The Munk Debates Podcast - Be it resolved: The time has come to embrace a high-tech/gene enhanced/drug boosted Olympics of sport

Episode Date: August 3, 2021

Who can forget these memorable moments in sports when reigning world champions lost their titles, medals, and invitations to compete as punishment for testing positive for performance enhancing drugs. But while most sports experts agree these high-profile scandals represent just the tip of the iceberg, some say the time has come to accept that doping is part and parcel of the spectacle of elite sport. They argue that the days where athletes won medals based on natural genetic advantage and dedicated training are long gone and that the World Anti Doping Administration's push for clean athletes is wishful fantasy. The future of sport is one where athletes will push their physiological boundaries with the help of steroids, hormones, and yes even gene editing, embracing the high-tech innovation that is revolutionizing every other aspect of our lives. Anti-doping crusaders respond that a sporting world that allows unrestricted access to performance enhancement drugs is one that threatens athletes' lives and also spells the end of sport as we have played and watched it for thousands of years. They argue that the most powerful reason to ban doping is that it undermines the skill development and overcoming of physical and mental obstacles that lies at the heart of fair play. Substances that provide immediate athletic advantages without any work or struggle represents the beginning of a joyless and pointless brave new world in sports. Arguing for the motion is Julian Savulescu, Uehiro Chair in Practical Ethics at the University of Oxford, where he directs the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics and Wellcome Centre for Ethics and Humanities. Arguing against the motion is Angela Schneider, Director of the International Centre for Olympic Studies, an Associate Professor in Kinisiology at the University of Western Ontario, and an Olympic silver medallist in rowing. Sources: BBC Sport, ABC News, Huff Post, CNBC, TNW, Calgary Herald, NBC, Channel 4, City News The host of the Munk Debates is Rudyard Griffiths - @rudyardg.   Tweet your comments about this episode to @munkdebate or comment on our Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/munkdebates/ To sign up for a weekly email reminder for this podcast, send an email to [e-mail]. To support civil and substantive debate on the big questions of the day, consider becoming a Munk Member at https://munkdebates.com/membership Members receive access to our 10+ year library of great debates in HD video, a free Munk Debates book, newsletter and ticketing privileges at our live events. This podcast is a project of the Munk Debates, a Canadian charitable organization dedicated to fostering civil and substantive public dialogue - https://munkdebates.com/ The Munk Debates podcast is produced by Antica, Canada's largest private audio production company - https://www.anticaproductions.com/   Executive Producer: Stuart Coxe, CEO Antica Productions Senior Producer: Christina Campbell Editor: Kieran Lynch Producer: Nicole Edwards Associate Producer: Abhi RahejaBecome a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

There are options, and that's why we need to take this opportunity seriously. There's no way you can prevent global warming unless China is part of the solution. This is not normal male behavior. This is predatory behavior. We don't know how bad this bug is. We don't know what this bug does. All of that was thrown away in those eight minutes and 46 seconds, and that's the moment that I became an abolitionist. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Welcome to the Monk Debates. On every episode, we provide you with a civil and substantive debate on the big issue of the day

to arm you, the listener, with enough information to make up your own mind. Today's debate, be it resolved. The times come to embrace a high-tech, gene-enhanced, drug-boasted Olympics of sport. The urine sample of Ben Johnson, Canada, was found to contain the metabolites of a banned substance namely Stanuzololol. It's an anabolic steroid. Tonight, Lance Armstrong confessed to one of the greatest lies and deepest cover-ups in all of sport. Did you ever take banned substances to enhance your cycling performance? Yes.

The consequences include the banning of Russia from the Olympics, Paralympics and World Championships for four years. The fastest woman in America disqualified from the 100-meter race at the Olympic Games after testing positive for marijuana. Hello, I'm your moderator, Rudyard Griffith. Well, who can forget those memorable moments in sporting history when reigning world champions lost their titles, medals, and invitations to compete as punishment for testing positive for performance-enhancing drugs? While many sports experts agree,

these high-profile doping scandals represent just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the use of prohibited substances in sport, others say the time has come to accept that artificial performance enhancement is part part and parcel of the reality of elite competition today. They argue that the era where athletes won medals based on natural genetic advantage and dedicated training are long gone and that the world anti-doping agencies drive for drug-free elite competition is a wishful fantasy.

The future of sport is one where athletes push their physiological boundaries with the help of steroids, hormones, and yes, even gene editing, embracing. the biotech revolution that is changing every aspect of human health today. And when we begin to think about what the next generation of athletes may look like, central to that vision is the integration of these technologies and potentially even giving up on this issue around doping. Anti-doping crusaders respond that a sporting world that allows unrestricted access to performance-enhancing drugs is one that threatens athletes' lives

and also spells the end of sport as they've been played and watched for hundreds of years. They argue that the most powerful reason to ban doping is that it undermines the skill development and the overcoming of physical and mental obstacles that lies at the heart of meaningful competition. Substances that provide immediate athletic advantages without any work or struggle represents the beginning of a joyless, brave new world in sports. Sports today is at a crossroads. The way doping is being handled is not one of the greatest threats to sport today.

It is the greatest threat to sport today. On this installment of the Monk Debates podcast, we challenge the essence of these arguments by debating the motion. Be it resolved, the time has come to embrace a high-tech, gene-enhanced, drug-boasted Olympics of Sport. Arguing for the motion is Julian Savulescu, chair and practical ethics at the University of Oxford, where he directs the Oxford Yehiro Center of Practical Ethics and the Welcome Center for Ethics and Humanities.

He also holds visiting positions at the Murdoch Children's Research Institute and the Melbourne Law School, where he leads the biomedical ethics research group. Arguing against the motion is Angela Schneider, director of the International Center for Olympic Studies, an associate professor in kinesiology, at the University of Western Ontario and an Olympic silver medalist in rowing. Julian, Angela, welcome to the Monk Debates. Hello.

Hi, pleasure to be here. Each time the Olympics comes around, I think all of us start to think about the nature of sport, what is fair competition, how do we think about performance and ability on the part of athletes? What are we really watching as viewers, as fans of sports? Is this competition of equals or is there lurking in the background all kinds of distortions in terms of how people excel at something at the pinnacle of sport, which is the Olympics?

So the opportunity for us to have a conversation with both of you today on a fascinating topic related to the Olympic Games is timely indeed. Our resolution, simple to the point, be it resolved. The time has come to embrace a high-tech gene-enhaned. drug-boasted Olympics of sport. Julian, you're arguing in favor of the motion, so I'm going to put a couple minutes on the clock and turn the program over to you. My proposal is we should change the rules

to allow doping, which is safe for athletes, rather than the current set of rules, which says we should ban substances, which are performance-enhancing, unsafe, and against the spirit of sport. So the reason that I propose this is twofold. Firstly, the current set of rules is failing. Somewhere between a half to maybe even two-thirds of athletes are currently doping.

So Michael Ashton did a survey of the results in 2012 independently and estimated that at least a third of medal winners were doping. And what his own surveys reveal around half of athletes admit to doping, in the last year. So it's clearly failing. And last year we saw about at least half of the out of seasons testing done that would have normally been done. So we will see records falling this Olympics. We've already seen the 10,000 metres women's record broken in succession already. So first of all, we're not winning the war. And certainly there's no reason to have this war. Most of the doping which occurs involves what I call physiological doping.

That is changing the natural substances in the body within the normal human range. So, for example, one kind of doping is blood doping, either using the hormone erythropoitin or a person's own blood to boost their oxygen carrying capacity. Now, the percentage of red cells for a man is roughly between 40 to 50% of their blood. So what people are doing currently is pushing themselves as close to 50 as possible, and that's safe. There's no problem with 50. But if you are naturally at 40, that gives you a considerable advantage. We should just allow that, just as we allow people to supplement themselves with glucose or water within physiological limits.

So we have a natural limit that would be more enforceable than trying to pick up small changes in growth hormone, testosterone, and erythropoitin. And so this would be more enforceable and fairer for the honest athletes. So this would allow us to change rules, not to eliminate doping, but to make it more enforceable and fairer. Thank you, Julian. Now an opportunity for the opening statement, Angela, that you're providing in this debate, arguing against our motion, be it resolved, the time has come to embrace a high-tech,

gene-enhanced, drug-boasted Olympics of Sport. Angela, give us your opening statement. Yes, so I'm arguing against this resolution for a number of reasons, one of which is the resulting pharmaceutical libertarianism, which follows from this particular motion. Right now, it's really good timing to talk about this because of the recent suspension of Shah Kari Richardson, the American 100-meter sprinter,

who was heading to the Tokyo Olympics. but tested positive for marijuana. This has contributed to community debate and raises the old question, what should be banned and why are we banning it exactly why we're doing this discussion? And each time a case like this that seems to be absurd

from a performance enhancement question, namely the idea of marijuana enhancing a performance in the 100 meter sprint, we then ask, well, how did that get on the list? What's recreational drug use doing on a banned list? for sport, and this seems to be ridiculous and a cruel standard for athletes to live by, if you look at in particular some of these cases. Some of the more extreme views on this topic, and they are increasing in number,

should say we should just stop this silly testing game. It costs a great deal of money, money that could be spent wisely somewhere else, and why are we doing it? So I certainly would argue that there are many things on the band list because there are hundreds of substances on it that are really minor when it comes to performance enhancement. But very importantly for this debate in particular, some forms of doping like genetic doping. And they make taking steroids look like eating smarties. So it's on a totally different level. And this debate really has not happened in.

enough with a focus on the athletes. My position is that the answer to this issue and the way ahead has always been with the athletes themselves. In this kind of intense international competition, with all kinds of risks, athletes already pay a really high price for something like gene doping. So for them to have to take on another risk that's external to the sport, not necessary for them to really be able to do the sport, they have been opposed to this. I was, director at WADA for Ethics and Education at the Inception of WADA. I sat on the committees, many of them on the list committee debate, and I saw the athlete collectives and representatives, and they argued to have these things banned because they did not want to have to deal with that

on top of all the things they deal with already. So for pharmaceutical libertarianism, that is not what they want. They want some things banned for very good reasons, and they're rational about it and we need to listen to them. But that does not mean we don't need to review and significantly reduce the man list. It should be an athlete-driven list. And it is they who take the risks and pay the price. It is they who should decide what is on it. Thank you, Angela. And just a reminder to our listeners that WADA is the world agency that was established to police performance enhancing drugs and their use in competition, including obviously, Olympic. So time for rebuttals now. Julian, you're up first. Another couple minutes on the clock for you.

As Angela said, it is ridiculous having somebody banned for taking marijuana, yet they can drink alcohol as much as they like. So I completely agree that what is list is confused and onerous. With respect to the risks of gene doping, yes, of course at the moment, there is no genetic enhancement available. It is unsafe. But in the future, as gene editing is perfected, it will depend on the particular gene doping that is employed. So it's important to remember that sport is very dangerous. The risk of traumatic brain injury in soccer, rugby and American football is extremely high. If you could gene edit people to be resistant to brain damage, that's something and those gene edits were safe.

That's something that athletes may well vote for. And I entirely agree that we should put athletes at the centre of this. I think that sporting teams and doctors should be held responsible for doping, not athletes, or at least that responsibility should be shared, and we should ask athletes what they want. But if it were the case that they understood that doping was safe, as well as performance enhancing, and that protected their health rather than compromised it,

my belief is they'd vote for it. I certainly would. Thank you, Julian. Angelus, same opportunity for you. Let's hear your rebuttal. So the challenge is that we are in reality not really dealing with that kind of a scenario, but right now, when I was at WADA, there were coaches and athletes calling people who run regular gene transfer technology labs, not for doping, but for medical reasons, to get a hold of the technology to use it. So we have a culture in sport that is always about getting better and better and better and paying higher and higher and higher costs. Athletes have said there are limits to what they

want to do. They don't want to have to go into something like gene doping. In fact, they're in a kind of prisoner's dilemma and it makes sense for them to limit the risk. Because There is already a lot of internal risks that are necessary to the sport they do. So from an athlete perspective, it is prudent to limit some of these things. The risk is so extraordinarily high. And there are countries that are trying to put this forward and not necessarily at the athlete's wish. So, you know, we saw the cheating that occurred in Russia.

This may be the biggest doping scandal in sports history, and if you read it in a spy novel, you might not believe it disguised Russian intelligence agents, swapping drug samples at night, all directed by the sports minister. And the world responded quite rightly with outrage, because what happened in that situation was a clear level of coercion, at least from the whistleblowers we have heard from. for the athletes to forcibly be told they have to take performance-enhancing substances that they didn't want to take, that push them to a higher level.

There are things that athletes know and have identified that say, I don't want to have that risk. And we need WADA to help us with this. Unfortunately, because when I raced in the 1980s against the former Soviet bloc and the former East Germany, there was no WADA. And we know now, very clearly, from the release of the Stasi files that these athletes were forcibly doped. So, you know, people say, well, this isn't, we're not in that world anymore. Well, you know, Russia came very close to that world. So the

athletes do need some protection. So just on whether athletes want this, and it's very difficult to get an honest answer from this, because of course you can't admit to doping. So when I last looked, eight human beings had run 9.8 seconds or faster. Only one of those individuals, you're saying, Bolt has not been implicated in doping. And Ben Johnson, the famous 100-meter runner in Seoul, who was first busted for doping, said, if you want a human being to run under 10 seconds, you have to take steroids in order to recover from the injuries that you'll inevitably get running at that speed. So I don't know what 100-meter runners would really say, honestly, about having to take testosterone. But if you want them to take,

to run that fast, it's inevitable that they'll be taking testosterone. And it's safe. It's not affecting their health adversely. If you take massive doses of testosterone, it will harm you. It will turn you from a woman into a man. And just as if you drink enough water, it will kill you. But I don't believe that we need to have the extent of the restrictions on substances like testosterone, growth hormone, erythropoitan.

And we could adopt a more enforceable set of rules. Now, those rules won't be perfect. There's no doubt there will be cheating, as Angela says, people relentlessly want to win, but we could do better than we're currently doing. Yeah, I'm certainly not disagreeing on therapeutic use for some of the substances that are on the list, Julian. But what I am saying is that there are real world risks out there that athletes do need and ask for help with on limitations. And until they are, supervised by medical professionals that are accredited and people know they have the ability to take care of the athletes taking some of these recovery drugs, then we don't know, and they don't

know, that their health is protected because I agree that we can have better health. I'm agreeing with a reduction of harm, but I am certainly, most certainly agreeing with the autonomy of the athletes first to make these decisions. A good sign of a good debate is when a moderator becomes superfluous. But let me join the conversation now and try to think up some questions that are on the minds of our listeners hearing you both speak now. And maybe I'll come to you first, Julian. And it is that idea of an arms race that athletes are inherently competitive. And who's to say that people are going to be responsible and use various performance enhancing techniques and therapies and drugs in ways that aren't risky, that aren't harmful. Why do you think that a self-policing

mechanism is actually going to work? And why isn't that putting athletes in really grave risk on the basis that they want to win? And to win, they're going to have to do what they think their competitors are doing, which could be risky, could be experimental, could be at the cutting edge of science. Well, well, that would be risky. And that's not what I proposing. So a complete libertarian or laissez-faire system would just allow anyone to take anything and be entirely self-policing. And that would be extraordinarily dangerous. We do need surveillance. We do need limits and policing. And I agree we need to set rules. So my proposal is that we set physiological health-related rules, not rules related to whether a substance is performance-enhancing.

This is the essential mistake that water made when it implemented its rules. To include the idea that something is performance enhancing counts against it. Glucose is performance enhancing. Caffeine used to be on the ban list. It's not any longer. Is performance enhancing? Reduces time to exhaustion by 10%. So my proposal would be we reset the limits.

So instead of trying to work out whether someone is micro-dosing with EPO, which is impossible. That's why only about 25 tests out of 20,000 come back positive. That's why we see that people are constantly breaking records. Instead of having that unimplementable rule simply because we want to pick up whether somebody has taken something which is performance enhancing, we say if your hematicrit is over 50, you're out, if it's under, you're in. And that's much more easily implementable. We will still need out of seasons testing, we will still need in-competition testing, but it would mean that people can take substances which are safe. Now, I agree with Angela.

Ultimately, we should put the athletes first and ask them. Now, if they don't want to take safe performance enhancements, then so be it. But they have decided to take caffeine, and caffeine is in many ways more dangerous than the substances which they're currently taking, at least in the doses that they are. So we do need limits, but we can change. time limits. So, Angel, what do you think of this proposal? In effect, what Julian's saying here is, you know, let's stop banning substances writ large,

including those that are performance enhancing. Let's instead come up with a, I guess, a safe list of these performance enhancing drugs are not going to cause, you know, short-term, long-term, you know, enduring kind of harm to athletes. Let them use them. In a sense, level the playing field because we already know large portions of, of them are doping, are using these drugs in ways that are enhancing their performance? So I think the proposal that Julian mentioned here about monitoring something like

hypocrite levels is a good one. And it in fact was done by UCI, the International Cycling Federation. After deaths of their riders, because of the viscosity of the blood, they tested for immigrant levels and just said, that's too high, you're not riding today. So they did follow a reduction of harm theory and it worked for them. But what happened is after the famous 1998 Tour de France when the Festina doping scandal broke, and the civil authorities, the French civil authorities stepped in and charged people for the first time. Festina, the world's number one team is out of the Tour de France.

After more than a weaker speculation and the arrest of the team's management, the riders themselves were last night sensationally thrown out as well. It used to be only sport authorities dealt with doping issues before that. But now we have civil authorities stepping into sport and saying, you guys have gone sideways and we're not letting you do it. It's where the external community has come in and said, this has gone too far, folks. We're stopping this. And unfortunately, UCI was in the process of practicing what Julian described there as a reduction of harm with testing for hypocrite levels before the writers went out to make sure they did not compete. with too high level, but they became the whipping boy of WADA after this scandal.

And so unfortunately, that idea got lost, Julian, at WADA. We have to deal with the politics, too, right? So that's the other reality. So the USA was not going to sign on to the WADA code unless marijuana was on the ban list because the U.S. drugs are, Barry McCaffrey, wanted to deal with recreational drugs, too, which was part of his mandate. So to get him to sign on, they had to put marijuana on as well. Further, with caffeine, what happened, the South American representatives had an abuse problem

with it in their sports. They asked to have it put on the WADA list because they didn't have the money to run an educational campaign to deal with this abuse. So there is a real reality of the political mix and that we can have this great debate of some of these great ideas and say they are great for us to. then get that through internationally, dealing with all these countries and all their political agendas, wow, it's a real challenge. I think what sport has got caught up with is the prosecution of ideology and agendas.

So the US, you know, who persecuted Lance Armstrong, despite every other writer just about in the Peloton at that time doing exactly the same thing, has a maniacal obsession with eradicating all forms of recreational drugs. And this is a part of that program. Now, a much more mature approach is a harm reduction strategy. And I think that we shouldn't be signing up to what is essentially a US war on drugs, which has failed in recreational drugs and is failing in sport. And we need to think independently of the particular problems of that country.

So people have this image of doping that these are, heroin junkies injecting, you know, mind-destroying substances that are ruining their lives. But if somebody describes, you know, a natural substance like caffeine, like coffee, that's taken orally, not by injection, people are much more comfortable. And that's because we have this bias, and we have an image of the drug addict that infects sport. But that's not what's happening. Now, we're not doing doping like the East Germans did in the 70s and 80s. This is highly controlled, scientific,

within physiological limits that doesn't harm the athletes' health. Two of the France riders, the biggest dopers in sport, have half the mortality of the ordinary population. The risks of death from all causes are lower, except for traumatic injury, which they sustain having bike crashes.

But doping is within limits, just like everything within limits, can be safe. and we should put the responsibility in the hands of the people who are supervising the athletes and not holding the athletes responsible with strict liability, which is another problem for the athlete. I agree with that, Julian, strict liability is, from my perspective, morally unfair to the athletes. The strict liability, Ridyard, is that if it's in your body, you're responsible for it. It doesn't matter how it got there.

It doesn't matter what your education was. you know, this list has got up to 600 substances. To be aware of all the possibilities in which you might test positive and be responsible, you can hardly let anything pass between your lips. Hi, Rudyard Griffith here, your host and moderator. I have a favor to ask you, please consider becoming a monk member. Membership is free and you get access to a series of great benefits, including a 10-plus-year library of some of our best debates, dialogues, and podcasts.

You also get a free monthly newsletter featuring the debates that we're watching around the world. And you get a specially curated Friday weekly monk members only podcast that focuses on the big international events and trends shaping our world. All of that, again, free at www.munkdebates.com. I hope you'll consider joining and becoming part of our community. Now, back to our program. Angela, you though are drawing some lines here, though. For instance, if I understood your opening statement and your rebuttal, you think there are some performance enhancing techniques,

most notably gene therapy, that you would want to be a lot more cautious about than I think what I'm hearing from Julian, which is, you know, if you can prove, I guess, to the extent that science can determine now that the gene therapy is not causing. you know, a permanent or long-term harm use it. You're not in favor of that approach. Why? No, as an athlete, I'm not because I think sport is about the struggle, about the egg on, about testing my

limits. And some of this gene toping stuff, Rudyard, would blow your socks off. I mean, Google Swartonager mouse or rat Lee Sweeney's work at Penn State. They basically took a completely untrained rat, the equivalent of an 80-year-old in human terms. And the increase in the muscle mass was so much so that the skeletal structure and membranes couldn't hold the muscle without training, no training. And you look up marathon mouse. Marathon mouse, they took field mice that run all the time and they put them on treadmills. Some ethics committees wouldn't pass this. Our animal ethics wouldn't pass this. They put them on treadmills and they shocked them as they got tired and fell off to keep them running. Marathon mouse after the gene transfer technology treatment ran for two hours

after all the field mice fell off the treadmill even by being shocked almost to death. Two hours untrained, Rudyard. Untrained. That's the point. So for me, there are limits. And I think that Really, for me, I cherish. I don't cherish what sports is about. So, Julian, yeah, I want to hear you answer that because I think this is really getting to what a lot of listeners are wondering here, which is, you know, at what point is the very thing that draws them to sport loss, that idea of the struggle, of an individual testing, their innate skill, their innate abilities against other people. And if you're going to go down this road of gene enhancement, I mean, what are you testing at that point?

Who has the most advanced gene research labs and therapies and treatments? That sounds like an Olympics or a sport of technology, not an Olympics in a sport of human excellence. Yeah, look, so this problem exists. Genes are not anything special. genes produce proteins and proteins enable the body to function. So you can give an athlete erythropoityin, or you can get them to train at altitude and they'll produce it naturally, or you can modify the EPO gene. And the level that you get to will depend on how much you give.

So you can do gene editing that will produce a hematic root of 50% or a hematic root of 90%. just as you can drive the red cell production with huge amounts of EPO to get to 90% or to 50%. So genes are no different from proteins. The only difference at the moment is the level of safety. So the question of where we draw the line is independent of whether it's genetic or non-genetic. And I agree there are lines that need to be drawn. Now, we already face this problem of what is the meaning of sport because athletes take substances. which I think undermine the spirit of sport.

They take local anaesthetics, they take narcotic analgesics, they take non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs. Now I think dealing with pain is a part of sport, yet soccer players are allowed to take these substances to continue to play sport. So there's a question of what we want from our sport. How much pain relief do we allow athletes to take during competition?

Pain relief is dangerous in competition. It exacerbates injury. So it's unsafe and I think against the spirit of sport, yet we allow it. So we face this question of where we want to draw the lines for particular sports. Another example is archery, shooting, other sports that require control of tremor. Beta blockers are substances which affect the heart and reduce anxiety and tremor. Professional musicians take beta blockers all the time to improve the quality of their performance. yet you might think that in archery and shooting that your ability to control a tremor

is something that is being tested by that sport. Now I think there's a good reason to make beta blockers illegal as they are in those sports because they're against the spirit of that particular sport. And beta blockers are safe, let me say. So this is a case where performance enhancement is safe, but we need to look at each sport from the athlete's perspective and from the expert's perspective to say, what are the excellences and what are the qualities that we want to be tested, that a particular

substance, whether it's genetic or not, undermines that. But whether something's genetic or not is irrelevant. Genes just produce proteins. So I would argue in favor of what Julian talks about with the regards to the spirit of sport. I'm one of the ones who was one of the co-architects of putting spirit of sport in the code. I came from the Canadian Center for Ethics and Sport. I had called it the joy of sport. They said that sound too much like the joy of cooking. That's not going to sell. We're calling it the spirit of sport.

And it's about those internal goods that Julian's talking about. And he is quite right. They're sports specific. They are the to the officiados of that sport. And so to take an example that's not in doping, but that we understand and know, when there's a technological innovation that destroys those internal values, the officiados and the lovers of the sport say,

whoa, wait a minute. So, for example, the U-Groove and golf, was banned by the PGA. The U-Groove was a technological advancement that made a compression of scores for the less skilled players. It allowed them to play better because of the club. So there was less diversity in the scores.

So the PGA banned that because they didn't want that for the values of their sport. So I think there is a parallel to what Julian is saying across the board with technological advancement. So it is tied to the internal values of sport which are about the spirit of sport.

So, Julian, we've seen over the last, I do literally the last couple of months, a whole series of world records fall in track. Largely people think it could be doping going on, but it seems to be a new technology, a carbon plate and spring in a new shoe design that Nike and others have brought out. So you're rightly saying,

look, let's not differentiate between, you know, genetic therapies versus non-genetic therapies. Well, you know, what about shoes? What about Oscar Prostores with his blades? I mean, where do you draw the line in terms of technology? Gene therapy's technology? The latest Nike spikes, track spikes, that's technology, too. Is there any limit that you would put on? Yes, so you're exactly right.

These interventions that are enhancing performance. And we face the same questions. I mean, in one way, this is a fantastic topic because we have ultimate freedom to make the rules. And my argument is that we should evolve the rules. Now, we saw this with the swimming suits that enabled people to swim faster and the swimming authorities decided to ban those.

That's very easily implementable. You can see whether somebody's wearing one. Whether we include it or not is just a question for whether we want to see people swimming slightly faster, Likewise with the shoes, it's very easy to decide whether we allow them or we don't allow them. And other reasons will be important, for example, the expense, access to other athletes, whether they're unsafe and aggravate injuries. Are you at all sympathetic, though, to let's say the 5,000-meter athlete who held the world record

for the last number of years who didn't have these Nike shoes with this new carbon plate technology in springs, and now someone's taken that record away from them, not on the basis that, I don't know, they had a higher V-O-2 max or greater endurance and running form, but simply because the person around today had access to this technology. Look, you've got to get real here. I don't have any sympathy with that individual because everything changes over time. More money is invested in training, better nutrition, more technologically enhanced. hands, training. Everything continues to evolve. You can't compare, you know, athletes directly from

10 years ago to today. And that's not to say they're not great athletes. And so this idea that, you know, by eliminating one thing we're creating a Levinville, it's just fantasy. So, you know, we are constantly evolving. And the question is, how do we evolve? What do we allow in there? And these technological advancements are just bundled into vast numbers of enhancements that we can't really see and we're not really aware of. So I think we should decide on other factors than this very crude idea of historical comparisons. It's just too difficult to make. I agree with that. But I also think to draw it back to the doping issue at hand, there are other harms and risks that the athletes face because of the system and the testing system.

The other thing that happened with Russia, which is absolutely extraordinary, is Wada had to go from relying on primarily analytic lab expertise to a covert espionage intelligence gathering to catch a level of national systemic doping like the former East Germany. It's not a rogue athlete like Lance Armstrong. This is FSB supported. So the shift of this impact is profound. and the athletes need protection on that side, as the whistleblowers have identified. Well, this has been a fascinating discussion, our resolution in which we've been debating today, be it resolved, the time has come to embrace a high-tech gene-enhanced, drug-boasted Olympics of sport. We're going to move to closing statements now.

Angela, you're up first, another couple minutes on the clock to wrap up this debate. What are the key points that you want to leave our listeners with? and you obviously have been arguing against our motion today. I think that obviously that just open this up to a kind of open drug using libertarianism is not good for sport and it's not good for people for the athletes. I do think, though, we do need to revisit the band list of substances, as we've discussed. There's a whole lot of things on there that probably shouldn't be on there and a waste of time and money. but in that process of reviewing that list and what we keep,

and I would say the majority we wouldn't keep, but the significant things we would keep, would depend on the athletes really being involved with this. I would argue that they are the ones that take the risk. They are the ones that should decide what is on the list. And then secondly, in this whole question of opening this whole thing up with genetic design, sport has been designed by people for people.

To then design people for sport, for doing a sport, for me, is a kind of perversion and a loss of the spirit of sport. Thank you, Angela. Julian, we're going to give you the last word in our debate today. You've been arguing in favor of the motion, be it resolved. The time has come to embrace a high-tech gene-enhanced,

drug-boasted Olympics of sport. Wrap up this debate for us. Well, we already have a, drug-boasted sport and Olympics. But I think I agree with Angela that we need to place the athlete at the centre, that we need to better protect athlete health and livelihood and well-being. And I believe that if athletes understood the proposal, that we could allow substances which are safe for their health

and doping practices that are within physiological limits and protect their health and that are consistent with the spirit of that sport, that those practices should be allowed to enable the honest athletes to keep up with those who are currently cheating. We do need libert's, and I agree with Angela that the water list is vastly too long, and we can't allow a laissez-faire or completely libertarian system. But everything evolves, and sport is not just about designing an athlete or seeing who's naturally the most gifted.

It's about a co-production between the athlete, the trainer, the training regime, the athlete's mind, the athlete's physiology, and allowing some modifications of physiology occurs when athletes supplement glucose or water. And I think we can use our knowledge of science to allow sport to evolve in a way that's more safe for athletes and also fairer. Thank you, Julian. And thank you, Angela, for a terrific debate. I've learned so much over this last 45 minutes. Together, you've approached this debate, bringing your expertise, your knowledge, your insights to all of us, to our benefits. So on behalf of the Monk Debates community, thank you so much for being part of today's conversation. It's a pleasure. Thank you for the invitation.

My pleasure. Well, that wraps up today's debate. I want to thank our participants, Julian and Angela. They certainly gave up. us a lot to think about. We love your feedback and reactions to what you've just heard on this podcast. Send us an email to podcast at monkdebates.com. That's MUNK Debateswithan s.com. Our members-only podcast, which we released every Friday, is yours to listen free anytime as a perk of our complimentary basic membership. You can access that membership at www.munkdebates.com forward slash membership. The Monk Debates podcast is that special place for civil and substantive debate on the big issues

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