Even though the Lance Armstrong doping scandal is far beyond us, the fear still exists that technology will be used solely for the purpose of giving athletes unfair advantages. However, the fact of the matter is that today’s athletes, and sports in general, have been made better in every way imaginable by today’s technology, so why shouldn’t athletes of the future have the same chance for improvement? Incidents like that of Lance Armstrong do not outweigh all the benefits that come from allowing new technologies into sports.
As a former athlete who underwent three surgeries that would’ve been career ending two decades ago, I personally was the beneficiary of technology helping sports. Isiah Thomas’ Hall-of-Fame career with the Detroit Pistons was up ended by an Achilles’ tendon tear in 1994. Had the current surgical procedures been around back then, his career would’ve likely received a much-needed rejuvenation.
Even if one were to make the argument that we played different sports on different levels, we could compare two athletes who don’t have such differences.
Enter Gales Sayers and Thomas Davis. Sayers of the Chicago Bears is another legend that was chopped down in his prime by an injury that isn’t a career death sentence today. He suffered from a couple of torn ACLs in ‘67 and ‘68. He scored 22 touchdowns in his rookie season and scored a then-league-record six touchdowns in one game. He was on pace to obliterate every rushing record in the book. Unfortunately, his injuries at that time ended up being his undoing.
Fast forward to today and Panthers’ outside linebacker Thomas Davis. Davis has made a pro bowl after three ACL tears. Before he had the injuries, he was a first-round draft pick and first-team All-SEC his senior year at the University of Georgia, but he was no first-ballot, hall-of-fame talent. Any fans of the Panthers should do nothing but sing praises of how different surgical techniques make Thomas Davis’ entire pro career possible. No one can make the ludicrous argument that players back then are more physically gifted than their modern day counterparts. So players with more injuries, playing against better competition has shined yet some still fear technology in sports.
If you want to look at the games themselves and the pleasure viewers get while watching, both of those things have been made exponentially better by technologies that have been very recently introduced. For example, the improvements of cameras have made instant replay possibly at the highest level in almost every sport. The NHL, NFL, NBA and MLB have all incorporated instant replay in order to review scoring plays.
We all know that referees are human, meaning they get calls wrong from time to time. How many times has instant replay shown whether or not a goal was really a goal? How many times has instant replay shown that a shot did not get off in time? Without it we’d be stuck in the era where refs’ biases and inability to properly judge a bang-bang play decide the outcome of a game.
Doping and other enhancements are not a major problem in sports. Let the tin foil hat conspiracy theorists tell it and every high school athlete will be doping with tiger blood by 2020; or every quarterback will have a bionic arm like Cyborg. However, that is not the reality. Let athletes of the future benefit from technology the same way as they always have.
A version of this article appeared in print on November 17, 2016 on page 14 with the headline: Science & tech’s effect on sports
