Olympic Committee Says "Bring On The Drugs"

Singapore, August 29, 2011 -- Lorene Konigsburg, press spokesperson for the International Olympic Committee, announced today a significant change in IOC policy regarding "doping", the use of performance-enhancing drugs by athletes. Beginning with the 2012 Summer Olympics in London, there will no longer be any restrictions on the use of such drugs.

The policy shift, inspired in part by the increasing difficulty in detecting incidents of doping, is intended to help restore equality and a sense of excitement and competition to the games.

"We essentially got fed up with the whole cat-and-mouse thing," says Konigsburg. "With new synthetic drugs being developed each week in national laboratories, it's become nearly impossible to sniff them all out. Many of the games have become nothing more than a test of who has the best chemistry set, rather than any kind of pure competition between athletes. We decided that the best way to level the playing field would be to simply remove all restrictions. Let them knock themselves out."

The IOC and WADA, the World Anti-Doping Agency, have been fighting a losing battle against performance enhancers almost since the early days of the East German women's bobsled teams, many of which were composed of semi-synthetic members weighing up to 240 kg, with 98% muscle mass and extensive five o'clock shadow. Over the years, the increasing sophistication of drug technology exceeded the pace of improvements in testing procedures, until it had become virtually impossible to successfully screen all athletes.

"Beijing 2008 was almost comical," said Maxine Yunus, assistant statistician at WADA. "Olympic records were broken in virtually every running, jumping, swimming and endurance event. The gold medal winner for the women's long jump, Julie Kearney, broke the previous Olympic record by nearly a meter. You don't get that kind of improvement through diet, exercise and better sneakers alone."

Kearney, while shattering the previous record, had in fact struggled to capture the gold, finishing only a few centimeters ahead of her closet rivals.

"It's absurd," continued Yunus. "The labs are churning out new variations on standard themes all the time, swapping a molecule here, snipping a bond there, and whammo, brand new drug. Our testing equipment won't flag it, because we don't know about it yet. Or even if we do catch it, it won't yet be on the list of proscribed medications, so there's no penalty until the next Olympics. But by then, of course, it's too late."

Konigsburg indicated that doping, while widespread, is by no means universal.

"But those poor un-juiced suckers have no shot. The division was pretty clear between the fields, drugged and not-drugged. In the 100 meter, the top five finishers came in at around 8.2 seconds. The other guys were still on their knees. It's not that hard to see who's doped to the gills."

The IOC also hopes that legalized doping will restore flagging international public and sponsor interest in the games.

"Let's face it, all the recent records were set using truckloads of pharmaceuticals," said Konigsburg. "Unmedicated humans will never come close. And who wants to look like a loser against the backdrop of history? We need the eyeballs. We need the sponsors. So bring on the drugs."

By Ion Zwitter, Avant News Editor