{"id":338,"date":"2013-08-12T18:27:54","date_gmt":"2013-08-12T17:27:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/helpingthebesttogetbetter.com\/?p=338"},"modified":"2013-08-12T18:27:54","modified_gmt":"2013-08-12T17:27:54","slug":"watching-the-world-championships-in-athletics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/helpingthebesttogetbetter.com\/?p=338","title":{"rendered":"Watching the World Championships in Athletics."},"content":{"rendered":"

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One of the good things of getting older is that you have more to remember and to look back to. No, not that things were better in the past, on \u00a0the contrary, most things were worse, much worse. But I remember watching the world championship in athletics and the Olympics in the past. I observed and listened to my friends and family who were watching the World Championships. They watched, admired, awed; they were fans, and so were most people. But now watching TV, Internet or newspaper, the only thing that is interesting is: who is taking doping and when will he\/she be caught. Every good performance is considered doubtful or under scrutiny. \u00a0The same people who watched and enjoyed the World Championships before now speculate, gossip, assume, pretend to know, they have become cynical. The same thing is happening in cycling and baseball right now. Has the sport lost its innocence? No, it was never innocent to start with! If you believe that performances in former days were delivered without the use of forbidden substances, you are naive or you simply lack adequate\u00a0 knowledge about this subject. \u00a0Performance-enhancing substances have been taken by athletes since the classic Greek Olympics, it\u2019s a phenomenon that has always been there and has been universal.<\/p>\n

And I think the only way to eradicate this issue completely, is to ban competitive sports altogether! In the future it will show that the only other option will be to lift the ban on the use of performance enhancing agents for elite athletes. I am not talking about ruthless coaches who give steroids to 13 year old girls telling them it\u2019s vitamins; they should be imprisoned for the longest time.<\/p>\n

The current policy of more testing, harsher punishments and more intrusions into the private life of athletes, who have to give up their basic human right to do sports, is going nowhere as we finally start to find out.\u00a0 It only services the agenda of sports politicians, the media because enlarging scandals in\u00a0 sports means big stories and big money and the industry that anti-doping has become. Where in most countries the support of the elite athletes is suffering from the economic recession, more and more (taxpayer\u2019s) money is going to be wasted in testing athletes, to the extent that testing an athlete on a yearly base now costs more than his\/her financial support for training, coach, travel, training camps, equipment medical support, etc. at least in Holland.<\/p>\n

Of course I don\u2019t make many friends saying this, but then, I have so many friends\u00a0 \ud83d\ude09 \u00a0I can afford to lose the few who don\u2019t comprehend what I am trying to say.<\/p>\n

This is not my opinion only, but it is based on solid scientific evidence. An example: in the last century it suited some people well to ban alcohol from daily life. Alcohol was a moral evil and the people should be protected against themselves by imposing a ban on the production, sale and transportation of alcohol. The exposure to alcohol of the people lead to alcoholism, diseases related to that, aggression, unemployment. So if you ban alcohol, these social problems should be eradicated. This was one of the most famous large-scale social experements ever performed, the \u2018Nobel Experiment\u2019 as it was called.<\/p>\n

Does this sound logical and reasonable? Yes, it did. This was the Prohibition in the USA, lasting from 1920-1932. Too bad that reality turned out to be completely different. Lots of data have been collected during that time that prove the following:<\/p>\n