Kim Landers reported this story on Friday, August 12, 2016 12:50:00

KIM LANDERS: There's no doubt that performance-enhancing drugs create an unfair playing field in elite sports - but there's a new frontier emerging.



Athletes are beginning to use technology to augment their bodies to gain an edge.



It's not 'The Six Million Dollar Man' or 'The Terminator' just yet, but it poses a minefield for sporting bodies.



To discuss this I spoke to Professor Roger Pielke junior, director of the Sports Governance Centre at the University of Colorado.



Roger Pielke, aside from doping, what sort of changes are athletes making to their bodies to make them better, faster and stronger?



ROGER PIELKE: Athletes are doing a lot of things to try to get an edge. And some of the more common things that we know of are laser eye surgery.



So if you're a baseball player in the United States or a tennis player or a golfer, or even a shooter in the Olympics, you're going to want to have a very good visual acuity. And when athletes get their eyes lasered, it's not like when I got mine to 20-20. They'll even go to 20-8, the limit of human ability to see.



KIM LANDERS: So things like laser eye surgery, perhaps a swimmer having a shoulder replacement: at the moment, those sorts of technological enhancements, if you like: they're currently allowed by elite sports, aren't they?



ROGER PIELKE: That's right. There are very few rules or regulations in sport governing how we change our bodies.



So if you're a skier and you're an elite skier and you blow out your knee - you tear your anterior cruciate ligament - you can have that replaced with a synthetic ligament that's better than the original.



KIM LANDERS: So what sort of technical enhancements do you foresee might be pushing the boundaries?



ROGER PIELKE: Yeah, we've already seen the boundaries pushed: first when Oscar Pistorius, the South African runner, in about 2005 or 2007 started expressing an interest to run with able-bodied athletes. It raised some questions: if you run on prosthetic legs - and he was born without lower legs - what should the rules be?



Sport wants to be inclusive, wants people to participate, but it also wants to be fair. So that was really the start of the asking of some very difficult questions about what it means to have athletes who are not fully human in their capabilities participating in sport.



KIM LANDERS: So what sort of things could you imagine? I mean, are you talking about a weightlifter who has special knees put into his body, if you like, so that he can lift a larger weight? Some sort of synthetic tendons? And would athletes actually have to even tell sporting bodies that they've got those bits in them?



ROGER PIELKE: So that raises a very significant question. And I'll give you an example of a sort of technology that didn't exist too long ago but is being used in the combat sports, mixed martial arts.



If you're a fighter, you can have the skin peeled back on your face and have your bones shaped down so they're nice and smooth. So when you get punched, you're less likely to bleed. Some fighters - and this is really happening - have even had their facial skin replaced with cadaver skin, so that it's fresh and new and doesn't bleed as much and they're able to complete the fight.



This raises questions about: well, should there be rules like for doping about what's allowed, what's not allowed? And as technology advances, as medical sciences advances, we're going to see more and more athletes looking to fuse their body with technology in a kind of an Arnold Schwarzenegger-Terminator fashion to gain that extra edge.



The one issue that I think where we'll see some bleed-over between the technology and the chemical questions is in doping, because it is possible that medical doctors could change the genetics of humans, so that we might be able to have genetically modified humans in the future who are selected for their athletic performance.



And given what we've seen over the last year, it's not unreasonable to think that a nation, a state may engage in a program to create superhumans for athletic purposes, to bring home those medals for geopolitical purposes.



KIM LANDERS: Well, we've already seen state-sponsored systems where children are identified from a very young age about what sort of their body might develop into and put into sports where they think they might do well.



So you're saying that maybe a state system might develop to actually, even before birth, try to develop a human that might be good at a particular sport.?



ROGER PIELKE: It's not unrealistic, given that some nations have even encouraged elite athletes to marry, have children, in hopes of producing offspring that will in the next generation dominate the Olympics. It's not a far leap to think that that might be done with more precise genetic technology in decades to come.



KIM LANDERS: And do you see any evidence that sporting bodies, governing organisations, are beginning to grapple with what might lie ahead and what they might do with it?



ROGER PIELKE: They really haven't. The case of Oscar Pistorius: the first instinct of the IAAF (International Association of Athletics Federation), the track and field athletics federation, was to keep Pistorius out. Pistorius won a court case that allowed him to run in the London Olympics. The sports bodies did the same with Markus Rehm and were able to keep him out.



But as society changes and we become more accepting of technological change - like laser eye surgery, which no one really cares about - I think we're going to see more and more of these challenges.



And when paralympians, who we used to consider to be disabled athletes, start doing superhuman things, then it's really going to raise real challenges and questions for the Olympics and track and field in particular.



KIM LANDERS: Do you think perhaps the Paralympics wouldn't be a place for athletes who were considered to have a disability: perhaps it would be the place for athletes with these enhanced abilities?



ROGER PIELKE: Yeah, very much so. I think in coming decades, people are going to tune into the Paralympics to see human beings doing things that you just can't see in the Olympics.



They will run faster, they will jump farther. They will do incredible things, because that is the place technology fuses with the human form. And athletic officials have a lot of experience in trying to put people in categories where they have fair competition.



KIM LANDERS: Is this an ethical dilemma that goes way beyond sport? Are we starting to test the question about what it actually means to be human?



ROGER PIELKE: Sport is a wonderful place to experiment and ask questions about ethics. And in many respects sport is just a reflection of the rest of society.



We have decades - centuries, really - of experience in modifying our bodies, whether it's getting a nose job or liposuction, or whatever it happens to be to improve our performance, however we define that.



Sport is going to be a place where we will have to take a look at what it means to be human; what it means to compete; what is fair. And all of the questions we have in broader society, we'll see play out in sporting competition.



KIM LANDERS: Well, Roger Pielke, thank you very much for speaking to The World Today.



ROGER PIELKE: Thank you.



KIM LANDERS: Professor Roger Pielke junior from the University of Colorado.



His forthcoming book is 'The Edge: The War Against Cheating and Corruption in the Cutthroat World of Elite Sports'.