 2012.

We could even call it The Civilisation Games.

It’s all about humanity and what, collectively, we can achieve, not a gormless celebration of the muscle mass of a minority.

Chemical corporations would wrestle one another to sponsor the event and redeem their public images, so funding concerns would evaporate.

And why stop with drugs? Too many exciting projects in genetic engineering are starved of funding: how better to raise those vital monies than promoting the benefits of cross breeding through sport?

In weightlifting the strongest man might lift five times his own weight, yet cross breed him with a Rhinoceros Beetle and that will be magnified by one hundred and seventy, so he’ll be bench pressing Boeings.

A human might leap five times the length of their height, but the right dash of DNA from a flea would see them covering three football fields.

Long distance runners may stagger through the marathon tape in two hours, but mix in some American Antelope and the event will be over in a half hour show, still leaving time for commercials and the National Anthem.

This is sport I’d actually watch on TV, finding it far more compelling than the supposedly drug-free Olympic drear we’re struggling to control.And I imagine I’d be no orphan.

There would be no cheating, for there would be no rules. No need to test, just straight from lab to podium. It makes such sense.

Banning drugs in sport is more than an attempt at coercive conformation: it's an attack on science and progress itself.

 Science, the Scientific Revolution, the gains we've made over the past four-hundred years in understanding the natural world, were all premised on the question: what next? If we do this - if this experiment works, if this scientific premise leads to that scientific conclusion - where will it take us? What new knowledge can be learned? What new data can we gain? What next?

The Armstrong haters, the anti-dopers, are effectively arguing: nothing next. 

Beyond opposing thumbs it’s enquiry and curiosity that separates us from other animals. That we do investigate, that we have higher cognitive ability that manifests, the historical experience has shown, as progress.

It’s how we know we’re more than apes. But the anti-dopers are, perversely, arguing we’re no more than apes. That in the sporting arena, we have our natural faculties, but no more.But of course more.

Through the long history of our species the haters have held thought back. The Flat Earthers, the anti-Copernicans, the Darwin deniers and now the Armstrong attackers. Lance Armstrong, 21st Century prophet of progress. His critics are dark ages’ obscurantist assholes.

What next? Why not allow Lance and his highly sophisticated and scientifically attuned doctors to pump him full of EPO and cortisone, and see where he ends up. We already know where the first round took him: to seven groundbreaking Tour De France wins, which were an awesome athletic feat, inclusive of the drugs.

We should live in the realm where the impossible may be possible. We’re better than apes, no?Let’s drag ourselves out of this swamp of ignorance, and loose the handbrake on what mankind can be.

Let’s broaden our notion of sport. Let’s scrap the eighteenth century elitism of natural selection and get unnatural. Let’s use our brains as well as our muscles and embrace the advances of science.

Bring on The Civilisation Games.