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Tommaso Ropelato
From ‘Robot Wars’ to super-athletes: public perception as a criterion to set the limits for
performance-enhancing modification
Not many years ago ‘Robot Wars’, a TV show that featured robot combat
competitions, showed for the first time a technological and steely face of combat sports: no
gloves and muscles but hammers, rotating blades, spurs, and flamethrowers. Only a few years
later, the speculation on the sporting competition of the future resumed embodied characters
but in a form that still tends towards the ‘post-human’: the so-called ‘Enhanced Games’,
organised by ‘The Enhanced Movement’ are already a ‘faster, higher, stronger’ alternative to
the Olympic Games. What ‘Robot Wars’ and these super athletes have in common is the
character of the design of those specifications that make them competitively superior to their
opponents.
Even if using genetic modification for the purpose of enhancing performance in sports
is not currently allowed by the Code of the World Anti-Doping Association that includes in
the ‘prohibited methods’ gene editing, gene silencing, gene transfer technologies, and the use
of normal or genetically modified cells as forms of ‘gene-doping’, the forthcoming possibility
of genetic modification of human embryos will most certainly create a new look for athletes
in the future. Does the objection to the use of performance-enhancing modification of athletes
as a form of ‘dehumanisation’ of the performance itself make sense when we think of
genetically modified super-athletes? Does the protection of natural talent, which equates with
ensuring a level playing field, set an agenda of moral education to shape public attitudes
towards sportsmanship?
To address these questions, in this paper I plan to offer some reflections based on
which circumstances would give rise to suspicion and disfavour in the viewing public,
suggesting public perception as an important criterion for the revision of sport’s categories
such the “extraordinary performances” but also “naturalness and normalcy”.
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Personal Details
Tommaso Ropelato,
PhD student at DREST - Italian Doctoral School of Religious Studies, University of Turin