Sports For Fans; Sports and Art For Athletes?

If Usedcarsalesman was a professional athlete he'd take every drug in the book to insure his competitive advantage. He'd use Human Growth Hormone and Steroids and even Insulin to gain muscle mass, he'd pop Amphetamines to improve reaction time, he'd dose Ritalin and Modafinil to improve intelligence and decision-making and he'd take an assortment of foreign drugs that would complement the aforementioned "hyper-pharmaceutical" cocktail. 

Although, he would have a vague idea that these drugs could be harmful to his long-term health, he would also know that pro-sports careers are inevitably short in duration, so use of these drugs wouldn't be in his system forever. He'd know that he was "drugging" to preserve his livelihood, advance his career and help his team. He'd sleep ok at night and so would, he suspects, most professional athletes.

Though Usedcarsalesman doesn't know too many professional athletes personally, he speculates that as athletes advance through the high school and college ranks of their respective sports, they see that certain things are "done" to improve athletic performance. 

Coaches may also make certain indirect demands: "Jim, the guy I need as a defensive-end in four weeks weighs 240lbs." Jim, the defensive-end, currently weighing in at 210lbs, gets the picture about what he needs to do. So, certain impressions may be made on athletes that stimulate their need to utilize performance drugs.

Of course the various Professional Sports Leagues, the Olympic Committee, The Tour De France all host what many speculate may amount to a pre-contest charade -- the side-stepping of various "legitimate drug tests" by one means or another in order for professional athletes to be around for the game.

Usedcarsalesman recalls that Andy Warhol once said that "Art is whatever you can get away with." It would seem that if the speculators are correct, Pro athletes may have to "get away with" quite a bit to stay at the top of their respective games. 

Thus, Usedcarsalesman might reasonably draw a conclusion -- if the aforementioned speculations have any merit -- that pro "Sports" as the fan sees them are just athletic contests with a winner, a loser.  

But from the Athlete's perspective, pro sports may be more a hybrid of Sport and Art.   You have the athletic contest, winners and losers of course.  But then you may also have an environment in which Warhol's definition of "Art" may come in to play:   pro athletes may -- some suspect -- have to "get away with" quite a bit pharmaceutical-wise to stay competitive within their respective field of endeavor.

So is this theoretical Sports and Art dynamic wrong? Shouldn't the public demand an end to the use of performance enhancing drugs? 

Usedcarsalesman doesn't know, really. He thinks that the public seems to grudgingly accept that when they are "paying" for seats at a sports arena, the people they will be watching are often pharmaceutical augmented in some fashion. 

He thinks where the public starts to raise questions is when an individual player's performance transcends the competition so completely (certain baseball players come to mind). Or, if say all NFL players from the 1970's era die of heart failure when they hit 55 years of age due to Cardiovascular trauma brought on by performance drug use. Those issues might cause the public to look at professional athletics and potential performance drug use more critically. 

Regardless, Pro sports does seem a reflection of the demands of society and of the athletic competition itself.  Those demands may require that the best athletes be artists of sorts also.