A lot of them won’t pass, of course, and will be sent home because of the growth hormone, radioactive spider venom or Y chromosomes found in their bloodstream.
But we can rest assured that the remaining athletes are completely free of illegal substances, right? Because bad guys always get caught, cheaters never win, and all the kittens in the whole wide world go to bed each night with full tummies.
The whole concept of doping is a weird one. Taking a young girl with athletic promise, severing her from any chance of a normal childhood, shipping her off to another country, training her day and night, then subjecting her to the sort of pressure that would crush a seafloor crab into mucus and shards — that’s normal.
Topping off with a little more testosterone than your genome saw fit to give you — that’s abhorrent.
However, I’m not going to suggest that we just let people dope all they want, mostly because a couple hundred comedians have already trod that one into the tarmac. Instead, I have a plan to restore the Olympics to what they originally were: a chance for Greeks to run around naked. Wait, no, I’m sure the Greeks can handle that one themselves.
Instead, let’s turn the Olympics into a true test — not of individuals, but of countries.
To begin with, Olympic athletes all start out with a completely unfair advantage over those of us who will never snatch, clean or jerk at a world-class level: genetics. Just like supermodels need to be born with the genetic code for high cheekbones and UNIX sysadmins need to be born with the genetic code for answering perfectly reasonable questions in a snotty tone of voice, an Olympic back-stroker must be born of ancestors who had to escape waterborne predators while keeping an eye out for flying predators.
Why not level the genetic playing field?
Here’s the plan: We use genetic engineering to create a human being who is genetically average in every way, clone him — or her, we can flip a coin — and issue one Average Athlete Baby to each country to raise as they choose. Then, 18 years later, every country brings their Average Athlete Adult to whichever world-class city hasn’t suffered enough, and all the AAAs compete. In every event. They all must run a sprint, and a marathon, and shoot arrows and wrestle each other and do whatever “dressage” is. (I don’t know, but it sounds even kinkier than clone wrestling.)
The great thing about this setup is that it makes it almost impossible to cheat with drugs. There will only be 200-umptyump athletes, so we can easily test and monitor each one of them. And we’ll have their genome on file, so it should be simple enough to see who’s gone past what their double helix could pull off on its own.
This would be a true test of each country’s climate, culture and food sources. Who can train a better athlete, a country that puts ketchup on its fries or a country that prefers mayo? Will the stoic, reserved Swedes prevail over the slightly less stoic and reserved Norwegians? At long last, these and equally unimportant questions can be answered.
And at last we’ll know, not which country is more likely to produce genetic freaks or which country has a large enough leisure class to support professional beach volleyball, but which country can torture a baby into acts of startling physical prowess. And isn’t that what the Olympics really stand for?
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Born helpless, naked and unable to provide for himself, Lore Sjöberg overcame these handicaps to become largely self-sufficient but, surprisingly often, still naked.