Eccentric jackass Mark Cuban spoke to students at the University of Pittsburgh on Tuesday. The appearance was part of the Pitt Program Council speakers series. Cuban attended Pitt and also hails from the Keystone State.
Cuban was introduced by Pitt men’s basketball coach Jamie Dixon and also answered students’ questions. The Mav’s owner presented his most recent “I’m smarter than everybody” logic when speaking about performance enhancing drugs saying:
“We do performance-enhancing things all the time, just not steroids. If you administer them properly and fairly and set the rules strictly, as long as in doing so we recognize there are no negative long-term health-impact issues. Sometimes, you just put blinders on because it came from underground. Rather than saying, ‘what’s the best way to do this and is there a positive out of it?’ we just dismiss it.”
So, if Barry Bonds lives past 60, Victor Conte is a hero. This is clearly flawed logic. Cuban later admitted that he’s “not an expert in the subject.” There’s another subject that Cuban knows very little about: being an athlete.
The main issue with Cuban’s stance is that he takes a capitalist approach to the human body. Sure, it might be minimally advantageous to take experimental drugs that won’t kill you. But it’s ridiculous to pretend that performance-enhancing drugs could be administered fairly. What if white people (or any other segment of society) benefit more from future PEDs? What if you had to start taking them when you’re 13 to get the maximum effect? What if they don’t hurt you at all… but they cost an exorbitant amount of money?
This is simply an issue of ethics in competition. The idea of creating rules to “fairly” regular performance-enhancing drugs is a complete contradiction. If you create the maximum level of fairness, you’re back to square one anyway. Last time I checked, having guys run sub 4.0 40s was not key to the advancement or survival of the human race. Maybe I really dislike Mark Cuban… or maybe I’m just afraid that the All Drug Olympics will become a reality.
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