Abstract
This chapter flips the question posed in Chap. 3. Instead of asking how enhancements might affect sport’s spirituality, we reframe the issue by asking the reciprocal question of how sport’s spirituality might affect enhancement use. Sport is more than just a game. We can discover the sacred in sport. This insight changes how we see sport and how we improve sport and athletes. If spirituality, as a marginalized value in sport, is privileged, then the evaluation of enhancements changes. Intentionality, transcendence, and values emerge as key issues.
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- 1.
Things get more complicated when we consider how gene editing might affect us at a germ-line level. What happens when we have an athlete who was born with athletic-enhancing anomalies because their biological parents used gene editing on germ-line cells? The athlete in question did not choose these enhancements but the parents actively chose and used banned enhancement means.
- 2.
Spiritual enhancement methods are being explored in the wider human enhancement conversation. These methods might have an application to sport as a source of the spiritual, but likely not. Entheogens, for example, have potential for generating and enhancing spiritual experiences with lasting meaning including a powerful experience of the interconnectedness of all life (Cole-Turner 2015). Enhancements such as entheogens are prohibited in sport, not because of their spiritual enhancement potential but because one could never concentrate enough to make sport safe or even doable. But it is possible that in the future entheogens may be considered outside of sport, in safe and structured contexts, to help people illuminate the spirituality that they taste in sport, and especially in flow moments.
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Trothen, T.J. (2018). Spirituality: Implications for Sport Enhancement Ethics. In: Spirituality, Sport, and Doping: More than Just a Game. SpringerBriefs in Religious Studies(). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02997-5_4
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