tonight on r t game on the twenty twelve olympics officially began today with the opening ceremonies about some of the only thing that's red hot in london the debate over performance enhancing drugs is more heated than ever as the anti-doping agency cracks down on athletes are if doping should just be allowed out. from the old days of naked athletes to today's a superhuman competitions and one picks has seen its share of changes over the years coming up we'll show you just how far the games have come since the athens arena arena. and the athletes are the only ones competing these days mitt romney is vying for israel's affection and he's willing to do almost anything to prove his loyalty but why is he so eager to win the hearts and minds of the jewish people before he's even sealed the deal with the american public will question more.

it's friday july twenty seventh seven pm in washington d.c. i'm christine if you're watching our t.v. . well let the games begin today is the official start to the two thousand and twelve olympic games the summer games of course come every four years and bring with it the spirit of competition and of national pride for the next two and a half weeks the finest athletes from around the world will compete for gold silver and bronze medals in sports like tennis and saying water polo and archery and every year it seems there are many athletes who ruin their chances of competing by breaking rules regarding doping this year more than one hundred outlets have already been banned from testing that took place during the last six months so why does this happen time and time again they simply think they won't be caught or does this lead us to presuppose many athletes simply are getting away with it so what is doping we're simply allow but under the close watch of experts doctors who know

what's safe and what isn't and. the university of the west of scotland recently told nature magazine if the goal is to protect health then the medically supervised doping is likely to be a better route better yet the world of sport should complement the world anti-doping agency with a world pro do it being agency the goal of which is to invest in safer forms of enhanced mint we track down another man julian savulescu chairman and practical affairs at the university of oxford for his thoughts on legalization. there's a fund of evidence that the absolute prohibition of doping is firing some of the world's best athletes like lance armstrong lewis and barry bonds have all been implicated in diving and it's likely to file because the substances that athletes are using to size just mimic the natural substances in their body that their body naturally produces like growth hormones spinning possibles in the people who get

caught to die the incompetent athletes or those with relatively few resources or do you mean relatively few resources i mean are you suggesting that the ones who get caught simply don't have. the best the drugs the drugs with more invisible ingredients i think there is a fair number of people who are trying to do this themselves and get caught i think it was a rocket athlete that was just recently banned. substances like growth hormone and indeed you can even read transfuse your own blood diaries now that's virtually impossible to detect if you don't use properly you're really not going to pick up the vast number of people you're really seeing the tip of the odds that given the huge rewards that are on offer and the relatively low probability of being caught we're probably only seeing a small fraction of the number of people then call but i mean i hear this argument a lot for a number of things that it's already going on so we might as well make it legal so

it can be regulated i mean is that actually a good reason to make this you know the case in the olympics. so i think you're right just because it's going on and murders going on and we shouldn't legalize that but if we can find good reasons to allow some doping action then it will be easier then to carry on what i think we should so to test case of this is kathleen this used to be on the banned list it increases the time to exhaustion by ten percent but it's never taken off the bat is because it cites enough and it doesn't seem to ruin the spectacle of sport or maybe you don't have to test the cap and there will be very dangerous things that we should test all but things like. being growth hormone steroids can all be given reasonable medical supervision and reasonable normal physiological importance but i think that's a difficult thing i mean you seem to be arguing that certain things should still be banned so doesn't that totally void the argument that it's already happening so might as well be regulated i mean if athletes just continue to take the stuff

that's banned to be better than the other competitors when that sort of defeats the purpose of making some things legal you know not really because you know we're living in a world of six resources used you can only y.h. a certain number of what was going on there not a number of wars on certain people's so why not use the relatively limited resources water or anti doping agency only has twenty million u.s. dollars that's not that much to patrol the whole of the world sporting population so why not use those resources on enforcing a ban on children and identifying the really undersized substances the really do jeopardize athletes sell blood doping doesn't jeopardize people's health let me ask you this that who would get to decide what would be banned and what wouldn't it seems at least to me kind of a subjective matter here. well you need criteria and i've suggested three criteria one is psyche another one is that the agent has to be consistent with the spirit of

particular sport so things which reduce your anxiety or tremor in sports like a tree or shooting such as beta blockers should be banned or something that removes theory books and should be banned but out of always steroids simply enhance the benefits of of try and increase the tomtom recovery don't fundamentally change activity the last thing you want or to be fundamentally human endeavor if you guys are people robotic around official limbs that would change the nitrile sport but that's not what we're talking about when we're talking about protocol and zeros well i think that's a really good point and i know that that particular point has generated a whole lot of argument i know that there are other performance enhancing things that are not drugs the full body swimsuits i know that there's a south african sprinter who actually has a mechanical prosthetics. do you think that this differs from performance enhancing drugs well you suits chinese macho just chinese the amount of friction i don't see

that that's and indeed i have been allowed to an extent but the roach of the story is i think you're referring to the south african athlete with bligh at the moment he can run faster than you saying bolt but it's only a matter of time before that technology enables a curse like that to run faster than someone like you stone cold and i think that should be bad because i think that's not really running and it's substantially the contribution of the technology so i think we can troll audience rather than simply having a sort of very blunt ended absolute ban on all performance enhancing drugs it's impossible. i know scientists at this year's olympics and they vowed to make this year the cleanest ever when it comes to doping i want to show you some clips of a story a c.n.n. reporter went inside one of the labs and we just want to play a short snippet of that story. during the period of the games this thirty million dollar facility will see one hundred fifty scientists manning deliberate tree twenty four hours a day samples of blood and urine from the athletes will be delivered direct from

the olympic park and we reckon we can pick up even things you haven't so what else we can do a sort of what is known as data mining approach where we can look for things that we had we hadn't thought of so i think we'll soon be away from the guys with designer drugs beating the analysts and so what about this notion julianne of course there are better and better more undetectible drugs but science is also getting better in the anti-doping agencies in terms of being able to find things out shouldn't that be the goal really devoting resources to the anti-doping aspect of this. work and then it would be a great solution but it hasn't that is a model filled with at least why is that true or not i haven't heard any good i could have a guide to accurately detect blood doping now you know if you could strew that we can once and for all women i mean why not but of course it's a war between. the. and unlikely that one is going to win this

war out ra it's always a moving target and as with most wars we have a racist too to build a better weapon than some people have even said in this case there's been an arms race of course the drug companies are already competing to make the best drugs with the least visible and greedy and so i'm wondering though if you think legalizing certain types of doping would make that exponentially worse and you know competition would simply be about who uses the best drugs as opposed to who's the best athlete. well as a city if that were the case we should ban those lasers but it's not of the mind that i mean nobody seems to come of this and somehow not one of the best athletes. so the point is at the moment we just have a black market if you introduce a watermark if you introduce little side substance you can compete with that market and the cost is always going to be something that gives you some advantages but you narrow the gap between the shootings and the almost athletes that are concerned

about the health you give the honest at least a weapon if you like to complete so you're never going to limit i the problems entirely at the moment you know we're in very poor damage control mode and we should we should we should up that and be more effective in reducing the problem. just let let's break this down really simply i mean is it fair to say that what you're calling for would more or less make it mandatory for all athletes to dope in order to remain competitive well is that you have to ask the question is that now moral is mandatory restless to talk about using you know i don't supervise doping i just as i suspect that's pretty much the answer you know you want to study a number of years ago i asked athletes if you were going to be detected how many of you do so with the little athletes what how many of you would use a jug agent that would guarantee that ninety percent belong to get level athletes so if i would use a substance if i were going to be caught that's probably the reality. and you know

that this is a really controversial topic but we thought it was one that was worth bringing up because guess what we haven't heard a lot of people talking about it and we appreciate you weighing in it's definitely a unique perspective but one that i think you know deserves at least discussing at a great to have you on the show julian savulescu chairman and practical ethics at oxford university thanks very much. well one thing we do know the doping in the olympics goes back hundreds of years and what is banned has changed immensely so what are the highs and lows in the history of doping in the olympics r g correspondent liz wahl came up with a list so let's give out some of our very own r.t. awards to commemorate. well we'll start our awards ceremony with a few honorable mentions these are teams we think at least deserve a shout out the most prominent the german olympic team who could forget those athletes pumped up bodies in the country's huge olympic medals hall despite having less than twenty million citizens thousands of these german athletes were given

steroids and what a german court later called a systematic and overall doping in east german competitive sports these german sports doctors gave athletes anabolic steroids and testosterone when they were as young as thirteen years old the drugs cause side effects like cancer organ damage infertility and more and we want to give an honorable mention to the united states track and field team more than one hundred athletes including nineteen medalist from different sports tested positive for banned substances from one nine hundred eighty eight to two thousand but somehow they were cleared by internal appeals processes and allowed to compete according to a thirty thousand page report from dr wade eggs a former u.s. olympic committee doping chief the scandal brought about the u.s. doping agency anti-doping agency that is and now to the individual medal awards the bronze this award goes posthumously to nude and jensen at the one nine hundred sixty games in rome the danish cyclist took ranya call right before his race

a drug meant to increase blood circulation he also took an amphetamine but the drugs didn't have the intended effect jensen collapsed during the race and fractured his skull he was pronounced dead shortly after in a roman hospital his death led to the institution of drug testing at all a limpid games now for the silver this medal goes to canada's ross county he still has his gold from the one nine hundred ninety eight and gone a winter games for the first ever men's giant slalom in snowboarding after winning the gold tested positive for marijuana the international olympic committee stripped him of his gold but the next day the i.o.c. . he gave the gold back to a because it realized it didn't have the power to take it that's because the i.o.c. didn't have an agreement on marijuana he said that the marijuana in his bloodstream must have been inhaled second hand at a going away party but even if he smoked a big fatty right before the race the i.o.c.

couldn't do anything about it and now for the gold sometimes you can't tell the first in one thousand nine hundred eighty gunner legion wall was the first athlete ever disqualified he got his medal stripped for drug use but he wasn't amphetamines or steroids the swedish pens at least drink two beers before the pistol shooting part of the competition it may have calm his nerves but it certainly made the i.o.c. jittery his bronze was taken from him but we hope this gold is some compensation and as the games of the thirtieth olympiad take over in london tonight we also want to take a different look at how the games have changed over the decades what used to be a world wide celebration of competition has now turned into what you could call a very revealing event are you going to see it you're going to have a look at how these athletes are cashing in using their bodies. faster higher stronger bodies built like machines and olympic extravaganza of athletes graced

magazine covers baring it all it would be nice to say it like to not look at these athletes like you know these are special specimens almost members of a different race but these are people just like us they could they could help us strive to do better their superhuman bodies are on display in a competition for attention and personal exposure the olympic gold it's not just the the gold at the athletes when and we're but the good old of all these endorsements and all this disability you know they want to cash in on it's their moment in the sun unfortunately i think that undermines the olympic goal and ideal . the original idea was an old trick but it's and human might crash the olympic dream and culture now transformed into a glossy images of athletes striking a pose in the nude the original olympics were performed completely naked so you could pick the case this is turning back to the original form of the olympics and

while london will see plenty of action and t.v. coverage some people will choose not to watch simply because of its location i don't think london's a fun city to have a dent and the brits are boring people so i'm not interested. in an ever expanding entertainment culture surrounding the olympics tells p.r. is good news for the show and the fifteen minutes of fame and opportunity not to be missed you've got hundreds of athletes who come back to nothing and a lot of them really look back and say well what did i get out of the last four years i could have made more money being a manager in a donald the corporation that's one of the biggest sponsors of the olympics is on a journey of what could be using that while the athletes are busy promoting their stunning bodies mcdonnell sets up to join in the world outside the olympic stadium a record one hundred fifty thousand condoms are also being distributed at. the olympic village that's roughly fifteen condoms for each athlete some argue sexing

up the olympics is slowly racing the true meaning of these historic games the marathon really became into effect and they based it off this is a great story i'm a guy that's a pita coming from wanting you know citizens about basically how the war was ending with the persians and going to twenty five miles and just having bleeding feet and how that is by the marathon for what it is today and instead the olympics of today inspired finger pointing and more excuses in the u.s. to blame its nemesis china why are the teams olympic uniforms made in china i think they should take all the uniforms put him in a big pile and burn them underlying just a tad more hypocrisy if you look at apple computer they make everything in china most of their actual production virtually all of it is made in china most americans who buy apple computers and there are many they may be the first american who ever touched that computer since no american probably touched it during the assembly. or

surrounding the olympics of today's anything but waste sportsmanship appears to be the last guest joining this party and if they see a church in a new york. and it's not just the athletes tens of thousands of people have descended on london for the games and the associated press is one of many publications that has released some tips on a limb pick etiquette for all those out of towners in london unfamiliar with the culture there they include the following when in doubt cue in american english that means get in line and be patient the tips include a warning that all the times that queue jumping will be met with by glares and furious tut tutting also remember you got to drive on the left stand on the right so on the road be sure you know to drive on the left and on the escalators in london as in washington d.c. walk on the left stand on the right also make sure you get around in one of my favorites if you're with a group of people in a london pub each member of the group is expected to take a turn at buying

a round of drinks for everyone buying a drink only for yourself is considered exceptionally rude also except slim down to portions restaurant portion sizes are often smaller while everywhere in the united states but especially britain i know it's shocking but you might notice that there is a lower obesity rate there as well all right so a huge production is made out of the olympics but it's all about is it all about putting on a big show or is there genuine majority interest laurie harvest with a resident on that ask this question to those she came across on the streets of new york city. do you really care about the olympics this week let's talk about that are you excited about the olympics i know i'm here. but is it crazy back home because of it yeah and we got out what are you excited about well team usa i hope we go all the

way to be really great does that mean we're the best country in the world if we win all the gold medals oh i don't know about that people really aren't that into track and field and not so much you know then the swimming you know the media build up between. phelps and his rival you know but you don't even know the name of the right man even to give his name on the front just finish tonight. for a minute do you think that the olympics are kind of a way to just distract people from what's really going on might be you know from your problems do you think people remember the names of all the athletes three months after the olympics are done i guess it depends what kind of sponsorships they've got and what advertisements are doing but yeah if their names are in plays and in lights everywhere yeah they're selling us wheaties yes exactly those athletes yeah they'll be remembered a lot of them probably wouldn't be you know i guess a sort all some boss that did pushups in london for a double decker bus or

a big push ups that i might for the olympics. that's insane so they're trying to yeah they're getting they're getting people excited anyway that they can what is why do they do that just for the good of sports i have no idea probably just try to drum up some more money for the country at that right over here tourism you know historically the olympics is something that's always meant to be a unifying action yes so it doesn't that kind of take away from that message of unification when it comes down to just drumming up business. yeah greed is unfortunately taking over the priority of some folks whether or not you care about the olympics the bottom line is you should be prepared to be bombarded by a lot of media coverage in the coming week. all right well it turns out this weekend isn't all about the olympics the two men

fighting to occupy the white house for the next four years seem to also be fighting to prove their love for a country many lawmakers here in washington refer to as our great and closest ally israel today president obama side the signs of the united states israel in hand security cooperation act of two thousand and twelve bolstering the u.s. commitment to the defense of israel and also releasing an additional seventy million dollars in military aid for israel there's announcement comes on the heels of a visit to israel by republican presidential candidate mitt romney a visit that it turns out is anything but uncommon so why israel what if you substitute israel for the names of another country it might look something like this i feel as sure or shared with you a very special connection to looks and bird care and i have been looks in bird we bought one of those. tiles that said pray for the peace of luxembourg strategic in all for under

a period ministration will increase to looks and bird all right but seriously as we mentioned this is in many ways a rite of passage in american politics so we take a deeper look into this tradition and its history. the long past the shadows of the sunshine state thank you saw the were and the cornfields of iowa there are was another required campaign stop for any u.s. presidential candidate i can tell you to say that. jerusalem will be the capital of israel here's then candidate obama in israel in two thousand and eight and many others before him mitt romney's visit comes just days after he slammed president obama for his lack of loyalty to israel or the people of israel deserve better than what they receive from the leader of the free world and the course. and the chorus of accusations and threats and insults at the united nations should never again

include the voice of the president of the united states many say the heart of this matter lies with two important constituencies those two constituencies are. christian fundamentalists particularly those in the republican party and a certain percentage of jewish americans those who are wealthy donors to both parties wealthy donors like to see no mogul sheldon adelson who recently made a ten million dollar donation to romney super pac restore our future the largest gift yet according to forbes magazine adelson has said his top priority is supporting and protecting israel the money also flows generously from the american israel public affairs committee or a pac one of the wealthiest and most influential lobbying groups in washington it has helped keep israel a top priority in the eyes of most lawmakers it's important that mitt romney go to

israel particularly since these are the most very dangerous times as you know the talks with iran predictably have failed iran one of many concerns associated with israel as well as its future borders which the president spoke about last year we believe the borders of israel and palestine should be based on the nine hundred sixty seven lines with mutually agreed swaps and idea criticized heavily by members of both parties romney among them just before bibi netanyahu came to united states if you will is the one of the best it must try to negotiate for israel typically the jewish american vote has leaned heavily to the left in two thousand and eight obama got seventy nine percent of it mccain twenty one percent it just goes to show that the issue of israel itself is not a partisan one and over time as how to be a place that both sides agree is a mandatory stop. on the campaign trail in washington christine freeze out r t.

let's switch gears now to syria some of the pictures coming out of the violence are just difficult to watch inside the country. the violence has been raging for months of course and the death toll reportedly in the thousands of arties policy takes us to the israel syria border where war war voyeurs are lining up to try to get a look at what's going on up close and personal you don't get to base a ringside seats in the this is the israeli syrian border and it's now also the latest israeli troops to traction feels good to be able to get close to with a little bit besides seeing only the items on television i was actually thrilled to come here today to over look into syria to realize that with only a few kilometers in that country unfortunately there are hundreds of and of people being killed every day. it's the perfect spot it seems for war voices keen on

getting a glimpse of syrians killing each other all from a safe vantage point the only hard way they carry binoculars and cameras are you rely on our armed forces that they are. of the situation and take all the precautions and so i feel i feel very safe you see both his family to see where he forty against the syrians nearly fifty years ago the border areas which could erupt again as the free syrian army takes on assad forces near israel but for now it's good business and tour guides are making a killing it's really something that you want to see some oh i know it's war and or might not be present but there is an attraction to the fair that factually occupies the media now it's like you feel you are in the center of stuff the fog was sparked when israeli defense minister who came to see for himself what was going on. here in the border was real fighting in syria and you can hear the noise and stalling

here we are one kilometer from. here booth cotton couldn't wait to get the jewish parents fled syria in the early fifty's for this visit is a dream come true it's like the promotion because my parents lived there and they told me that they really bury these full with all the people and that's why we went . over some to a groups are now thinking of including the syrian unrest on their list of must see excursions they maybe day trips now but disasters on the horizon should the fighting get closer until of if choose to get involved. on the israeli syrian border. well that's going to do it for now but for the latest information on the stories we covered today and a few things we didn't have time to get to check out our web site r t dot com slash usa and if you're about to leave the house and don't forget to take us with you watch the show streaming live at r.t.e. on air or go to youtube dot com slash r t america to catch the interviews after and

don't forget to leave us your comments feedback and story suggestions because they were listening you can also follow me on twitter i'm actress jane for is out and i'll be back here at the top of the hour with more news. we just put a picture of me when i was like nine years old on the field with fruit. i confess and i am a total get a friend that i love grabbing hip hop music and pretty. much it was kind of a yesterday. i'm very proud of the role without you it's played.