RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) — There may have been a time, when athletes smoked pipes, competed in everyday clothes and didn't tweet sponsored messages, a time that fewer and fewer people can remember, when sports were "real," not theater.
Theater requires audiences to suspend their disbelief, to pretend that the cardboard tree on stage is a forest and that the actor holding a skull is Hamlet.
Today, after decades of doping, the best performances in the world of sport are almost immediately followed by whispers and social media postings with one question: "What are they on?" That wasn't always the case.