Sports

I am very strong. I have never used drugs to enhance my performance. I don't compete. I don't need to. I also don't want to die an early death. I will need a knee replacement because I ran too far on a knee already wrecked from jumping out of planes and poor decisions in college. The only steroids I've taken are shots into my knee joint, on the advice of an Orthopaedic surgeon who wouldn't just cut the thing off and fit a prosthetic so I could run again and also make a TSA agent upset because they had to check my metallic leg for bomb dust. Unsurprisingly, the steroids did nothing and I hate needles. Certainly didn't give me freakish strength. Oddly it might qualify to compete here and walk home poorer in wealth and morals than I already am.

So with that context, I care to say a few things. Dearest readers, this is just another (de)evolution of the freak show. There, I said it. Entertainment value, that pays the performers for that performance, and ultimately exploits them under the guise of care and the spotlight. The real benefactors are, as so many alluded to, Donald Trump and Peter Thiel. In a PT Barnum-esque horror show of performance that builds upon the "ideal male physique" applied, in this case, to all genders through a cocktail of juices. The irony of promoting drug and surgery induced changes in sports here is not lost on me, but money washes away morality. Traditional and body norms don't apply to this crowd when it comes to printing money on the backs of non-billionaires, but I digress.

Banking on the understood dilemma that capitalism has no need for athletics that can't sell ads, they pay to promote artificial physique instead of merely encouraging it in the dank rooms of a Florida home, I mean club. A wheaties box does not pay all day every day, they understand, so swimming or running or, perhaps, curling (oddly not represented, despite the rogue-like mental gymnastics required to cheat, which should be prized in such a theater as this), can come, show off, and trudge home with bags of cash. Everyone wins.

Sickening? Yes. Immoral? Of course. A freakshow, to cite the founder of Mr. Universe and other bodybuilding competitions? Of course, it's why, as one audience member during the Arnold years declared when such bodybuilding competitions banned drugs, they watch. Not for the physique, for the freaks. Freaks aplenty. So here we have not just the muscular types, or the speedy types, or the jumping high types, but the self-declared champions of Christ and Golden Calves, and their wealthy benefactor Peter Thiel. Oh, also along with the anti-muscular fast food loving grifter. Can't forget him.

If only table flipping was a sport, would we see buff Jesus partake? In this crowd, that would be too woke. Thankfully I'm a Buddhist, and we're supposed to fat and happy. I'm neither. Maybe I would be happy, at least, if I ate shark cartilage and shot HGH into my eyeballs so I could bench a Type 82 Kübelwagen or swim faster than a U-Boat. I'm not willing to find out though.