The sports that still experience sporadic bursts of record-breaking are those that can boast improvements in fields and equipment, or because of new entrants into the competition. Running tracks aren't covered with crushed cinders anymore. Swimming pools have wave suppressors. Bicycles are lighter and better balanced.

This idea extends to human beings and performance enhancement. We will be debating the merits of the use of enhancers and drugs for the next few generations at least.

But how far could we responsibly go in permitting the use of previously banned substances? Should we allow athletes to take the most demonised of all performance enhancing drugs - anabolic steroids?

He gives a careful reply. “The risks of anabolic steroids - although real - may in some cases have been overstated and in any case have to be put in the context of various aggressive forms of training and the risks we allow people to entertain every day of their lives.” When I raise the subject again, however, he is more forthright. “I would prefer my child take anabolic steroids and growth hormone than play rugby,” he says. “Growth hormone is safer than rugby. At least I don’t know of any cases of quadriplegia caused by growth hormone.”

That's from a contrarian take on sports doping. RTWT

You have to read the whole thing, but what struck me most about it is how irresponsible the World Anti-Doping Agency chief Richard Pound has become. It's obvious the tests aren't perfect. And there's no way Lance can be sanctioned over this accusation. What's more, there's no way for Lance to prove a negative -- so it should remain nothing more than an accusation advanced by a paper with a history of negative attacks on Lance.

If a newspaper wants to run with the accusation, that's fine, I suppose. But why is Pound insisting on injecting himself into this controvery when nothing conclusive can come of it? It seriously undermines the perception that any anti-doping chief needs to cultivate, that of a dispassionate arbiter. Time and time again Pound has come across half-cocked, as a zealot. With his careless remarks, he shifts the burden of proof onto the athlete, something no anti-doping chief should ever do. How can any athlete have any confidence that Pound will not believe them innocent until proven guilty? With his imprudent table-thumping lately, he's undermined his and his agency's moral and scientific authority. It's time for him to go.

A small plaque lies before a tree planted in Korey Stringer's memory at Minnesota Vikings training camp. "In Memory of Big K," it reads, honoring the beloved right tackle who died four years ago from heatstroke. There was no way for trainers to monitor players' core temperatures on that sweltering July day when Stringer collapsed, no definitive way to tell that his massive body was overheating beyond its threshold.

But now there is, in the form of a swallowed capsule that measures core body temperature as it passes through the digestive system, and the Vikings -- along with a few other NFL teams -- are using it.

Cool.

I disagree with most of what Art Caplan has to say here

It is easy to condemn steroid use. The drugs, while effective, are dangerous. But what if they were not? How are professional and amateur sports going to deal with the impending explosion in performance-enhancing drugs and bioengineering tricks that can boost performance with little or no risk for the user?

For example, at my school, the University of Pennsylvania, physiologist Lee Sweeney is hard at work trying to find ways to tweak genes to make muscles grow bigger and more dense. This research holds out real hope for those with muscular dystrophy and other debilitating muscle diseases.

But the gene transfer technology he is working on will also allow normal muscles to be made bigger and stronger. Figuring out who may or may not have engaged in "gene-doping" will prove next to impossible. And it is likely that there will be little risk associated with genetically altering muscle cells.

Similarly, scientists around the world are busy making pills that enhance our performance a bit by letting us sleep better, fight fatigue, slow the loss of memory, speed up learning, recover more quickly from hard exertion and calm anxieties. Some of us already are benefiting from drugs like these when we use Ambien, Provigil, Ritalin, Prozac or Effexor.

So what are we going to say when the archer, the chess master, the competitive marksman, the Nascar driver or the women's professional golfer says, "If I take these same drugs I just might get enough of an edge to move ahead of my competition"?

One problem with this is Caplan skips over any serious consideration of the relative dangers of steroids, which are not what are commonly believed. This is one reason so many athletes have been taking them. Until we have a more honest assessment of the relative risks involved, our public debate over this will be totally incoherent.

How is an athlete's performance aided by insulin, a substance more commonly used by diabetics to control their blood sugar?

Chiefly by boosting the body's supply of glycogen, a crucial muscle fuel. As diabetics know well, insulin, which is produced naturally by the pancreas, is a hormone that regulates blood-sugar levels by enabling the breakdown of glucose. The hormone stimulates this process (called glycolysis) by transporting glucose into muscle cells, where it is metabolized. If the muscles are flooded with too much glucose at once, however, they store the excess in the form of glycogen, a complex carbohydrate that provides energy to muscles during physical exertion. The more glycogen an athlete possesses, the longer she can keep her muscles pumping.

Like many elite athletes, she agonized over which pills and powders she could ingest without triggering a positive doping test.

Experts say government regulation of nutraceuticals -- vitamins, herbal remedies, dietary supplements and other natural health products -- is slowly improving but remains woefully inadequate for the needs of athletes.

That's why some members of the sporting community are hoping manufacturers will regulate themselves, to guarantee the purity and efficacy of their products.

Perhaps the first example of such self-regulation in Canada was unveiled at a news conference in Winnipeg yesterday, as the makers of Cold-fX announced a study showing their pills full of bitter-tasting ginseng extract don't contain any banned substances.

It was an unusual study in an industry notorious for shoddy science. Grant Pierce, a sports researcher at the University of Manitoba, conducted clinical trials at arm's length from the company, CV Technologies Inc. His team gave the cold remedy to 40 recreational athletes under controlled condition for a month and tested their urine according to International Olympic Committee rules.

The results, to be published in the August edition of the International Journal of Sport Nutrition and Exercise Metabolism, showed the athletes tested negative for about 200 banned substances.

Pierce said he wasn't paid anything by the company, which spent "hundreds of thousands of dollars" on the project. He was also free to report his results if they were unfavourable.

"It provides an example for the nutraceutical industry that this is what they need to do make their compounds credible and show they're safe," Pierce said.

Adding protein to conventional sports drinks improves athletic performance and reduces post-exercise muscle damage, says a study in the July issue of Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise.

The James Madison University study compared Gatorade to a new protein-containing sports drink called Accelerade in a double-blind, placebo-controlled study with bicycle athletes.

The cyclists drank either Gatorade or Accelerade and then completed an endurance test until they were exhausted. The athletes returned 15 hours later for a second endurance test. At that time, researchers took blood samples to measure CPK, a primary marker of muscle damage.

Those who drank Accelerade had a 29 percent improvement in endurance in the first exercise test and a 40 percent improvement in the second test, compared to those who drank Gatorade. The athletes who drank Accelerade had an 83 percent decrease in muscle damage compared to Gatorade drinkers.

I remember when I played soccer in grade school, all the parents would bring quartered oranges we would devour at halftime. We're a long way from those days I suppose.

Imagine a world where performance enhancement was open and regulated. Instead of forcing athletes to sneak through back alleys to stay competitive, sports authorities should admit that drugs are essential - then help athletes cope with the side effects. Once legalized, drug use would still have limits, but they would be established by physicians and athletes - based on their ability to handle performance enhancers. Bad outcomes would be far less frequent if players were not forced to rely on quacks (such as the former Tower of Power bassist at the center of the baseball designer steroid scandal). Innovation in performance enhancers would accelerate in the light of day. There might even be spinoff applications that would benefit you and me.

To be sure, monitoring all this would be tricky. Balancing benefits and costs is hard. So for pharmco Luddites who want a simpler world, where performance enhancers don't transform competitions and the cult of the natural still thrives, I have an answer: Create one league for the genetically engineered home-run hitter and another for the human-scale slugger. One event for the sprinter pumped up on growth hormones and another for the free-range slowpoke. One tour for the supercharged cyclist and another for the antidoping racer.

I made this same suggestion a while back.

While I see some merit to moving over time to a two league universe, let's not kid ourselves. There's no guarantee that legalize-but-regulate means that athletes won't push the envelope or do back-alley doping to gain an edge. You can leglize-but-regulate to your heart's content and you won't get rid of the competitive desire to best the competition. The implications of that are obvious.

But they're also a bit worried what with all the stories circulating about how the facilities aren't ready yet at the pool and other problems. Plus they're freaked about the possibility of terrorism.

Well, they might want to add another worry to the list. Apparently there's a new test for human growth hormone (HGH) which is a banned substance. But new tests are always controversial and this one is likely to be no different.

International Olympic Committee President Jacques Rogge has already warned potential Olympians that HGH, a naturally occurring substance in the body that can be used for performance-enhancing purposes, could be included in the tests conducted in Athens in August.

Bowers and World Anti-Doping Agency Director of Science Olivier Rabin forcefully echoed that warning today after a two-day scientific symposium on HGH sponsored by the US Anti-Doping Agency.

"There will be collection of blood at the Athens Games, and it's possible this test could be used," said Bowers. "When a test for HGH is validated, it will be used."

"A collection of Blood at the Athens Games"? That sounds like something you'd hear on al Jazeera.

What is happening to Barry Bonds and his brethren isn't fair.

Bonds' bloated face is on the cover of Sports Illustrated with an asterisk superimposed on his forehead, and this serial smearing we're doing feels myopic, bloodthirsty, irresponsible and wrong.

We don't have proof. Wouldn't you like to have some of that? We have a lot of circumstantial evidence we've made admissible in the court of public opinion, but an indictment of Bonds' trainer is not an indictment of Bonds. How does this work? Is everyone who has ever trained with indicted Greg Anderson now guilty by association? That's fair?

''Because I only hit 50 home runs once, it was, in fact, an aberration. However, it was not a fluke... 'Nothing can be considered a fluke that takes six months to accomplish. Rather it was a culmination of all my athleticism and baseball skills and years of training peaking simultaneously. This was my athletic opus.

''Hitting in front of (Roberto) Alomar, (Rafael) Palmeiro, (Bobby) Bonilla and (Cal) Ripken didn't hurt either.''

''I know what I accomplished, am proud of it, and know that it was done with integrity... I'll state this once again: It was 26 more home runs than I hit in any other season, but that's just one more home run per week, just one more good swing. That is the data that simultaneously comforted me and haunted me, the small difference between greatness and mediocrity.''

UPDATE: JC has more on Brady and Ken Caminiti here.

... if you are one of those people who thinks the Palmer standard is a good one, then you would have to say that if Anderson had some help from steroids, he also had to improve quite a bit on his own. His hitting power grew a lot more than Caminiti's, and we know he was on the juice.

We have come to prefer a world where the distractable take Ritalin, the depressed take Prozac, and the unattractive get cosmetic surgery to a world ruled, arbitrarily, by those fortunate few who were born focussed, happy, and beautiful. Cosmetic surgery is not "earned" beauty, but then natural beauty isn't earned, either. One of the principal contributions of the late twentieth century was the moral deregulation of social competition--the insistence that advantages derived from artificial and extraordinary intervention are no less legitimate than the advantages of nature. All that athletes want, for better or worse, is the chance to play by those same rules.