Why Athletic Competition Can Never Be Fair (And Why That's Actually Fine)

What is athletic competition really for? Strip away the rhetoric about excellence and achievement, and several purposes emerge:

• Pure Human Limits: Discovering the absolute boundaries of human physical capability
• Merit Through Effort: Rewarding dedication, sacrifice, and maximizing one's potential
• Narrative Drama: Creating compelling stories of triumph, rivalry, and overcoming odds
• Social Function: Reinforcing cultural values like perseverance and teamwork
• Biological Curiosity: Experimenting with human performance under different conditions

Of these, only one actually explains how people engage with sports in practice.

What Sports Really Are

Watch how audiences react to athletics. They don't get most excited about world records or absolute human limits. They get excited about comebacks, photo finishes, and personal bests. They root for athletes with compelling backstories or from their hometown. The Paralympics generates as much emotional investment as the Olympics despite slower times.

People want narrative drama wrapped in social function. They want simple, relatable stories that reinforce their beliefs about hard work, determination, and overcoming obstacles. Sports serve as morality plays where virtue is rewarded and effort matters more than luck.

This is why doping scandals feel like betrayals rather than mere rule violations - they undermine the story we want to believe about earned success.

The Requirements of Good Drama

Compelling narratives require specific properties:

• Simplicity: The story must be instantly understandable. "Fastest person wins." "David vs Goliath." "Hometown hero makes good."
• Relatability: Audiences need clear characters to root for and against, with motivations they can understand.
• Stakes: The outcome must feel meaningful and earned.
• Fairness perception: The competition must feel legitimate, even if it isn't perfectly fair.

These narrative requirements are completely incompatible with creating genuinely fair competition.

The Impossibility of Rules-Based Fairness

Human beings exist on countless continuums - genetic, developmental, environmental, economic. Every person brings a unique combination of advantages and disadvantages that are largely beyond their control:

• Genetic gifts: muscle fiber types, cardiovascular capacity, limb proportions, neurological wiring
• Developmental factors: nutrition, training access, injury history, when they hit puberty
• Environmental advantages: altitude training, climate, coaching quality, family support
• Economic resources: equipment, facilities, time to train instead of work

Any rules-based system for fairness must draw arbitrary lines through these continuums. Why is Usain Bolt's genetic muscle composition acceptable while certain hormone levels aren't? Why is training at altitude (which permanently alters physiology) fair while EPO is cheating? Why do we separate by age but not by when someone started training?

The more comprehensive you make the rules to address these inconsistencies, the more complex the system becomes. But complexity kills narrative power. Nobody can emotionally invest in "Athlete A achieved 94.7% of their calculated genetic potential while Athlete B only reached 89.3% of theirs."

The Narrative Solution

This is why birth gender categories, despite their imperfections, actually work well for sports' real purpose. They're:

• Instantly understandable: Everyone grasps "men's" and "women's" competition immediately
• Broadly correlative: Sex categories roughly align with performance-relevant physiology for most people
• Socially familiar: They map onto existing identities and tribal affiliations
• Dramatically functional: They create competitive balance that generates compelling stories

The edge cases that challenge these categories - intersex athletes, transgender competitors - aren't flaws in the system. They're inevitable consequences of trying to impose simple categories on complex biological and social realities.

Every categorization system will have edge cases because human diversity can't be cleanly divided by any set of rules, no matter how sophisticated.

The Enhanced Games: Pure Human Limits

Interestingly, a real-world experiment is emerging that explicitly rejects narrative-based fairness in favor of pure human limits: the Enhanced Games, planned for 2025 or 2026.

Founded by Australian businessman Aron D'Souza, it would allow athletes to use performance-enhancing substances without being subject to drug tests. Performance-enhancing drugs will not be mandatory for participants. Prosthetic limbs and shoe technology will be allowed. Only FDA-approved substances will be allowed for insurance reasons, while cocaine and heroin will not be allowed.

The Enhanced Games represents a coherent philosophy: if the goal is discovering absolute human performance limits, then allow everything that doesn't involve mechanical augmentation. D'Souza sees the International Olympic Committee (IOC) as corrupt and greedy, and wants to eradicate the WADA, which he calls an "anti-science police force for the IOC".

This approach achieves remarkable simplicity around fairness precisely because it abandons narrative concerns. Instead of wrestling with which advantages are "natural" versus "artificial," it simply allows all chemical enhancements while maintaining basic safety guardrails. No complex rules about testosterone levels, genetic advantages, or training methods - just pure "what can humans achieve?"

The reaction has been overwhelmingly negative from traditional sports organizations and media, highlighting exactly the tension we've discussed. The IOC stated, "If you want to destroy any concept of fair play and fair competition in sport, this would be a good way to do it". But this criticism assumes that "fair play" is more important than discovering human limits - a value judgment, not an objective truth.

Australian swimmer and Olympic medalist James Magnussen said in February 2024 that he intends to come out of retirement to compete in the games in an attempt to break the 50m freestyle world record. D'Souza pledged a US$1 million prize if he did break it, and Magnussen said that he will "juice to the gills ... break it in six months".

The Impossibility Remains

Even the Enhanced Games, with their coherent "pure limits" philosophy, can't escape arbitrary boundaries. Most tellingly, they allow chemical enhancement but ban mechanical augmentation - a completely inconsistent distinction if you're truly measuring what humans can achieve. Why is injecting EPO fundamentally different from using a powered exoskeleton? Both are external aids that push performance beyond natural capability.

Their ban on cocaine and heroin is equally arbitrary. If the goal is discovering absolute human performance limits, the legal status or typical recreational use of substances is irrelevant. Cocaine is actually a stimulant that could theoretically enhance certain types of performance. The Enhanced Games aren't actually committed to "pure human limits" - they're committed to a version of enhanced performance that feels socially acceptable to them. According to D'Souza, athletes should also be categorised based on their chromosomal sex - yet another arbitrary line.

More importantly, the Enhanced Games will likely fail as mass entertainment precisely because they prioritize fairness over narrative. The Spectator opined that "What's absolutely crucial, at least as far as retaining spectator interest goes, is that the advantage is natural". Audiences want to believe in "earned" success, not chemically optimized performance.

This perfectly illustrates our central point: any system focused enough on genuine fairness becomes too complex or philosophically alien to generate compelling stories. And any system simple enough to create emotional narratives will necessarily be unfair in fundamental ways.

Embracing the Contradiction

Birth gender categories, for all their imperfections, thread this needle better than either complex algorithmic systems or radical "anything goes" approaches. They're simple enough for mass audiences to understand and emotionally invest in, while being roughly correlative with performance-relevant biology for most people.

Sports can never be perfectly fair because fairness and compelling storytelling are fundamentally opposed. Fair competition would require accounting for every advantage beyond an athlete's control, creating a system too complex for anyone to understand or emotionally engage with.

Instead of pretending our categories are natural or perfectly just, we should acknowledge what they actually are: pragmatic compromises designed to create the kinds of stories we want sports to tell.

This doesn't make sports meaningless - it makes them human. The arbitrary lines we draw serve real social and emotional needs, even if they don't serve abstract ideals of fairness.

The debates about transgender athletes, drug policies, and other edge cases aren't really about sports. They're about deeper questions of identity, justice, and what kinds of differences we think should matter in society. Sports just happen to be where these tensions become visible.

Once we stop pretending competition can be perfectly fair, we can focus on what sports actually do well: creating simple, powerful stories about human effort and achievement that inspire us to be better versions of ourselves.