ABSTRACT
From the steroid scandals of major league baseball to analysis of Oscar Pistorius’s cheetahs to the sex-verification test of Caster Semenya, questions today about what constitutes fairness in sports are wide-ranging and varied. Successful short-track speed skaters possess explosive strength, finely honed technique, and the courage to face the possibility of serious injury from razor-sharp blades. When it comes to performance-enhancing drugs, gene doping, and the panoply of manipulations banned widely in sports, the challenge is less about fairness than about meaning. If the rules ban performance-enhancing drugs, then using those drugs to gain an advantage over athletes who refuse to cheat is unfair. Any serious ethical commentary on the uses of performance-enhancing technology in sports must confront two compelling realities. First, sports science has provided a great deal of information about how to optimize training and performance. The second reality is the ineluctably comparative nature of sports.
