The idea of sport as ‘fair play’ has been complicated by worries over performance-enhancing pharmacological and prosthetic devices adopted by athletes. The outrage has been principally moral: these advanced humans — posthumans — it is alleged, have moved beyond their ‘natural’ bodies and, as a consequence, cheated at sport.

In response to these legal and social strictures on performance-enhancement methods, a parallel sports industry has emerged. Enhanced.org and Human Enhancement Games hope to fight the anti-enhancement climate. They not only accuse the International Olympic Committee of corruption (HEG posts costs of the IOC president’s lifestyle and the money the hard-working sportsperson actually earns) but also of being anti-science. The rationale for posthumanism in sport is well-argued by these new industries.

The enhanced-games industry projects itself to be in line with the tradition of enhancement techniques adopted since ancient times — gladiators took hallucinogens, West Africans used Cola acuminita and Cola nitida for running, and indigenous Australians employ the pituri plant for stimulation. Endorsers of
enhanced-games thus suggest that what they are doing is not new or radical: cultures have always tried to transcend the limits of the human body through some means or the other. Posthumanism, they argue, is merely unveiling a new dimension.

The enhanced-games industry presents pharmacological-prosthetic enhancements as a supplement, not a substitute, to training programmes that all sportspersons undertake. As one company puts it, “performance enhancements augment the effects of training, and help athletes reach the true peak of their athletic ability.” This claim challenges our notions of ‘natural’ and ‘enhanced’ athletes. There is no athlete who has not undertaken years of training with the assistance of technological aids and items like specially-designed shoes, clothing, headgear and so on. Do specific diets, mental training and psychological counselling not count as enhancements?

The enhanced-games industry treats such enhanced-sports as scientific because it employs the controlled use of chemicals and prostheses. This emphasis on science is significant. If we see the dietary regimen of professional athletes, especially those who are sponsored and can afford it, these are indisputably potent and pure chemicals that shape and harden muscles and bones and alter metabolism among other physiological effects. While we may not want to call the ingestion of fruit juice or herbal extracts ‘doping’, do we care to examine whether these contain chemicals of certain kinds? How different are they really from other pharmacological products? Do we consider outlawing the super-nutritive food that high-performance athletes consume? Don’t high-performance sportspersons not have physical and mental health trainers, pain therapists — the physio treating Glenn Maxwell en route to his marauding double century is fresh in our minds — and counsellors who bring highly-specialised, scientifically-designed expertise to work on their bodies and minds?

Can a sporting body be ‘natural’? ‘No’ would be the answer. There is, of course, something like raw talent. But for raw talent to perform at extraordinarily high levels, it requires training and years of committed working-at-the-talent to hone it to near-perfection. Is not training through work-outs, nutrition, counselling forms of enhancement? Why are these legitimate?

The enhanced-games industry will grow and pose a challenge to traditional sporting events. The moral quandaries will become unresolvable. The contradictions are also hypocritical because we do accept, indeed demand, enhancement in some cases — tutoring and training, for instance — but not in others.

How we make enhancement egalitarian, accessible, and ethical is the crux. Outlawing it because it does not fit our slightly bent moral compass is not a solution.

Pramod K. Nayar teaches at the Department of English, the University of Hyderabad