The past few days in Olympic swimming could reasonably be described as lively. I could only imagine them being glossed by a deeply galaxy-weary Yoda. Begun … the pool war has. Like so much of Olympic competition these days, the sport comes off as a battle between scientifically modified troopers of various dysfunctional republics and empires. Quite how rosy the future is for a brilliant aqua-Jedi such as Lilly King is unclear. Ultimately, all USA swimmers will probably be cloned from Michael Phelps. Not sure who China are set to go with but it’ll be someone along the lines of their teenage girl who swum the last 50m of one her 2012 races faster than the men’s champion, Ryan Lochte.
So, once more, to the drugs spoiling sport – or vice versa, if you prefer. It’s notable that for all those saluting King for wagging her finger at even senior USA team-mates Justin Gatlin and Tyson Gay for being in Rio despite previous drugs bans, there are almost as many – more? – who believe that battles to eliminate chemically enhanced athletes have already been lost. The more the wiles of the labs and the failures of institutions emerge, the more you hear people wondering why on earth they don’t just let athletes (or their handlers) put what they like into their bodies and be done with it.
This argument is not new, though some might feel a reflexive disdain for those whose best solution to any complex problem is “leaving them to get on with it”. Non-interventionism isn’t always all it’s cracked up to be. But many have long espoused it as an athletics doctrine, apparently willing to encourage talented children to see this as the best way forward, as well as to ignore unsatisfactorily solved mysteries like the untimely death of track legend Florence Griffith-Joyner (still the holder of the 100m and 200m world records). Either way, the chemical libertarians need to clarify whether there’d be two sets of medals: one for the athletes, and one for the constructors. Consider the evidence of Rocky IV ... You’ve got to give Brigitte Nielsen one, haven’t you? (Yes, yes – and a medal too.)
There is little these days that is not regarded as another strand of radical populism and perhaps the increasing clamour for rejecting conventionally-governed sport is part of that. Hey – I’m being at least 60% serious (the rest is just naturally occurring sarcasm, which I have a doctor’s note to prove I metabolise slowly).
Maybe Olympic sport is just another thing that people perceive as lying to them. The call for chemical libertarianism has many of the hallmarks of other radical populist shifts: it is founded in profound disillusionment, it is a devil-may-care revolt and it is already handily rooted in nationalism (international sport being a place where an open distaste for the foreigner is positively encouraged). From the Republican party to Brexit, people are moving against dysfunctional established systems, which could certainly include anti-doping laws.
Crucially, that’s just the half of it. Not only are people popularly held to be losing trust all our planet’s major conventional institutions, but there are approximately 237 comic book movies a year, with every major studio seemingly regarding several superhero franchises as their tentpole output. In our leisure hours, we are being relentlessly bombarded with the notion that humanity’s best hope is a tightly-costumed lab accident. We are as encouraged to sit guzzling a 10-gallon multiplex drink in front of a superhero movie as we are in front of an Olympics whose motto is Citius, Altius, McDonalds.
Fed this narcotising diet, a society searching for heroes it can believe in is perhaps less resistant to – in fact, actively calling for – the idea of celebrating chemically-altered humans. I mean, really: who is actually going to save you? Is it the federal government? Is it the financial regulators? Is it the police? Is it the church? Is it the establishment? Or is it a totally ripped chemical superhuman?
Scan the movie listings for a few months and you’ll note that almost everyone who can rescue your country/planet from the forces of darkness is effectively the result of gene doping. It is highly possible the Olympics are just an emerging galaxy in either the DC or Marvel universes. Perhaps it’s time we stopped thinking of drugged athletes as cheats, but as potential heroic mutants – X-Olympians who attended Dr Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters and graduated summa cum laude from the breaststroke programme. Of course they are outcast by their contemporaries; of course the unique pressures under which they operate are misunderstood. But ultimately, only they can save us.
After all, secret chemicals have been behind so many of our superheroes. It might be a lab experiment gone wrong; it might be one of those accidental transformational oversights where you don’t realise that being bitten by a radioactive spider is on the banned list. As the comic book decades have worn on, the cause of superhero mutations largely turns out to have been deliberate genetic engineering. The classic radiation accidents of the atomic era have frequently been rewritten in later iterations as genetic engineering, nuclear terror/fascination having lost something of its novelty. “The next war will be a genetic one.” Not the words of Wada, my friends, but those of Nick Fury: Agent of Shield.
Right now, those who strive to create the X-Olympians must do so covertly. But imagine if we gave them free rein. What wonders – what superhumans – would they create? Admittedly, I am dimly aware the unfettered embrace of biotechnology sometimes ends up being a cautionary tale – I think I once saw an island-based dinosaur movie about this and have read The Island of Doctor Moreau. But if we confined the Olympic Games to an island until the teething problems were ironed out, who on earth among us could not welcome our new superhuman overlords?
