I see that the official international rules regarding who can and can’t compete continue to get more ridiculous. First, there was the ruling that Oscar Pistorius could run on prosthetic legs because no one could prove that he had any advantage. This despite the fact that there was evidence that he had an advantage-and then where do you draw the line against any mechanical help? Now they propose to test female athletes and not allow them to compete if they have “too much” testosterone, even if they come by it naturally and are not taking pharmaceutical help. Women, I suppose, must be sufficiently feminine in order to compete.
You can’t get around the fact that all elite athletes are freaks of nature in some way. They all have natural advantages that most of us will never have, no matter how hard we work at it. Once you start down the road of deciding to allow mechanical assistance if it only brings you up to elite level, or disallow natural biological characteristics that give you greater advantage, you might as well make every event a “handicap,” like in horse racing, and make really good athletes carry bags of sand to even out the competition. (Or let me take enough steroids or testosterone to bring me up the the natural level that elite athletes have.)
Since before the original olympics, humans have watched athletic competitions because athletes are blessed by the gods, they are freaks of nature. We are well on the way to giving grades for effort, awarding the medals not to the best but those who try the hardest.