Records are competition: they’re competition against the best that a certain person or group of people has ever performed. The big difference between the absolute sports and the relative ones is that this type of comparison is very relevant; you can see immediately whether you’ve covered a hundred meters faster than you ever have before, or faster than anyone from your school, or your nation, or the world.
At its root, the point of sport isn’t simply to win; if that was the case, I’d be racing folks at the retirement home until there was a chance that they could beat me. The point of sport is to test the limits of your capacities. Competition is supposed to drive you to push those boundaries further than you could have in the absence of competition.
The problem with stars dodging each other isn’t records—it’s that they’re failing to embrace the essence of sport. However, this isn’t just a passion for elite athletes—it’s their livelihood, and they’re going to do what they believe is in their best interests, regardless of the impact of their decisions on popularity of the sport, and regardless of the philosophical foundations underlying various alternative choices.
The problem with PED’s isn’t a focus on records—as mentioned, any competitive environment is going to foster some cheating, from Wall Street to the track. The problem is the inability to identify that cheating when it occurs.
