The Curse of PED Shaming

More On The Maria Sharapova PED Positive Test Thing

I've been following the headlines for a couple of days since Maria Sharapova hit us with her bombshell about testing positive. I have to say other people are far more condemning of Sharapova than I was, so maybe I'm the one with the out-of-step view. Although, I find it hard to understand how all these people who follow sport can't get their heads around certain notions. Sometimes I think the visceral hatred directed at offending athletes is bolstered by fairly unreconstructed nationalist fervour more than anything reasoned. That is to say, the condemnation is in proportion to the resentment felt about athletes who lost, who might have lost to PEDs.but I guess she's fair game right now.

Way back in the 1970s when the Olympics were a lot less money-covered, the sport was still firmly amateur and hostile to professional sports. Baseball, Tennis, Soccer and Basketball were nowhere near the five rings every four years. Arguably, the only thing the athletes were competing for was national pride. The Olympic Games as they stand are terribly nationalistic affairs, and taking pride in one's countrymen and women winning gold out there is a kind of proxy war but without violence. During the Cold War, the Eastern Bloc saw fit to juice athletes wholesale and try and grab as many medals as they could. It also coincided with an era when Australia's medal tally dried up, and this was a painful outcome for our national psyche - so much so it gave birth to the Australian Institute of Sport.

Australia has been one of the most vocal countries in combating PEDs, and one suspects it comes from this deep psychological trauma of the 1970s when the East Germans romped home with medals having smashed records which then took three decades to match. Sharapova being Russian by nationality probably scratches at this scar more than Lance Armstrong's efforts. After all, it's been a long time since Australia has produced a female Grand Slam winner. We also produced Shane Warne who tested positive to a PED and he got off with a 1 year ban. So we're certainly a lot more flexible about this topic than our headlines indicate.

The Olympics certainly went weird in the late 1980s, specifically around the time of the Seoul Olympics. This requires a bit of a background too. The Olympic Games were a high prestige but money-losing proposition for some time. A brief back of the envelope digest of the Summer Olympics from the 70s goes - '72 Munich which had a terror attack; '76 Montreal which left Montreal broke; '80 in Moscow which got boycotted by the West because of the USSR's invasion of Afghanistan; '84 in LA which got counter-boycotted by the Eastern Bloc as retaliation for the Moscow boycott. That takes us to '88 Seoul where some of the Professional sports were brought into the tent. These were specifically Tennis, followed by Basketball, Baseball and Soccer.

The absence of professional sport until that moment was the hallmark of the Olympic Games as a brand. You couldn't really make a tonne of money out of winning the Olympics. Consider the big names of the '76 Montreal Olympics: Bruce Jenner (way before becoming Caitlyn) did okay for his Decathlon Gold medal doing the talk circuit, but he was very active in marketing himself. Dorothy Hamill sort of made some money being in ads, but in most part Gold medalists didn't make a tonne of money out of their success. Nadia Comaneci, who scored a perfect 10.00 went home to Romania where she was courted and abused by the son of the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu - not much money in that. In most part these amateur athletes did it for the love of the sport.

The inclusion of professional sport opened the door for more corporate sponsorship, and that meant more money for the athletes as well as the IOC. So it is no coincidence then that Ben Johnson famously tested positive for steroids after beating Carl Lewis in the 100m dash. He wast trying to win so he could get sponsorship money. It was also the moment that blew the door open for PEDs to be a major problem, roughly 16years after the East Germans cleaned up at '72 Munich. It's almost bad luck, really that the moment the Olympics redefined its business model so it could make more money, this horrible little complication burst open on to the scene. There's something deeply ironic that at the Olympics where the IOC figured out how to make money, an athlete cheated and got busted trying to earn sponsorship dollars.


Nice bit of Bruce McAvaney commentary there.
The Ben Johnson bust was a terrible thing. I've spent years since then pondering his race, his win, and then the positive test which disqualified him. He ran the 100m in 9.79 seconds. It was more memorable than just about anything else that happened at '88 Seoul, and then he was stripped of his medal. The IOC established WADA and they test hundred of thousands of athletes a year... and Dick Pound thinks they're not really serious about catching them because catching cheats and exposing them is a scandal with only downside for the relevant sport.

Six out of the eight men who raced in that race were later found to have had ties to doping. Ben Johnson maintains till today that doping is widespread, the drugs are now better, and also harder to detect. For all the people getting busted - which is about 2% of the sample, plenty more are flying under the radar. None of these sports are cleaner than they were in 1988. None. And so we're really left with the results to argue over and people will argue just how much the records are tainted.

Here's the thing: all records are tainted, and nobody will ever know to what degree. If you're a sport fan with any amount of brains, you just have to accept that fact and deal with it. Even if Ben Johnson was disqualified because of PEDs, he did run 100m in 9.79. Carl Lewis got the Gold Medal that day, but he didn't exactly come in first. And this is the same of all these records. They ended up stripping Lance Armstrong of his 7 Tour de France titles, but the man did win them. They haven't handed over his titles to the people who came second because they can't be certain they weren't on PEDs. Rewriting the record books is an undignified response of the anal pedant. Reality is what doesn't go away when you close your eyes.

Perhaps the most significant records to fall in numbers were in Major League Baseball. MLB ran right into the storm with their eyes closed. As a professional sport with 30 teams and 162 games to be played in a schedule per team, putting product on the field for paying audiences meant turning a blind eye to PEDs. Pretty soon hitters bulked up, the batting side of the sport exploded in numbers, and some long-standing records began to tumble. It took until 2004 for MLB to start putting in regulations about PEDs. Until then, it was a seeming free-for-all, as an astounding number of players reached milestones with great ease. 500 homers used to mean something. Players like Rafael Palmeiro and Gary Sheffield who were linked to PEDs made it mean much, much less than it did ten years before. Condemn them as much as you like, the reality is still that these homers were hit and baked into the record books.

As I pointed out previously in the previous post about PEDs, the bigger threat for professional sport isn't a single player trying to get ahead by doing unnaturally better, it's the threat of players tanking and manipulating results for gambling money. To this end, the lessons of the 1919 Back Sox remain with us today with Pete Rose, the sad addendum. Next to Pete Rose, Barry Bonds is ... just not so bad - and there are apologists even for Pete Rose, wanting to reinstate him into baseball and putting him into the Hall of Fame.

So naturally I've come to view all this bicker/banter/brouhaha/balderdash/ballyhoo about PEDs with a more disdainful eye. It seems the moral scales we have for judging players has the sophistication of a comic book's sensibility for moral justice (and perhaps less) while the whole enterprise of sport as business, and sport as entertainment, and sport as this object of fetishistic attachments demands we have an adult, nuanced understanding of the context in which these things happen. Maria Sharapova taking for ten years, a substance that ended up on the banned list is not the worst thing to happen in the world, in sports in general, or even Tennis in particular. It's not. Even the likelihood of Sharapova being a "bad role model" in inspiring younger athletes to take PEDs is actually no higher than if this positive test and press conference had never take place. Besides which, ten years on Maria Sharapova seems to be perfectly in good health in spite of taking this substance - which weakens the argument that the side effects of PEDs can ruin your health; and it's not like the agent would turn another, regular-run-of-the-mill top 50 player into a Maria Sharapova. The indignant condemnations are media hyperbole in a world that has lost perspective.

I don't know how long they will suspend Sharapova. They will likely pick a length which would be arbitrary as any sentence-without-trial. The bottom line is, it's just another aspect to sport that is a media circus. Mistaking it for morality or ethics would be pretty sad.

Lance On Oprah

The Confessional Interview

By now, everybody knows Lance Armstrong 'fessed up to his 'roiding ways. All bets are on for a flurry of court cases from people chasing their money and dignity. Still, you sort of wonder how the sport stayed so blind for so long.

As I pointed out before, even if they take away his bronze medal from Sydney 2000 and strip him of his 7 Tour de France titles, you're left with the accomplishment itself; and God only knows who else was doing what for their placings in all those races. There's simply no undoing this mess.

Although in the bright light of retrospection given his confession, it seems mightily obvious that something was very awry with the sport of cycling if somebody won the Tour 7 times. A cycling athlete once told me that cyclists could be broken into two rough groups: Short guys with lots of torque leading the way through the mountainous terrain and tall guys pumping their way ahead on the flat plains. There really isn't a cyclist who is at once both tall and short, so it is hard for a cyclist to be dominant over the field - unlike say the way Pete Sampras or Roger Federer towered over their field. The athlete said that it was highly unlikely the same competitor won 2 Tours, let alone twice in a row.

And here we had an individual winning it a record seven times. Even if they strip him of his wins, nobody is ever going to win as many as seven tours without some kind of help. It's just that kind of sport and that kind of race. So they can strip Armstrong of these honours, but over time I think the seven abandoned results are going to mean something totally different, for, unlike Ben Johnson's tainted 100m sprint record from Seoul 1988, nobody 'doing it fair' is going to go past 7 wins let alone come close.

And there it would sit, in everybody's consciousness that one time, a man with the help of medical science was able to accomplish the impossible. We may berate him for being a cheat today, but we may well come to a different understanding at some point in the future.

In The Shadow Of PEDs

Lancing the Boil? I Don't Think So

This whole Lance Armstrong situation with his alleged PED use is getting much attention and I was going to write something about it yesterday when the USADA released the dirt it had on Lance Armstrong. The fallout from that report has been far reaching, and once again cycling is embroiled in a scandal about performance enhancing drugs. What's even more dramatic is how Lance Armstrong has had his seven Tour de France wins taken away from him in the record books, although you wonder if the guys who came second in those races automaitcally get declared winners; and whether they're going to get their big recognition in a group presentation event. I doubt they'll do that.

As with all these things, it's all circumstantial evidence, but a good mountain-load of it; meanwhile Lance Armstrong has quit the sport and won't address the issue at all. We can only conclude from this that he probably did PEDs, and now he's going to play the plausible deniability strategy right down to the line of utter, abject, total, improbability. You can only wish him luck in trying to persuade the world. Cycling is consequently in another one of its terrible turmoils, but in some ways this is no different to Major League Baseball. You could argue that at least the cheats are getting caught, even if it's too late.

I might have blogged this a long while ago, maybe in one of the earlier incarnations of this blog, but I'm basically a great sceptic when it comes to sports and the record book. I have no choice, given the times I have lived in.

It started with Ben Johnson at the 1988 Seoul Olympics, and since then there have been a great deal many names who have been outed and hounded. Yet, Ben Johnson's record stood unofficially for many years until quite recently when Usain Bolt started running amazing times. Carl Lewis ended up with the gold medal from Seoul in that event as Ben Johnson was disqualified, but years later, Carl Lewis himself was linked to to PEDs. More recently, Car Lewis has cast aspersions on the Jamaican sprint team suggesting they were doping in an elaborate manner.  If you said that Carl Lewis' suspicions were credible, it would mean that Ben Johnson's time in Seoul can only be beaten with more PEDs. And that's just one example of how vexing the record book has become.

After Ben Johnson in 1988, I came to the conclusion that the PED problem was a problem of technological advancement, and that as new drugs were developed, there would have to be ever mew ways of testing for them. Whatever the case, no record book was going to be safe. I imagined a world where some sports would simply smash record after record with PEDs, while others stayed relatively inert, and with little excitement surrounding them.

Of course, the way this played out in the 1990s was that Major League Baseball's players embraced PEDs, giving rise to amazing historic seasons by the likes of Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa and Barry Bonds, all on the backs of PEDs. After a long dearth, suddenly these hitters were producing seasons that matched or broke the feats of Babe Ruth's greatest season. It was unthinkable if you exercised a rational statistical analysis, but suddenly McGwire and Bonds were not only smashing past Ruth's single season mark of 60 homeruns in 154 games AND Roger Maris' mark of 61 homeruns in 164games, they were posting 70+ homeruns.

Then, in the 2000s, they were all found out. Some said the record books were tainted, others argued that the record books were already tainted by 'Greenies' (amphetamines) in the 1950s and 1960s. It was worth asking, even if only rhetorically, what the hell did all of this mean? Consider for the moment that 3 out of the 4 members of the 40HR-40SB in a single season club Barry Bonds Jose Canseco, Alex Rodriguez were linked to steroids in their careers. The fourth member is Alfonso Soriano, and who knows if he was on PEDs that year that he accomplished the feat? It may come out yet.

And in some ways, this is the exact crux of the biscuit that Ben Johnson sits on in Seoul 1988, and Lance Armstrong with his 7 Tour de France wins, and the 70 McGwire homeruns and the 73 Bonds homeruns, and whoever else that won on the back of PEDs and got found out. The feats themselves cannot be undone. As per the joke, you cannot unfuck the goat. We may never know about Usain Bolt, but if we ever find out that he used PEDs, then it's him on the same crux of the biscuit as Ben Johnson.So now, Usain Bolt is in PED purgatory with Alfonso Soriano and other record-setting athletes. Is it even fair that they get suspected?

What can these accomplishments possibly mean? If Lance Armstrong didn't really win those 7 Tour de Frances because he was on PEDs, then what can it possibly mean to win the Tour de France?

It's a mess - And we're doomed to go through this again, some way down the track. Somebody is going to invent something that will enhance performances, and it will slip through the testing net; and as long as it's there slipping through, we'll never be sure that hat we're seeing is what we think we are seeing in sport. The old adage used to be that only the sport scores were the unvarnished truth and facts reported in the newspaper. We find ourselves that even that is no longer true. It's a fine mess.

So back to this Lance Armstrong thing. I can't offer up anything for fans of cycling as to how to digest this fact. Armstrong was on PEDs, and he did it so well and systematically, he never got caught red handed. By doing so, he won an un-Godly 7 Tour de France titles - and that is likely so off the charts that you will never witness that again if you lived to 100 in the absence of PEDs. It's so off the charts that even a non-cycling fan like me knew about it. It's going to take a long time to digest and understand what exactly all that means in the sport of cycling. I sure as hell don't know what to make of all these steroid tainted records I witnessed in the making. If there is one bit of advice I have, it is this: no amount of moralising is going to make this reality better. That much is most certainly sure.