There has never been a perfect athlete. Perfect things have been definitely done across the sports world — 23 pitchers have thrown perfect games, 27 golfers have hit a hole-in-one at the Masters, 12 horses have won the Triple Crown. And some sports stars are just better than others, and become the stuff of legend, but no one has ever retired with the distinction of being truly “perfect.” No athlete (or animal, for that matter) has sustained perfection, and all signs point to sustained perfection never being possible… unless the human race creates athletes with the sole intention of making them the embodiment of perfection.
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Just a few decades ago, there weren’t many people that thought of the creation of a perfect athlete as anything more than a super-science pipe dream. But on May 10, a tour-de-force of researchers, business leaders, and more met at Harvard to discuss the recent merits of man-made gene sequencing, and they collectively determined that biology has progressed to the point where an entirely synthetic human genome could very feasibly exist “in as little as a decade.” The price of building each little bit of a genetic code has dropped so much that constructing a human genome would only cost $90 million — chump change, given how invaluable life itself is. And if a human can be built entirely from scratch, making that human perfect at something, such as sports, seems like a logical step in the futuristic direction. All of this is to say that the artificial generation of a perfect athlete doesn’t seem nearly as far-fetched as it once did.
Alas, despite representing one of the greatest scientific breakthroughs the universe has ever seen and a watershed moment in the history of everything, would a perfect athlete actually do any good for the Earth? It seems difficult to find a compelling argument that puts forth a yes as the answer to that question. Sports were not conceived with the intention of ever being unilaterally winnable, and while a perfect athlete would personify a resounding victory for science, it would typify a calamitous defeat for the world of sports. Games like baseball, basketball, and soccer achieve their excitement purely from the competition that accompanies them — a perfect athlete would render that competition obsolete, and likely render sports obsolete in the process.
None of this is to say that the science community should neglect to produce a perfect athlete if it is given the opportunity to do so. People from all over the world would flock to see Artificial Joe Dimaggio get a hit in every at bat, or to watch Artificial Tom Brady connect on every pass he threw to Artificial Rob Gronkowski. In a vacuum, perfect athletes have the potential to be the most incredible thing that’s happened to sports since sports happened in the first place. But, like every great scientific development, the creation of a perfect athlete would have its drawbacks — and in this scenario, the bad just may outweigh the good.