Why Make a Sports Techonolgy Ethics Blog?

This is a blog I've been meaning to start for a while. I first became interested in this topic when I was writing my final year engineering thesis (2005), in which I designed a bike for the pursuit cycling event. To me, the obvious start of the project was to determine if the project should be done, and then why. There are many controversial aspects of the use of technology in sport. Some are very high profile, such as the Speedo "shark skin" swimsuits. And some are less obvious, like what is the definition of doping, and where do you draw the line.

So with this in mind, I researched the topic of Sports Technology Ethics/ Philosophy; and I found myself quite disappointed with the quality of information out there. So many sporting governing bodies (e.g. in the case of cycling, the International Union of Cyclists, UCI) produce rules to govern their sports without first developing a strong basis for what the rules are supposed to achieve.

In my opinion, before coming up with any rules or regulations, you need to figure out what the actual purpose of the sport is, i.e. come up with a philosophical background. Or to put it in a more catchy way: develop a mission statement for the sport as a whole (not just for the governing body).

When I was researching philosophical texts on the topic, I found there was some, but not a great deal, of material regarding why elite sport exists. And the material that did exist was pretty much exclusively written from the point of view of a non-athlete. The writers mainly did not even come across as sports enthusiasts. As an athlete myself, I found myself strongly disagreeing with most of the starting assumptions in the papers that I read. I'll go into the details of this in another post, but my point is that I felt that an athlete's voice (preferably many athletes' voices) should be added to the dialogue. I also think that the elite sports watching public point of view should be considered, but I will leave that up to someone else.

I didn't mean this initial entry to be so long (but that fact helps to reassure my fears that I wouldn't be able to think of enough things to say in order to justify a blog!). So I'll sum up:

Why did I start this blog? To introduce another voice into the topic of Sports Technology Ethics. As an athlete, an engineer and a philosopher, I am in a rather unique position to add to what I believe is a very important subject.

Thanks for reading!

P.s. In case you were wondering how the ethics chapter in my engineering honours thesis went:

It went down like a lead balloon.

Actually, to be fair, one of my markers liked it and said he wished there was more consideration of ethics in engineering. The other marker called it "a waste of 10 pages" and marked it accordingly!

Huh. This is the kind of attitude that prevails in many traditional engineering circles, and it worries me.
Don't think about "should we do it?" just concentrate on "can we do it?".