The entire Russian team? I guess Putin is really commited to this Soviet revanche thing.
Also, our best swimmer smokes weed and has gotten a DUI. A fair percentage of the elite swimmers have always smoked weed.
Maybe the Japanese could host an alternative like the old Pride fight days where everyone was roided out of their minds.
I have for some time advocated for a division between a "Clean" Olympics, and an "Open" Olympics, where anything goes. Records would be kept separately, and athletes would have to wait a year if they wanted to move from Open to Clean. The Clean games would be more anthropologically interesting, but the Open ones would be more fun to watch.
2 I believe a neighbor just a couple of years ahead of me in high school who lived a few houses down the street from where I grew up still holds some swim records for NY. Dude not only smoked a lot of pot but competed a time or two while tripping on mescaline. I think that was one of the record times too.
I endorse 4.
Furthermore, the Open Olympics would have valuable spinoff benefits for the rest of society. Just as Formula One has produced, for the rest of us, cars with computer-controlled fuel injection, lean-burn engines, computer-aided aerodynamic design and so on, the Open Olympics would lead to a leap forward in the fields of pharmaceuticals and human enhancement. The muscle-building drugs that push the Open 100m sprinters through the nine-second barrier could help maintain muscle mass in bedridden invalids or chemotherapy patients; the carbon-fibre bone replacements would lead to spinoffs for reconstructive orthopedic surgery; the improved synthetic haemoglobin would make heart surgery safer and easier.
Plus we need to be preparing the army of superhumans for when the robots rise up and try to overthrow us.
Many performance enhancing drugs are things with legitimate medical uses.
Alcohol is a performance enhancing drug with legitimate medical uses and that can be used as a fuel. Try that with cocaine or steroids.
This can also be the Kevin Durant thread, in case anyone is interested. These superteams feel like such cop outs.
I reckon you could probably use cocaine as a fuel. It's a fine organic powder, so it presumably burns fairly well, especially in its street form which is generally cut with something like powdered milk or dextrose, both of which burn extremely well. Robert Hooke made an internal combustion engine that burned gunpowder, and I'm sure you could build something very similar that burned cocaine.
Plus we need to be preparing the army of superhumans for when the robots rise up and try to overthrow us.
The Pentagon prefers to call it enhanced human operations.
10
"I guess he didn't have enough grit to be a Celtic." -- Tawmmy from Southie
10 - I don't really see this particular one working out or providing much if any improvement to an already great team. I mean obviously there are huge pluses but it's not clear that you're actually making it harder to defend them than it already was, just shifting the ways in which they're hard to defend. This may be 100% wishful thinking.
Wouldn't people just cheat in the Closed Olympics?
8 - Between most and all of them, right? There are people whose ability to perform is impaired, and something that increases their ability to perform would count as a treatment for that. (I assume there are ones that aren't used for that, but mainly because there are ways of doping that are way too cumbersome/complicated and also add so little that the benefit is really only helpful to world class athletes trying to shave milliseconds off of their performance times.
I think the problem with the open Olympics would be that you'd still need rules of some kind to keep people from pretty much just killing themselves*, and the second you have those we're back to the same situation only now the athletes' bodies are all jacked up on the allowed crazy drugs as well and probably a lot less stable.
*"These gunpowder-boots could really improve my 100 meter time!" The Olympic level athlete population isn't exactly one known for not making crazy sacrifices and/or taking ridiculous risks in order to gain a slight advantage in their attempt to win a small metal disk.
Speaking of superhuman abilities, kids eventually grow out of the stages where they scream defiantly about everything and then throw things on the floor and then hurt themselves stomping on or tripping over those things, right? I'm dying here.
I am so close to doing all the things in 17 right now, but it's true that strictly speaking I have not done them. Best I can offer is that frequency should go down over time. (Frequency and pitch.)
I WOULD LIKE TO ALSO! Instead I've locked myself in my room to chill out. I suspect their version is much more satisfying. Oh god, but what just fell down the stairs? A what not a who, so I don't have to unlock and check. But grr.
Parenting youngish kids in one's 30s has certain things in common with a second adolescence. The overwhelming cabin fever, the suddenly inescapable extended-family vacations, the compromise compromise compromise compromise.
The entire Russian team?
The woman who blew the whistle on them is being allowed to compete. Which seems fair enough.
20: The sudden obsession with the idea that everything will get better a few years in the future?
22: I tried out my self-encouragement line about how by the time I'm 40, they'll be 13, 12, and 7.5, which seems like a whole new ballgame, but she shot me down with assurances it will just be differently awful and I shouldn't expect to have a serious relationship or a personal life. That's looking more accurate by the day.
There are people whose ability to perform is impaired, and something that increases their ability to perform would count as a treatment for that.
For instance, old people and people who've used steroids in the past will have low testosterone levels. The UFC had, for a while, a widely abused therapeutic use exemption.
23: That seems unduly pessimistic. Seven-year-olds certainly take work but it seems to be work that is more consistent with parental downtime than for younger kids.
25 is what I thought. And comparing an ugly rainy 4th of July where we're off our schedule after weekends with emotional visits with Lee or birth family to a life that's tolerable on a daily basis really isn't fair. Her argument isn't that the 7-year-old will be tough, but that the older girls will be needy and out of control as teens. But perhaps they can get that out of their systems today!
(They're wonderful, amazing, age-appropriately obnoxious children. I'm just being extra petulant because we got past the anniversary of the breakup and I can't believe how useless Lee still is and how it's damaging them. But they've done amazingly well and it was totally the right choice for them as well as me. Just blech.)
4: a "Clean" Olympics, and an "Open" Olympics, where anything goes.
An opportunity to post a thing I was thinking of sending to ogged some time back for a guest post given hos interest in sports doing. What Powerlifting Tells Us About The Effects Of PEDs. Compars the results of three different powerlifting competitions that range from no testing to "strict testing" as well as world record lifts in tested versus untested competitions.
In total, the lifters at Raw Unity put up about 17.44 percent more weight than the lifters at the USAPL competition and 3.46 percent more than those at the IPF meet.
Link in 28 indicates that one-year waiting period proposed in comment 4 (for moving from the open olympics to the clean olympics) is much too short. Might need to be five years. Or perhaps even a lifetime prohibition.
I think it probably would need to be no going back.
Speaking of going, did you ever do the Rachel Carson Challenge?
Somebody who just finished this year asked me to try with his group next year. He didn't seem injured.
On my browser the picture says, "The media could not be played." That seems unlikely.
the suddenly inescapable extended-family vacations
So much this. Trapped in what should be an amazing family vacation with several people who quite clearly do not like me at all. Joining the screaming 3-year-old is incredibly appealing. Can't wait to be jammed on a crowded plane with strangers again. Never again.
Sad emoji to 35. That sucks.
FWIW, Thorn, 12 has been less stressful than 10 was; the transition from kid friendships to adolescent ones hit hard, but now her emotional life has stabilized, and we get less blowback. We expect future drama as well, but for the moment she's a helpful household member. Oh, and this isn't just her: she had 4-5 friends over for a bday slumber party, and dinner with them all was actually fun and charming. No guarantees, but don't dread that age until you get there.
7.5 is almost entirely great, hands off and semi-self-sufficient. So yeah, it should get better.
I'm still willing to believe better will happen! And I don't really have an alternative to doing what I'm doing, so it doesn't matter. I think they'll get better as they get older. I hope I will too.
Of course you will, like a fine wine. Just make sure you stay cool and dark.
Han Solo got better as he got older, then he got stabbed by his son. You have girls, but maybe don't raise them Jedi anyway.
11: talking of burning cocaine, I was once present at the closing-down of a biggish pharmaceutical research site and my colleague was the person with responsibility for the cocaine used in PK/PD studies (I think - anyway the point is that they had quite a lot of very pure charles on the premises). The guy sent from the Home Office to oversee its disposal presumably didn't have a background in chemistry, as he repeatedly insisted that it should be "destroyed by dissolving it in methanol". My colleague eventually won the ensuing argument and it was tossed in the furnace. I've always felt that he missed an opportunity, since he was being made redundant along with 500 other highly specialised people, and a few thousand pounds would probably have been quite helpful at the time.
"Let's destroy this gin by mixing it with tonic and adding a lime wedge."