All apologies

"What else should I be
All apologies"

So sang the late Kurt Cobain. Apologies are in vogue lately, particularly by athletes seeking atonement for the seemingly mortal sin of self-cyborgification via performance enhancing drugs (PEDs). Dramatic apologies, half-hearted apologies, and mostly vague admissions of some indiscretion. No less than a half dozen cyclists in the 2009 Tour of California cycling race are "ex-dopers" in search of redemption. Some have no such crusade because...well, they were never caught in the first place. Alex Rodriguez, inhabitant of that den of purity known as major league baseball, is the latest protagonist in the now tiresome saga of so-called "steroid scandals." Melodrama. Like plasma through a syringe, these are the Days of our Dopers. Sanctimonious rhetoric. A website called dontbeanasterisk.com claims that the * signifies "being a fake." In A-Rod's case, dating Madonna is at least as big of an * as taking steroids, or what he now refers to as an "amateur hour" injection procedure. The Material Girl aside, though, what is material here is the ongoing use of loaded terms, such as "fake" and "real," that are problematic in the cyborg era of sport where athletes are far from gobs of stem-cell potential absent of any chemical, procedure, or practice meant to improve performance. If Lance Armstrong's babies can be (accurately) described as products of modern scientific medicine, then I am fine with A-Rod with or without the *. What we might consider is our framing of elite sport as anything other than fake in the first place. A manufactured, corporatized entertainment endeavor that, underneath the veneer of good old fashioned competition, is as much like American Idol as anything, in that it pretends to be something it is not. Here we are now, entertain us.

FYI: We'll address the "harm to the kids" argument at another time...