View From The Couch - 16/Aug/2016

'Eddie The Eagle'

Goodness, the Olympics are on and what do I end up watching? I watch a movie about a guy who barely made the cut and did pretty badly to make a spectacle of himself. I've really not followed the Olympics this time and I feel a secret guilt about it, but there's only so much Beach Volleyball and Swimming I can take. I've seen snippets of other events but I'm just finding it hard to get into it this time around.

'Eddie The Eagle' is a feel-good comedy that is built from the template of 'Cool Runnings'. Eddie the Eagle himself has said he likes the film but only 5% of what happened in it are true. So, it's basically 95% a crock, and it plays like that too. The cool coach that teaches Eddie just enough to get in to the competition played by Hugh Jackman? complete bollocks. The backstory of the coach? Complete bollocks. Otherwise the story is a beat-by-beat re-run of 'Cool Runnings' except it's a hopeless Englishman instead of 4 Jamaicans in the snow, and Eddie finishes his event but he's utterly below standard so even the moral victory of it is suspect.

Now, the Olympics have changed the rules so there won't ever be an Eddie The Eagles style competitor. It raises the question as to whether that is still in the spirit of Coubertin's original ideas about Olympic Games. Today it is undeniably an exercise in elitism so it's hard to say to the common person in any given country they should be enthused about all this sport. In a sense, Eddie The Eagle himself and the rule he spawned combined, is the reductio ad absurdum of Coubertin's ideal that the point wasn't winning or losing but the struggle. The modern Games as we know them certainly puts a lie to that one. It is about elite athletes winning and losing.

Of course, it was bleeding obvious by the way our media carries on about our swimmers.

Sports Nationalism Is Actually Boring

This business of spending taxpayers' money on athletes to bring back gold medals is a bit on the nose. There's a certain level whereby if an athlete wants to become elite and perform at the Olympics, they're really doing it for themselves. They're not doing it for their country, really. Certainly not in the same way that soldiers go and fight under a flag do it. Is all this fuss really necessary? Is there any reason on God' Green Earth that Australia needs even one more medal of any colour?

When I think about the summer Olympic gold medals won by Australia, the two that pop into mind are old ones. John Sieben snuck by for gold in LA '84. That same year Dean Lukin won a gold in weight lifting - mainly because the Soviets boycotted the LA Games, and so his major rivals were entirely absent. Both of them sort of were serendipitous, which underlies the notion that Olympic Gold medals are thus precious because fate is so random. When it gets down to Winter Games gold medals, the mot memorable will always be Steve Bradbury, mainly because his win illustrates exactly how fickle and wanton fortunes of the Games can be.

In none of these cases were our national profile raised any higher, none of these cases really added to GDP or contributed to the betterment of mankind. It had about a couple days' worth of good feeling and that was it. The wins - watched from afar - were more akin to going to a really good rock concert. The buzz wears off pretty quickly and memories of Olympics past are pretty ordinary things next to other televised-memory-merchandise. We spend millions on it and then divide up the spending with numbers medals won. I'm here to tell you it's just not doing it for me. I'd really rather they spent that money on health and education. Really. If it's so damn important to our society, sports funding is one area of the government I'd be entirely happy to privatise. Sport is important, but no that important. There's something truly demented about where we've come to with our engagement with sport.

Madness Masquerading As Politics

This has got to be the theme of 2016 - and I'm not talking about Donald Trump. It's our own Senator Malcolm Roberts, he of the second One Nation ticket into the senate.

We've elected Norman Gunston to the Senate.
How did it come to this? We're not a nation of complete nongs. We're a nation who made a hero, across several generations of children, of a physicist who's trademark line was a four-word advertisement for science.

"Why is it so?" Julius Sumner Miller would ask, and we relied on science to provide the answer. Even Mrs Marsh tapped the boffin in us, with her chalk dipped in dye celebrating the benefits of fluoride. "It does get in!" said the kids, believing the evidence of their own eyes. 

Oh no it doesn't, would be Malcolm Roberts' reply, perhaps with a triumphant assertion that teeth aren't made of chalk. And to the question "Why is it so?", he might reply, as he did on Q&A: it's a NASA stitch-up. 

Roberts: "First of all, that the data has been corrupted and we know…"
Cox: "What do you mean by 'corrupted'? What do you mean?"
Roberts: "Been manipulated…"
Cox: "By who?"
Roberts: "By NASA."
Cox: "NASA?!" 

The audience erupted in laughter, as Cox pressed: "This is quite serious" - before Jones tried to restore decorum.

"We have to hear what is being said here," Jones admonished. "It is all very well to laugh but we have to hear what is being said." 

Actually, it was hearing what was said that was the problem, as panellist Lily Serna, a mathematician, noted: "First of all, I cannot believe we're having this conversation." Discussing the scientific consensus on climate change, she told Roberts: "You don't ask your architect to read your medical charts just as you don't ask your accountant to perform surgery on you."

Good Grief Charlie Brown. I guess it's important to expose the man for exactly what he is, a wilful  nutjob who indulges in conspiracy theories in order not to face reality. That we have elected such a fantasist to the Parliament is truly astounding. As if a portion of the population - 77 votes, apparently - is infected by a particularly powerful strain of stupid, and somehow their views had to be reflected in the polity.

View From The Couch - 26/Jul/2016

Runaway Trump

Since confirming his nomination as GOP nominee for the POTUS elections, the critiques, the attacks and brickbats have mounted against Donald Trump. It's game on for everybody to have a hack.

First cab off the rank was Michael Moore who pessimistically prognosticated a Trump win.

I can see what you’re doing right now. You’re shaking your head wildly – “No, Mike, this won’t happen!” Unfortunately, you are living in a bubble that comes with an adjoining echo chamber where you and your friends are convinced the American people are not going to elect an idiot for president. You alternate between being appalled at him and laughing at him because of his latest crazy comment or his embarrassingly narcissistic stance on everything because everything is about him. And then you listen to Hillary and you behold our very first female president, someone the world respects, someone who is whip-smart and cares about kids, who will continue the Obama legacy because that is what the American people clearly want! Yes! Four more years of this! 

You need to exit that bubble right now. You need to stop living in denial and face the truth which you know deep down is very, very real. Trying to soothe yourself with the facts – “77% of the electorate are women, people of color, young adults under 35 and Trump cant win a majority of any of them!” – or logic – “people aren’t going to vote for a buffoon or against their own best interests!” – is your brain’s way of trying to protect you from trauma. Like when you hear a loud noise on the street and you think, “oh, a tire just blew out,” or, “wow, who’s playing with firecrackers?” because you don’t want to think you just heard someone being shot with a gun. It’s the same reason why all the initial news and eyewitness reports on 9/11 said “a small planeaccidentally flew into the World Trade Center.” We want to – we need to – hope for the best because, frankly, life is already a shit show and it’s hard enough struggling to get by from paycheck to paycheck. We can’t handle much more bad news. So our mental state goes to default when something scary is actually, truly happening. The first people plowed down by the truck in Nice spent their final moments on earth waving at the driver whom they thought had simply lost control of his truck, trying to tell him that he jumped the curb: “Watch out!,” they shouted. “There are people on the sidewalk!” 

Well, folks, this isn’t an accident. It is happening. And if you believe Hillary Clinton is going to beat Trump with facts and smarts and logic, then you obviously missed the past year of 56 primaries and caucuses where 16 Republican candidates tried that and every kitchen sink they could throw at Trump and nothing could stop his juggernaut. As of today, as things stand now, I believe this is going to happen – and in order to deal with it, I need you first to acknowledge it, and then maybe, just maybe, we can find a way out of the mess we’re in.

It's not a happy thought, and he's right in assuming we're all in denial that this is going on.

The more urgent hit came from the Washington Post, famous as the home of the guys who brought down Richard Nixon. This time it appears they're not taking any chances.

DONALD J. TRUMP, until now a Republican problem, thisweek became a challenge the nation must confront and overcome. The real estate tycoon is uniquely unqualified to serve as president, in experience and temperament. He is mounting a campaign of snarl and sneer, not substance. To the extent he has views, they are wrong in their diagnosis of America’s problems and dangerous in their proposed solutions. Mr. Trump’s politics of denigration and division could strain the bonds that have held a diverse nation together. His contempt for constitutional norms might reveal the nation’s two-century-old experiment in checks and balances to be more fragile than we knew. 

Any one of these characteristics would be disqualifying; together, they make Mr. Trump a peril. We recognize that this is not the usual moment to make such a statement. In an ordinary election year, we would acknowledge the Republican nominee, move on to the Democratic convention and spend the following months, like other voters, evaluating the candidates’ performance in debates, on the stump and in position papers. This year we will follow the campaign as always, offering honest views on all the candidates. But we cannot salute the Republican nominee or pretend that we might endorse him this fall. A Trump presidency would be dangerous for the nation and the world.

And on it goes, right down to the end where they say:

The party’s failure of judgment leaves the nation’s future where it belongs, in the hands of voters. Many Americans do not like either candidate this year . We have criticized the presumptive Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, in the past and will do so again when warranted. But we do not believe that she (or the Libertarian and Green party candidates, for that matter) represents a threat to the Constitution. Mr. Trump is a unique and present danger.

Look, I don't know about you, but the candidacy of Donald Trump and the surprising Brexit vote and even the election of Tony Abbott indicates a world where democracy seems to have one to mean much less than it used to. We seem to be voting in favour of less tolerant less meaningful, less nuanced, less informed, less intelligent positions in spite of ourselves. A little like how we seem to like to cut off our noses to spite our own faces or cut off our dicks to spite our balls. We should know better than to be voting in the likes of Abbott or Turnbull, or listening to demagogues lie Farage, Gove and Boris Johnson, or for that matter making one Donald J. Trump a serious candidate for the Presidency of the most powerful nation on the planet on nothing but a promise to make that land great again (whatevertjhe hell that means). There are a lot of asshole voters giving into their inner fascist assholes in the first world.
I don't exactly relate to that mentality.

In that light, it is perhaps valuable to assay the catastrophes of the past that we as humans inflicted upon ourselves.

So zooming out, we humans have a habit of going into phases of mass destruction, generally self imposed to some extent or another. This handy list shows all the wars over time. Wars are actually the norm for humans, but every now and then something big comes along. I am interested in the Black Death, which devastated Europe. The opening of Boccaccio’s Decameron describes Florence in the grips of the Plague. It is as beyond imagination as the Somme, Hiroshima, or the Holocaust. I mean, you quite literally can’t put yourself there and imagine what it was like. For those in the midst of the Plague it must have felt like the end of the world. 

But a defining feature of humans is their resilience. To us now it seems obvious that we survived the Plague, but to people at the time it must have seemed incredible that their society continued afterwards. Indeed, many takes on the effects of the Black Death are that it had a positive impact in the long term. Well summed up here: “By targeting frail people of all ages, and killing them by the hundreds of thousands within an extremely short period of time, the Black Death might have represented a strong force of natural selection and removed the weakest individuals on a very broad scale within Europe,“ …In addition, the Black Death significantly changed the social structure of some European regions. Tragic depopulation created the shortage of working people. This shortage caused wages to rise. Products prices fell too. Consequently, standards of living increased. For instance, people started to consume more food of higher quality.” 

But for the people living through it, as with the World Wars, Soviet Famines, Holocaust, it must have felt inconceivable that humans could rise up from it. The collapse of the Roman Empire, Black Death, Spanish Inquisition, Thirty Years War, War of the Roses, English Civil War… it’s a long list. Events of massive destruction from which humanity recovered and move on, often in better shape. 

At a local level in time people think things are fine, then things rapidly spiral out of control until they become unstoppable, and we wreak massive destruction on ourselves. For the people living in the midst of this it is hard to see happening and hard to understand. To historians later it all makes sense and we see clearly how one thing led to another. During the Centenary of the Battle of the Somme I was struck that it was a direct outcome of the assassination of an Austrian Arch Duke in Bosnia. I very much doubt anyone at the time thought the killing of a minor European royal would lead to the death of 17 million people. 

My point is that this is a cycle. It happens again and again, but as most people only have a 50–100 year historical perspective they don’t see that it’s happening again. As the events that led to the First World War unfolded, there were a few brilliant minds who started to warn that something big was wrong, that the web of treaties across Europe could lead to a war, but they were dismissed as hysterical, mad, or fools, as is always the way, and as people who worry about Putin, Brexit, and Trump are dismissed now.

It makes for some sobering reading. The rest of it is no less somber and sobering. History tells us we're heading in for some self-destructive times. We'd better take note.

Meanwhile The Arseholes We Have Down Here

It's no secret Kevin Rudd wants to be the Secretary General of the UN. He has two problems on that front. One is that the Australian government hats officially endorse him as the Australian candidate. The other is that Helen Clarke is also running. While none of this is fresh news, the Australian Government has prevaricated mightily over Kevin Rudd's candidacy. In short, they don't want to give him the nod in cabinet. Why? Partisan politics.

Except John Key over in New Zealand's quite happy to endorse Helen Clark, who was the NZ Labour Prime Minister.

Mr Key, who hails from the conservative National Party in New Zealand, is barracking hard for his former Labour party rival Ms Clark to become the UN Secretary-General.
It marks a curious contrast with his Australian counterpart, Malcolm Turnbull, still struggling to decide whether his government will do the same for Mr Rudd. 

Mr Key also revealed he had spoken to Mr Turnbull about the race and was quizzed about whether he'd asked him not to support Mr Rudd. 

"I've had a couple of chats with him about it," Mr Key told breakfast television in New Zealand, but was coy about details. 

"All I'd say is if any person wants to be in the race, be in the race … You've got to get either your host country, preferably, or a country, to nominate you. At the moment, he [Mr Rudd] doesn't have a country nominating him. 

"I still think anyway, if it's a drag race between Kevin Rudd and Helen Clark, New Zealanders - and I reckon a hell of a lot of Australians - know who the best candidate is, and it's not Kevin Rudd."

It's all bit academic really, because the man in the lead is Antonio Guterres from Portugal. All the same, it's worth pointing out that Kevin Rudd was quite nice to departing Coalition politicians. The least they could do is return the damn favour. The fact that they don't immediately say yes says tons about these people. 

IOC Takes A Stand Against Doping And Passes The Buck

Nobody really has spine. 

It seemed a mere formality that the entire Russian team would be rubbed out, saving the Olympics any more of the embarrassment that the host city keeps heaping on itself with incomplete facilities. 

There was an expectation – not a mere desire – that Russia would be excluded.
Instead, the Olympic Committee's executive board has displayed the type of leadership that allows doping to flourish: it passes the buck and instructs individual sporting federations to decide which Russian athletes can compete in Rio. 

In other words, it has been left to sporting federations to wade through a legal minefield … in 12 days. 

Some of these sporting federations are loyal to Russia and the bottomless money it provides. Some are too scared. Some are complicit to doping themselves, turning a blind eye to the poison in their own sport and yes, cycling, we are looking at you. 

The IOC has had an appalling bet each-way. Foremost, it is a slap in the face for WADA, which has again been undermined. 

"WADA is disappointed that the IOC did not heed WADA's Executive Committee recommendations that were based on the outcomes of the McLaren investigation and would have ensured a straight-forward, strong and harmonised approach," WADA president Sir Craig Reedie said. "The McLaren Report exposed, beyond a reasonable doubt, a state-run doping program in Russia that seriously undermines the principles of clean sport embodied within the World Anti-Doping Code." 

That's not a few rogue athletes. That's not even a rogue sport. That's a rogue country. If the same happened here, we'd be calling for Royal Commissions, lifetime bans and jail time for those responsible.

Oh the outrage blahblahblah. As I asked - rhetorically - in my previous entry, are we done with this PED hysteria yet? We really need a new approach to the problem especially if the body that allegedly is in most favour of the current method of shaming athletes and banning them, won't back itself to carry out its policies. Go figure.  

We live in a world where haters are gonna hate and cheaters are gonna cheat. It's just the way it goes when sport is anachronistically wrapped up in nationalism of 200-odd nations,some of whom have no shot at any medal, but more importantly some of whom whose national pride depends upon it. Like Russia and Australia. The dumbest thing about the Olympics is how somebody from some nation wins a gold medal and the whole nation gets to thump their chest over that win. This idiotic bit of identification is bolstered by nationalist sentiment and misplaced identity politics. These are really 19th century kinds of modes of thinking, unbecoming of the 21st century. Yet here we are again at another Olympic Games ready urge our boys and girls on to medals. 

Go you beautiful Aussies as you swim through the raw sewerage waters of Rio! Do we relate to this experience? Really?  

PED Offences And Russian Sport

The Olympic Games And Their Dwindling Appeal

With every passing year the Olympics loses its lustre and allure. Maybe I'm saying that because we've had ours in Sydney and it's fading into memory and history every year. Yeah 2000 was grand but every Olympic since has made you wonder if it's really right or worth it. 2004 Athens and the Greeks who ended up with the GFC and austerity?; 2008 Beijing and the self-congratulatory navel-gazing?; 2012 London which was okay, but then it's London so it's hard to go wrong; and now Rio with all the reported problems that make you not want to fall in to the water at all. As for the Winter Games? There's been Sochi with guards beating up on Pussy Riot and all the other unmemorable events, and if you're an Aussie it's hard to take the Winter Games as seriously anyway, seeing that we'll never stage one.

Now that I think about it Baseball got kicked out of the Olympic Games because of the doping scandals in the mid 2000s. They kicked out Softball with it, which was a bit like punishing Table Tennis because Maria Sharapova tested positive. And they added Golf and none of the top players in Golf are going to play at Rio because... Zika virus, apparently. I guess golfers are susceptible to acephalic medical conditions. All of which makes you wonder if the Olympics actually have relevance to the rest of the world of sport. Think of all the sports that aren't contested at the Games and they now include Baseball, Softball, Cricket, and Rugby. But hey, they have Volleyball AND Beach Volleyball as separate, discrete sports. Sports we don't watch unless it's on because of the Olympics.

Quite simply, the Olympic Games is like a bundle package of obscure sports we only want to watch once every 4 years. The sports that aren't there are the staple sports we like to watch regularly. It's a big gap. Baseball, Cricket and Rugby don't need to be at the Olympics at all and can sustain their global audiences quite nicely. It's sports like Track and Field and Swimming that need to be at the Olympics, and probably Table Tennis too. Golf and Tennis? Clearly not so much. Basketball of course started the joke of inviting highly professionalised sport into what used to be the pinnacle of amateur sports. 1992 USA vs. Angola Basketball game was 'fun' (if you enjoy a team of professionals smash through country amateurs), but totally not in the Olympic spirit.

Anyway, all of these things have made me reconsider how I feel about the Olympic Games, and I have to say I'm less enamoured of them today than I was in 2000.

So, here's the news that Russia's Track and Field athletes are out for Rio.

Russia's Whole Track And Field Team Is Out For Rio

It's quite disturbing really.

The Court of Arbitration for Sport said on Thursday it had rejected Russia's appeal against the exclusion of its track and field athletes from the Rio Games starting on August 5, opening the door to a full ban on Russian athletes from the Olympics.
"CAS rejects the claims/appeal of the Russian Olympic Committee and 68 Russian athletes," CAS said in a statement. 

The ruling by the CAS, sport's highest tribunal, will be taken into consideration by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) as it ponders whether to impose a blanket ban on Russia from all sports. 

The affair has triggered a crisis in world sport, with Russian President Vladimir Putin speaking of the risk of a split in the Olympic movement. 

Russian track and field athletes were banned from international competition in November after an independent commission set up by the World Anti-Doping Agency found rampant state-sponsored doping in Russian athletics. 

The ban was imposed by the IAAF, the global governing body for athletics, which reconfirmed it last month, saying there were still considerable problems with anti-doping in Russia. 

The appeal was launched by the Russian Olympic Committee (ROC) and 68 Russian athletes who said they were being punished despite not having failed drugs tests, and that they should be eligible to compete in Rio.

Thus, if you're an innocent little schlub whose only talent is chucking a spear and you've never done any PEDs, you're still out thanks to those who did in your country and got caught which includes your whole nation's sport administrative institutions. The problem is you don't choose to which country you are born. There is no point at which the innocent go unpunished in this WADA regimen.
Clearly it's unfair on the innocent, there's no presumption of innocence that would happen in a court of law, and this was the appeals court that just cited precedent to punish the innocent with the guilty. Way to go guys. I can really feel the righteous burn of justice right there... not.

This isn't like the 1919 Black Sox where knowing about the match-fixing and not blowing the whistle got Buck Weaver banned for life from organised Baseball by Kennesaw Mountain Landis. That was done to send message forever eternal that match-fixing threatened the integrity of the game and won't be tolerated. That's kind of a worthy sacrifice. What this is, is like punishing Svetlana Kuznetsova because Maria Sharapova got banned for a failed drug test - even though Kuznetsova had no idea about Sharapova's doping let alone anything to do with it. I'm amazed they're doing this with a straight face.

That's not to say the Russian sports federation doesn't have major issues with doping. Clearly they do.  But 28 years after Ben Johnson, and with what we know today, you'd think the thinking about PEDs might have moved on from the ban-everybody-in-sight routine they've been trotting out forever. There's got to be a better way of dealing with PEDs than what WADA is doing.

Honestly, I've long lost faith that this approach has much merit. I know it's the minority view, but I think we're coming to the point in history where the War on Drugs has failed and we'd better take stock of what that means, right across the pharmaceutical board. That would include admitting PEDs might not be all unilaterally harmful.

Amphetamines, Ephedrine, Pseudoephedrine, Phenylephrine

Once upon a time, Amphetamines were legal over the counter, and they were also PEDs. MLB players took them a lot in the 50s and 60s from what we can gather, until the whole drug abuse thing became such a legal anathema they made amphetamines illegal. Which, I think is an over-reaction.

My ex-friend KJ (we fell out badly but that's another story) had high-powered academics as parents. One of them was even a professor of Pharmacology. They said that when they were doing exams in the 60s, they'd bolster their cramming with Amphetamines. And they didn't turn into crazed drug abusers or mentally compromised brain-disease cases. The worst they would have experienced would have been come-down after the exams, which they also related. The Amphetamines were sold as flu medication to stop nasal congestion.

By the time KJ and I were cramming for our exams at Med School, the Amphetamines were replaced with Ephedrine. Yes you could get Ephedrine over the counter in the 80's and they were really quite good as nasal decongestants. They used to have this ad where you could 'soldier on with Codral', With Ephedrine, you really could sit through days of 3hour exams even with a ringing flu. Then you crashed for a couple of days - but it worked. Even so KJ's parents said it wasn't quite as good as Amphetamines in terms of efficacy.

Of course, Bikie gangs discovered that they could convert Ephedrine into Methamphetamine, a methylated analog of Amphetamine, so they went out and bought up big on Ephedrine in order to produce their Methamphetamine,and sell it as 'Speed'. This led to legislation banning Ephedrine, and so the pharmaceutical companies came out wiht Pseudoephedrine, which once again was not anywhere near as good as its predecessor as a nasal decongestant. It sort of worked, as opposed to really working.

Years went by, and bikie gangs figured out how to make Crystal Meth, otherwise known as 'Ice' out of Pseudophedrine. 'Ice' is by all accounts, a much worse drug than its predecessor 'Speed', which was a worse drug than straight up Amphetamines. Now, the 'Ice Epidemic' has forced Pseudoephedrine off the shelves, replacing it with Phenylepinephrine, which hardly works at all as a nasal decongestant. If things keep going the way they go, the bikies will probably figure out how to make an even worse drug out of Phenylepinephrine than 'Ice' or 'Speed' before it. This will inevitably lead to an even less effective medication replacing Phenylepinephrine; and whatever that medication is, the Bikies will then turn that into an even worse drug than whatever they'll do with Phenylephrine.

The point is, it is the War on Drugs that is enabling this gradual degradation in the quality of medication available to the ordinary innocent consumer, all to stop some people abusing it to get a buzz. That's it. To that end, the Bikies work harder and harder to make worse and worse drugs. Had it just stayed at Amphetamines, and the government not banned it being sold over the counter, it probably would have stayed mundane with some kids giving themselves a buzz. Instead, it's the highly ineffectual Phenylepinephrine that's available over the counter (they might as well be selling placebos) while the Bikies are busy cooking up Crystal Meth like Walter White. It's tremendously difficult to argue we're in a better place for all of this "fighting drugs" business. We're getting all the problems of prohibition without the joy of jazz or speakeasies.

Here's the thing. Lots of these drugs that are banned are actually useful pharmacological substances. Even Heroin has uses as an anaesthetic. When they banned heroin, it took a grea tool out of the hands of Anaesthetists, and any Anaesthetist would be all too happy to tell you that their work is like having a hand tied behind their backs because they had to work with opiate analogs and derivatives when in fact what would really do the trick was Heroin. Yet instead of regulating it like they do with Morphine, they ban it, and the Anaesthetists have to work pretending they don't know about it.

The point of all this is to say, in banning more and more substances for being PEDs, it's driving people into trying more dangerous pharmacological concoctions. Maybe plain old Testosterone might not be so bad in comparison to some of these synthetic drugs that are being created just to pass WADA's tests.

There's just got to be a better way. Certainly there's got to be a better way than punishing the innocent on the presumption of guilt. The first step is admitting there's a problem. We've had 28years trying the prohibition model and predictably, it's not working. There needs to be a total rethink on what drugs are, and what even "performance-enhancing" means.

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.