Joe Humphreys

It's more about how, I mean, what I'm trying to draw attention to more is how, in a sense, the technology will change our kind of ethical outlook over time in that, you know, as I say, these things were regarded as a kind of a cheat, to put it crudely, a few years ago.

Now it's kind of accepted even in athletics.

There's a sort of a, Sebastian Coe recently said,

the head of international athletics said, look, we can't turn back the clock on these technologies.

And it kind of points to, you know, a trend that's there in society, that large technologies are created and one can't put them back in the box.

So we just accept them as norms in society.

So again, I wouldn't be condemning kind of individual kind of runners.

I think there's a, you know, this is a lesson or this is kind of illustrative of a broader

issue around how technology creeps in and affects our kind of outlook.

Yeah, well, I think this is it because the Enhanced Games, it's hard to know what's necessarily wrong with that in one level.

Like people are taking drugs in this instance openly.

And they're using equipment that's banned, in particular, these speed suits in swimming pools are being permitted in the hands games, which aren't allowed in the Olympics.

So, you know, you can argue, well, what's the difference between cheating with a speed suit and wearing one of the carbon fibre shoes?

They're both technological enhancements that are designed to kind of give one athlete an advantage over another.

I think, to be honest with you, sport has become entangled, if you like.

If you think of the traditional idea we have of the Corinthian sport and ideal, the Olympian who would compete just for, you know, on a sort of a level playing field in an amateur era, that era is gone.

And I suppose a lot of the old values of sport have been eroded through professionalism.

What I would argue for, and I suppose this comes back, this is the bottom line, or at least a question, is there something within sport that is above just a commercial operation, a purely competitive operation?

And I guess there's a division between maybe the romantics in the sporting world and the hard-nosed professionals.

And you see that tension in all sports.