Olympic Engineering
By BRUCE STERLING
Published: September 16, 2000
Olympic athletes have been role models since the days of the ancient
Greeks,
representing the best that is physically achievable. Comely, brave young
men, the champions of their city-states, would hurl their javelins down a
playing field, instead of at one another. The winners were crowned with
laurel and carried on the shoulders of an adoring populace, and all was as
it should be.
But there's a wrinkle in the scheme now, and it gets bigger every time the
Olympic Games roll around. We used to pluck athletes out of the fields of
Arcadia, just as dewy and fresh as natural apples, but this is an era when
our apples may be genetically modified.
We're achieving levels of performance far beyond those of the ancient
Greeks
and rather beyond the merely human. Growth hormone and blood-doping
scandals
have broken out repeatedly, but this is just the thin edge of the
biomedical
wedge.
If you want a human body to work to unhuman levels, you have to understand
it fully. You have to measure and record everything, from the protein
level
to the gross mechanics of bones and tendons. Then, once you fully grasp
the
science of s****ts medicine, you can re-engineer that body, not with mere
crude narcotics, but with the body's own software and hardware. Every four
years is a further measure of this progress.
Not that we'll want to line people's bones with titanium so that they
clank
like Robocop or look like the pop-culture symbols of the posthuman, from
Star Trek Borgs to the X-Men. There's no market pull for monsters. But men
and women everywhere have always wanted to look and act just like
athletes.
Or like supermodels. Or best of all, like a combo athlete/supermodel,
like,
say, Gabrielle Reece. The path to athletic beauty is the one we will
follow
forward to the more than human.
The masters of the Olympics are anxiously policing the easy stuff. They
properly see growth hormone as the international s****ts equivalent of
cheating on arms accords. But the body is subtle, the range of performance
is very wide, and there are many clever workarounds. Knowledge is power.
If
knowledge of the body explodes, then banning drugs is a mere finger in the
dike.
Suppose you need bigger biceps. You have your arms scanned after every
workout with a nuclear magnetic resonator, examining every working strand
of
muscle by computer. In this case, the athlete has done nothing illegal.
But
while his rival in Kenya trains the traditional way, building strength
with
push-ups, our cyber-paragon can tailor a program to his exact needs for
more-than-peak performance -- while obeying the letter of the Olympic law.
The two competitors look and weigh the same, they both test drug-free, but
the champ knows himself on a cellular level, while others still work by
pre-industrial intuition. We like to think that Rocky will win this one by
sheer guts and heart. That's s****ts mythology at its best.
The trend toward the future of the body manifests itself best now in
non-Olympic s****ts -- poorly policed, wondrous spectacles where we're
cutting to the chase because the refs are all in on the action.
TV wrestling, for example, features big, steam-snorting guys who emphasize
their sci-fi departure from the human norm with pancake makeup, klieg
lights
and tattoos. Modern female bodybuilders look like no women have ever
looked
in human history. Even genuinely tough, scary, ferocious women -- say, the
mothers and sisters of invading hordes -- would keen in alarm at the sight
of these women.
Yet we moderns don't find their strength offputting, because this is the
exact direction in which we ourselves long to go. Compare any contem****ary
model to the zaftig beach babes of the 1940's. The modern ones are very
lean
and strong, with backs ridged with muscle and legs fit to kick holes in
sheetrock.
This is the catwalk to the posthuman future. Olympic athletes are just
fighting our battles first, mocking it up in a cleansing social ritual. If
they try to slow down, an eager society will just take a route around
them.
They may remain honest to their oldest traditions -- but if they do, they
risk becoming sentimental antiques.
Bruce Sterling is author of ''Distraction'' and the forthcoming
''Zeitgeist.''
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