http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/17/sports/o...amp;oref=slogin

So the link above is about a story where a double amputee (below knees I believe) sprinter was barred from the Olympics because his prosthetics were supposed to give him an unfair advantage over "able-bodied" sprinters.

The highest court with authority over world sports ruled that he is allowed to compete in the regular Olympics.

I think this decision sheds a little bit of light on the interesting issue of how sports will be handled in the future when physical enhancement by prosthetics is not only possible, but easily performed.

What do you all think?

I believe Shadowbeat mentioned multiple leagues. The minors don't allow artificial augmentations while the major leagues do.

I think Baseball might be the only exception. Something about not wanting to either triple the size of the field or have every single person on the team knocking the balls into the stands every time they come up to bat.

I didn't get the vibe that it was pure practicality that drove the baseball authorities to veto augmentation. There seemed to be a whiff of purism about it too.

So Metas are out aswell?

[sarcasm]
Much like the baseball league now...
[/sarcasm]

I don't know. While augmentation would definitely feel like cheating, there's an old romanticism to breaking race barriers. Multiple leagues would make a lot of sense, especially if one was supported by Humanis.

I wholeheartedly support augmented footy; cyber/bio and awakened. Although in the BBB they talk about soccer being a "purist" sport with no metas or enhancements, I think it would be better augmented.

I couldn't disgree more with this decision.

Don't forget the ideological control that England has over soccer (at least in the minds of the devs, if not in real life) and consider how England reacts to the world of 2070.

Stop calling it soccer. It's called football. The version with the pointy ball has a prefix for a reason.

And yea, bringt it on. Can't wait for the first able-bodied athlete to amputee himself to get up to speed.

We're on a forum with Americans who would misunderstand calling it Football. Hence I use the term that everyone recognises because it causes less misunderstanding, and I hate misunderstanding.

True, my british side took advantage of me posting there.

I still reflexively think "real football" when I hear football as opposed to the pointy version. But I'm a footy starved yank who plans on spending most of his vacations in England watching some live PL.

I could only imagine how scary a keeper with wired reflexes would be

Techically, its that each of the four home nations has one vote on the rulemaking board (meaning 50% of votes) if I remember correctly, although I don't know whether TirNaNog plays football.

Nota Bene; Football .

Well, every non-american thinks of football when they read football, not american football. I would say it causes more misunderstandings if you don't call it american football.

Hmm. I think this might be a reason to keep footy unaugmented. Or at least restricted to passive stuff like bone lacing. Simple fluid dynamics means that even if you strike the ball twice as hard, by the time it reaches the goalie from the edge of the box, it won't be going much faster than it would have been when hit by a long-range specialist in the unaugmented game. A Wi-Ref 3 goalie could stroll over and stop it every time. It's already the hardest game to score in, and I think shifting the advantage even further to the defense would produce a lot of goalless draws. Penalties would almost never be scored...

I suppose you could make the goal larger, but you'd have to retain the smaller size for unaugmented leagues and competitions.

The issue of metas is a thorny one. Really, humans probably shouldn't be playing competitive physical games against Trolls and Orcs. Legs get broken in the aughties game, in bad tackles. Having a Trog backline would effectively require something tougher than a human to get through it... it's still a contact sport.

Please try not to speak for every non-American.

Ok, most non-americans.

Shrug. While I freely acknowledge that 'soccer' is overall the more well-known sport, keep in mind that outside of the 'gridiron' issue, there are also a fair number of people to whom the word 'football' automatically means 'rugby'. Using the more specific label for each individual sport does indeed go a long way toward avoiding confusion.

Being a non american, I usually call american football american football, soccer soccer and rugby rugby, just to avoid confusion, when I see football, I usually have to figure out which football people are talking about...

But I don't feel augmented soccer would need a lot of rules adjustments, I mean if everyone is on wired 3 and <insert name of bioware that gives bonuses to athletics>, everyone would still be on the same level...
But it would indeed be the height of stupidity to start combining Trolls and Humans in any type of football...
"What do you mean, tackle the guy? Did you see he's a fucking troll??" as anyone who's ever played BloodBowl can testify to...
But a point could be made that an augmented league could also accept adepts without upsetting the balance...

I'm just waiting for the day when NASCAR becomes an Olympic sport.

The issue of mechanical advantages in humans is a sticky one. If you get too nitpicky you'll end up having no choice but to start restricting things like leg-length and lung capacity. Hell, some people think that testicular cancer gave Lance Armstrong an unfair advantage. One can only imagine that this ill soon lead to an epidemic of athletes breaking into nuclear reactors with their balls hanging out in an attempt to develop testicular cancer themselves.

Leagues that allow cyberware will modify their rules to compensate. Some will even use it as an opportunity to transform their passtime into a brutal combat sport. I remember, for example, an NES game about a futureistic version of baseball in which the only way to tag a runner out was to defeat him in armed combat. This made up for a low hit rate one would expect when the pitcher literally has a cannon for an arm by extending the game for longer and making it more difficult to tag runners out. It also meant that the team that could afford the best cyberweapons would usually win.

Oh comon, that was the most fun part of the game.

Hockey, the fastest game...add augmentation...zoom!

I can't believe some court will over turn the IOC withoutocmpeltely stripping away the credibility of that organization to self regulate. since it is a private organiaztion that does not report to any world governing organization I think they can tell the court to sit and spin.

The case htough does raise a really good example of SR sports. As other has pointed out in Shadowbeat they stressed that usually college sports has only limited cyber. the idea being that the pros want to see the raw talaent before they pump in money for cyber that ius usually covered by a contract. also the levels of cyber are lmiited, like modern salery caps so if both players in a line have Level X augmentation, the one who was already better, will still be that degree better when the augmentation levels out.

For this sprinter you see the issue of cybered vs meat. Sure the guy is a double amputee but the cyber legs he runs on are designed to put a spring in his step. They don't have ankles so they're less moving parts to f' up if you take a funny step. Any of us take a misstep and we can twist an ankle-he doesn't have this problem so it gives him an advantage meat legs do not have. Also, like I said, they have a spring built into the basic design, human legs don't have those. WE have to put an extra spring into the steps that he'll get automatically.

Put that in a SR world and it's the exvielant of someone with augmented legs trying to claim he's just the same as someone with meat legs.

Yeah, exactly what you wrote. This seems to be the first case where there is a dispute to the legality of mechanical augmentation in an athletic contest. It's very interesting to see that they would overturn the decision.

The reason they can overturn the decision thought is because the IOC signs on with them to be the highest authority in settling their dispute. They didn't force their authority over the IOC as far as I know.

I kind of wonder what will happen once we have far more sophisticated artificial limbs. What happens when an ex-war vet gets a replacement to his leg that gives him a more stable footing on the ground and better pushoff that could give him an advantage as a linemen in football?

It's pretty cool to see we are at a technological level where these issues actually have to be argued in the courts and resolved.