Keith,
I have not thought deeply about the pros-and-cons of performance enhancement in sports, but maybe you have.
Part of the reason for banning performance-enhancing drugs like anabolic steroids is that those who take them suffer long-term harm to their health. An athlete may be willing to trade his health or a few years of lifespan for athletic stardom. A ban on such drugs prevents such social harm as well, and the nobody-wins arms race that would result from allowing harmful performance-enhancing drugs.
Less objectionable would be performance-enhancing drugs that cause no harm to the drug-taker. Why might one object to these? Well, the advantage they would confer would be so overwhelming that any serious player would have to take them to stay in the competition, and this might be expensive (but no more expensive than wearing hockey equipment, which is notoriously expensive).
What about performance-enhancing sportswear, such as this? (See videos here.) Surprisingly, these spring-loaded stilts, which work on the principle of the kangaroo leg, were not invented until 2003, by a German named Alexander Bock (with an umlaut on the "o"). A reason to ban such equipment in sports would be that to allow them would create a completely different game, like basketball played on a court whose surface consists of trampolines (couldn't find a video, but I've seen it on TV).
Continuing along the spectrum from most objectionable to least objectionable, what about permanent prostheses? Suppose an artificial limb enhanced athletic performance? You would want to discourage people from chopping their arms or legs off to be fitted with performance-enhancing limbs, but you would not want to ban play by people who have lost a limb "legitimately."
Next, what about everyday wear that also enhances athletic performance, such as eyeglasses? If you would ban superleg prostheses, why would you not ban supereye prostheses like eyeglasses or superear hearing aids that allow a football player to hear what is going on in the other team's huddle?
Finally, it might be argued, practice and training should be banned, because they provide an unfair advantage over players who do not have the facilities (e.g., the willingness) to practice and train. The objection to this argument is that the advantage of practice and training is not unfair, but is rather one of the good things that a sport is meant to encourage.
Just some half-formed thoughts,
Mark Spahn (West Seneca, NY)
Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D. 