Medal auction
It's reported that each Olympic gold medal in the last 20 years has cost Australian tax payers about 40 million dollars. I hear that the UK is now reaping the rewards of extra investment. Why not save a lot of bother and just auction the medals off the highest bidder?
Anything goes
Many events in the past have been won with the aid of performance enhancing drugs, advanced computer modelled training, or special suits or shoes. Complex rules currently control which techniques are legal and which are illegal. No doubt new drugs, for example, are being used this year that won't be detected until after the event.
Why not remove all the rules and let the teams pull out all the stops. The most performance enhanced, steroid soaked, android, with atomic shoes would win - if they don't have a heart attack first.
True competition
If the medal tally is really a measure of the performance of the people of a nation, perhaps no preparation should be allowed. In the days leading up to the Olympics, representatives should be picked at random from each country. These true representatives of the country would compete with only a brief explanation of the event before it starts.
Oh, and praying should be banned as presumably that is performance enhancing.
Then we'd have a real Olympics.
3 comments:
... and the competitors should compete naked "to celebrate, in part, the achievements of the human body".
Can you imagine the Olympics if it was done with randomly selected humans? Reality TV at its worst!
After seeing the Men's 100 run this time I do wonder what Zenith for humans is (enhanced or not)? Bolt ran 9.72 and seemed to have plenty of spare capacity.
I'm not for open-slather on performance enhancement. Equipment and training methods sure, but after seeing what happened to some of the Soviet "project athletes" - women so androgenised they ended up having a sex change - well at least not without informed consent for the athlete, which apparently many of those poor people didn't get!
Even if the drugs were "safe" access to them would not be universal and elite sport would become even more of a contest for the richest countries with the best sports scientists.
Yeah, you're right, we should go the medal auction approach.
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