Enhance
He wasn’t fast enough. He knew it. The players around him knew it. Everyone accepted that as a truth, but Oscar. He expected more out of his aging body. He was 26, which in athletics is a lot closer to sixty than most expect. His dad used to talk about age using the same language he used when he talked about cars. He would sit Oscar down after a tough game and say, “You run your body like you run a car, son. The problem with that is you’re not supposed to run a car hard like that for the first 50,000 miles. It does something awful to the engine; makes it hard to get to the next 50 with any reliability.”
Turns out the old man was right about that. He was right about marriage too, but it wasn’t the sort of thing they ever got to talking about before he died. No, Oscar learned his lessons without the benefit of a long lasting fatherhood, and by the time Oscar became a father and a husband he’d run his engine hot and hard for so long that it wasn’t going to run right for the next 50. Now he was in the next 50 and he didn’t know what to do about that.
Well, he did know what to do, but he had to come to terms with what that meant.
It used to be that people doped. After that the truly desperate turned to bioenhancements and genetic manipulations. In response the league developed a stringent test regimen to check for all of it. In their haste to stop the bio they forgot about the cybernetic. More and more advanced wares were being developed to enhance muscle twitch and development. With the right implant Oscar would be fast again. Faster.