By Pat Kane

It would be easy to look at sports as a somewhat ethically-limited zone of play. It dominates our media spectacle, some might say, exactly because it provides us with an illusion of clarity and finality. Our tribe’s athletes beat your tribe’s athletes: in a fluid and confusing world, perhaps it’s no surprise that we flock to the games. (Though the Scottish columnist Joyce Macmillan holds out hope that the solidarities of sport can be used to better ends.)

But it’s amazing how fragile the legitimacy of sports can be. In an era where authority figures are regularly derided, sports fans touchingly expect their referees to be absolute paragons: any whiff of partisanship from the men in black, and the whole game unravels.

As for the athletes, the great fun of spectating any sport is our imputation of motive - reading the soul from the exertions of face and body. But even here, it’s so easy for our Olympian faith to be stretched to breaking point. What if those struggles aren’t just recognizably human ones, but almost literally post-human ones? We know we’re watching talented people: but can we cope with them also being biochemical experiments?

Mark Lawson in The Guardian, sifts elegantly through the contradictions of drugs and sport. What is the difference between performance-enhancing and performance-enabling drugs - the steroids that propel a runner slightly faster, the corticosteroids that stop a pro-footballers joints seizing up? We know that sport - from boxing to motor-racing - involves high levels of possible self-damage: we also know that sport is a striving to improve the natural, even under the purest conditions.

Lawson's vision is of an "Addams Family start-up line at the Olympics 100 metres" - all DNA-replacement and cyberlimbs. So do we object to that because it makes athletic prowess less about individual human striving (one we might still concievably empathise with, as we puff round our own running tracks), and more like some kind of collective cyborg arms race between nations? Or do we object because these athletes might be making the ultmate play-ethical decision: to start "playing God" with their own bodies?

As ever, the cultures of play have been rehearsing all the conundrums of the coming biological age on our behalf for years. The German philosopher Jurgen Habermas's recent book on bio-ethics, The Future of Human Nature, agrees with Francis Fukuyama - that what genetic or biochemical God-playing reveals is the religious core of our Enlightenment assumptions.

As the athletes mass on their fields of play, we still implicitly believe that they are "creatures of God" - their bodies and minds granted free will by a "Divine Creator" who, the monotheists at least assume, will not intervene in that autonomy. But to find that they are "creatures of the lab" brings us face to face with the fuzzy outline of our own, increasingly self-determined humanity.

So we should be vaguely grateful to those rule-stretching, muscle-injecting sportsmen and women, whose post-human play (perhaps ultra-human would be better) is outlining a possible future for us. In light of this future, I have a rather poignant nostalgia for the philosopher-athletes - those who manage to leave space for the conceptual, in the midst of physical regimes that are becoming ever more cybernetic and biotechnic.

Unfortunately defeated by Lennox Lewis in Los Angeles a month ago, heavyweight boxer Vitali Klitschko is both an intellectual as well as a physical contender - with a doctorate in physical science from the Ukraine, and a professorship in philosophy from Germany, where he now trains. The story of how he began his titanic dual career, told by his old tutor Professor Leonid Volkov, couldn't be more post-Soviet if it tried:

Vitali came up to me and said: 'Leonid Viktorovich, I am interested in one question -- being talented at sport, being good at sport -- what does it mean? Am I gifted or have I made myself talented?'" That was how he started his PhD. Working into the early hours during his trips to Ukraine, Vitali, Vladimir, a childhood friend and Volkov would analyse the data from experiments on national youth teams and argue about their conclusions. "We had to open all the windows and the balcony doors because with three strong men in my room having to breathe, there was almost no oxygen," Volkov laughs, sitting in his two-roomed flat on the outskirts of the Ukrainian capital Kiev.

Volkov concludes: "I have always said to him: 'Don't let yourself get hit on the head, science needs you.'" A childhood hero of mine also revealed his social-theory side recently - the seventies Dutch soccer wizard Johan Cruyff. Now a major force in Dutch politics, the magazine Ode has unearthed an extraordinary 1984 interview. How much is there to learn from this disquisition on the relationship between individual play and team play:

You have this game with 22 players, all of them individuals, and yet they form two teams. Everything in this field of sport is contradictory. The 11 of you must operate as a hermetic group, while each player is constantly being judged on his individual performance. Eleven ways of thinking, 11 opinions, 11 personalities - how can they ever agree? And yet on the field a common goal must be set. Another complication is added: the problems that arise when things are not going well, appear in reverse when all is going smoothly. If there is a hitch, the guys, by being organised and not solely relying on their own insight, will give all it takes to get things back on track. If the game is progressing optimally, then these players will all want to stand out again anyway.

Cruyff's own solution? "I always went against the grain of all the accepted opinions. I dared to say to myself: 'Today is not important.' So I do not really have to go around that guy now and shoot the ball in the goal myself. If the organisation is sound, we will succeed - maybe not today, but tomorrow."

A better exposition of self-organisation as an ethic - see next week's blogger Steven Johnson for the book on that - couldn't be more naturally found. Cruyff's a genius - but he's also an iteration... For more background on the extraordinary fusion of philosophy and sports that created the Dutch soccer dream of the seventies and eighties, read David Winner's Brilliant Orange: the Neurotic Genius of Dutch Football. Winner cites this definition of the Dutch system here, and it's as play-ethical as you'd wish:

A good player is one who touches the ball only once and knows where to run.

All comments welcome.