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.

Maria Sharapova Tests Positive

Maria Sharapova's PED Infringement

Maria Sharapova got pinged for taking PEDs. The only catch with this one is that she was taking a medication that was legal until 1st of January this year, and then tested positive during the Australian Open.

The ITF said in a statement that "Sharapova will be provisionally suspended with effect from [March 12], pending determination of the case".

The five-times grand slam champion said: "For the past 10 years I have been given a medicine called Mildronate by my doctor, my family doctor and a few days ago after I received the letter I found out that it also has another name of Meldonium which I did not know". 

Sharapova said she received an email from the World Anti-Doping Agency in December that noted changes to tennis' program for 2016. She said that the email including a link to a list of banned substances, but that she did not look at it.

Meldonium is used to treat diabetes and low magnesium and improve blood flow, among other things. 

"It's very important for you to understand that for 10 years this medicine was not on WADA's banned list and I had been legally taking the medicine for the past 10 years," Sharapova said. 

"But on January 1st the rules had changed and Meldonium became a prohibited substance which I had not known."

So now, there's speculation that she can't continue playing if she has to be on this drug, thus spelling the end of her career.  Nike, Porsche, and TAG Heuer promptly dumped her.  Very classy... not. It's not as if she's suddenly turned out to be a big white Russian female Tiger Woods type sex fiend; and last I checked owning a Porsche and a TAG Heuer were great performance enhancers for pulling chicks so I don't see how they have the moral high ground here. After all, Porsche and TAG Heuer stuck photos of Maria Sharapova on their ads with the intent of subliminally telling their target market that if they buy their product, they might have a chance with Maria Sharapova. Yeah, real classy, right there.

Jokes aside, there are some really grey areas developing in the world of sport and drug testing, and this case would be one of those. Tennis is a fully professional sport. The big break with amateurism that happened in the 1960s left great scars on the sport, but in a nutshell, it is one of the sports where the players make money in direct proportion to their performance. While it is customary to argue taking PEDs is cheating, there's an aspect to tennis that indicates the effect of PEDs might not be so dramatic.

For instance if a male player took PEDs for better endurance, there would be an advantage in the fifth set at a grand slam tournament, which happens about 1 in 6 matches across 4 tournaments a year with 127 matches each. Even if the PEDs added a 10% boost performance, its arguable it is not going to be reflected in a 10% winning rate. It is totally unlike Olympic running or sprinting where by a 1%boost in endurance could reflect itself as 10% more chance of winning. In women's tennis, they don't play these 5 set matches at all - ALL of these female tennis athletes have enough endurance to play the 2hours on court through a 3 set match that goes deep into the third set.

This is from the same sport that allowed their racquets to develop, grow, and become totally unlike the wooden racquets that were standard in the 1960s. They've been perfectly happy to let these modern racquets completely change the sport (and in the process make it rather boring) and suddenly they're worried about Maria Sharapova's meds.

As for Meldonium, it is highly suspect as to whether taking it would enhance performance enough to make an ordinary Top 50 player into a player with Maria Sharapova's record. This also goes without saying but the results of tennis matches are more likely to be manipulated by match fixing than PEDs At least the player on PEDs is trying to win. The player tanking sets and matches because of match fixing are far more detrimental than the incremental advantage of PEDs.

I get it that PEDs are open to abuse and might have terrible side effects. Especially steroids of all kinds. And if Maria Sharapova were forced into retirement because of this drug, I probably won't be one to miss her al that much. But it does seem to me that people are overestimating the impact of PEDs on a professional sport where other influences are far more likely to impact on the fairness or legitimacy of match outcomes. You'd have to be blind Freddy not to see that PEDs like this one, pertaining to tennis is firmly in the middle of the 18% grey card.

Of course, Jennifer Capriati doesn't see it that way.

"I had to lose my career and never opted to cheat no matter what. I had to throw in the towel and suffer," she wrote. 

"I didn't have the high priced team of [doctors] that found a way for me to cheat and get around the system and wait for science to catch up".

"What's the point of someone taking a heart medicine that helps your heart recover faster unless you have a heart condition? Is that accurate," she asked. 

"In my opinion [if] its all true every title should be stripped. This is other people's lives as well."

Well yeah, but as Navratilova pointed out somewhere, what Sharapova took was legal until 1st of January this year. Besides, this stripping offenders of medals and trophies is starting to look crazy after Lance Armstrong had his 7 Tour de France titles taken from him. Sports organisations can do that to humiliate the offender but it hardly changes what happened - somebody on PEDs beat the field. It's not like Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa and Barry Bonds didn't hit all those homers during the years when MLB didn't look too deeply into PEDs. It's not like Sharapova didn't win those 5 Grand Slam tournaments. In the context of professional sport, it's actually hard to argue against an athlete who tries to get better by taking PEDs, especially when his pay is dependent on the outcome. 

So here we are again, in this moral purgatory of Performance Enhancing Drugs. We're none the wiser, none the better and probably more huffed up with self-righteous indignation over something oh so grey.

News That's Fit To Punt - 29/Jul/2013

Won't Take It From You

This business of the asylum seekers that arrive by boat being sent to PNG as a deterrent has quite a few critics. Judging from the Q&A panel that I watched the other night it seems nobody gets the point of the policy which is deter people from handing over their hard earned cash and life savings to people smugglers who will put them on leaky boats to Christmas Island. Now, there are all kinds of critics out to brand this policy xenophobic to not tough enough, but you would be surprised at the people who want to piss into this pot.

A more irritating critique came out of Fiji today.

Mr Kubuabola said Fiji was ''decidedly less-than happy'' with the PNG deal, saying Australian politics was affecting Fijian affairs and demanded that Australia consult with the region.

''It is our business. Before this goes any further, we want thorough regional consultation ... We demand to have our voices heard.''

Mr Kubuabola said that Australia had used its ''economic muscle'' to persuade PNG to accept the deal that would see asylum seekers who arrive by boat sent to the country for processing and successful applicants resettled there. The Rudd government has also flagged that the model could be applied to other countries in the region.

''This was done to solve a domestic political problem and for short-term political gain without proper consideration of the long-term consequences,'' Mr Kubuabola said.

''This deal and those mooted with Solomon Islands and Vanuatu clearly threatens our interests by altering the fundamental social fabric of any ... country that accepts a deal with Australia.''

Now, this s a bit rich coming from Fiji. Fiji has been having coup d'etats every decade since the 1980s because every time they hold elections, the naturalised Indian population's vote outnumbers the indigenous Melanesian/Fijian vote. The point being, the Military-led Fijian governments are quite the xenophobic racists themselves because the sole point of these coups has been to oust democratically elected governments.

Let's also not forget that Fiji, like most nations on this planet is decidedly not a signatory to the UN convention on refugees, meaning they are currently not likely to take anybody seeking asylum.

So now, they're turning around and saying to Australia, they don't want Australia to send Asylum seekers to PNG because it is going to disturb a kind pan-Melanesian polity by introducing non-Melanesians. There is no other conclusion to draw but that the Fijian government is xenophobic and not really understanding the issue at all. They'd have a bit more credibility in their complaint if they actually were signatories and took asylum seekers.

I'm okay with just about anybody in the region criticising the 'PNG solution', but it's really hard to take Fiji's complaints seriously.

Will They Really Ban A-Rod For Life?

I haven't written much about baseball and the Yankees and what have you for a while, but the ugly business of steroids keeps on coming back to haunt us all. now it is this Biogenesis thing which has squarely framed up A-Rod for a big suspension and possibly even a lifetime ban.

Bud Selig was at the Hall of Fame ceremonies in Cooperstown this week and was said still to be mulling what punishment to deliver Rodriguez. It is conceivable he could ask for permanent banishment, akin to Pete Rose. But the belief is no matter the level of evidence — and it has been portrayed that MLB has substantially more evidence on Rodriguez than it does on Braun — it would be hard to convince an arbitrator, if Rodriguez appeals, that Rodriguez’s first suspension should be for life.

Keep in mind, though, that Selig could ask for life knowing the arbitrator could lower the punishment to a shorter duration — or even find that Rodriguez should not be punished at all.

But as a way to levy a sanction that will not be reduced, there was growing belief around baseball that Selig would request the rest of this season and all of next year.

That could be viewed as just about the death penalty for Rodriguez, at least for his playing career. He turned 38 yesterday. He has yet to play this year. The idea that he would not play this season or next season and come back able to play in 2015 after two hip surgeries seems farfetched.

It's a messy business. None of this is endearing baseball as a game to the IOC to let it back in, but that is a minor point. This A-Rod and PEDs business just keeps ripping the side out of the reputation of the game itself. All of these kinds of revelations and arguing suspensions in various sports across the last two decades have exhausted my tolerance and patience for the topic itself. At this point it wouldn't surprise me that anybody was on PEDs. I don't trust any of it on one side, and I've learned not to care that sometimes the champions are chemically enhanced. There's nothing you can do to unscramble the egg.

 

Cultural Differences

No Leaks

It's been a weird week in Australian sport, what with the big press conference saying 'This is The Blackest Day in Australian Sport'.

AUSTRALIA'S top sporting codes have been rocked by revelations that organised crime is behind the increasing use of banned performance-enhancing drugs by ''multiple athletes'' across sporting codes and possible attempts to fix matches and manipulate betting markets.

The heads of all the main professional and participation sports expressed shock after being briefed on a 12-month investigation by the Australian Crime Commission that found professional sport in Australia was ''highly vulnerable to organised crime infiltration''

The article goes on to say that all of our codes of sport probably have had doping going on. Lance Armstrong's name came up and some anonymous football player in some code even piped up during the week with an article saying what an edge it was to have the injection.
The declaration sent all these bodies scurrying for cover (how else do you explain the rush to declare "We're clear!"); and swimmers saying they refused injection in fear it was contaminated with banned substances.

It's interesting how the sport bodies have responded. the NRL has put together an 'Integrity Commission', which suggests, they're up to their eyeballs in the doping problem. The Minister for Sport says it's 'game over' for the cheats, but again you'd expect her to say it without any follow through - what else would we expect a Minister for Sport to say? "We give up?"

The strangest call of them all may be the call to name names mentioned in this one:

The Australian Crime Commission's chief executive John Lawler hit back on Saturday at critics to clear up ''confusion'' as to why he did not name names, given the explosive nature of the allegations.

Mr Lawler said classified strategic assessments had been sent to all police agencies around the country and Commonwealth agencies, which were now responsible for pursuing action.

''Very detailed information, the names of the clubs, the names of all the persons, the details of how, when and why and where, based on the intelligence, the persons suspected, has been provided to the anti-doping agency ASADA and to the police. Particularly the NSW and Victorian police,'' he told Fairfax Media.

Home Affairs Minister Jason Clare echoed Mr Lawler's comments as a number of sporting identities and commentators questioned the investigation and motives behind the report's release along with its veracity.

Given the nature of the witch hunt that is about to ensue it seems entirely understandable that some people want the messenger shot. But really, with Australia's insane libel laws, it would a brave ACC CEO who would start naming names. The way this normally goes is through leaks, starting at the biggest names in the various sports.

If this were America, somebody somewhere in the chain of information would leak to the press. After all, tat is how we found out about Barry Bonds and the clear and the cream; Roger Clemens and Andy Pettitte using HGH; A-Rod being on some PEDs in his peak years in Texas; and ultimately Lance Armstrong as well. The cross-hairs a re firmly on performance-enhanced athletes now and the witch hunt is in full swing over there.

That such leaks have not happened seems to indicate that the ACC investigation was pretty subtle and went very deep. There also seems to be a cultural difference here as opposed America that the press are not willing to tarnish the names of the stars just yet. It maybe the case that the culture is about to change and professional sport will never again have the cozy relationship with the media as it does now.

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.

News That's Fit To Punt 23/04/2010

In Brief...

Olympic 400m champion LaShawn Merritt tested positive for anabolic steroids found in his over the counter penis enlargement product.

Merritt, who is also the world champion at 400 metres, said in a statement via his lawyer that he was "deeply sorry" at failing three doping controls for the banned substance dehydroepiandrosterone.

The 23-year-old American, who faces a two-year ban, said: "To know that I've tested positive as a result of a product that I used for personal reasons is extremely difficult to wrap my hands around.

Very unfortunate turn of phrase there...

ETS Fight Is Back On

So says K-Rudd.

KEVIN RUDD says the great moral challenge posed by climate change is undiminished and he will keep trying to implement an emissions trading scheme if Labor is re-elected.

In an interview with the Herald, Mr Rudd rejected growing criticism that he had abandoned the climate change cause because it was no longer a vote winner after the Copenhagen conference and the defeat of his emissions trading scheme.

"It's very clear cut that whether climate change is topical or not, whether it is popular or not, the reality of it does not disappear," he said.

"This remains a fundamental economic, environmental and moral challenge. Whether it's newsworthy or not in a particular season is beside the point. We haven't changed our view of this.''

The Senate has twice blocked legislation for the emissions trading scheme. The legislation is again before the Parliament but the Senate has delayed debate until at least next month and there is next to no chance there will be a vote before the election expected in the spring.

Mr Rudd said that if he is re-elected, he will try again to have a scheme introduced but it would depend on the make-up of the Senate.

''We've got to ensure that we act on climate change and we do so always within the scope of our powers. We maintain our position that this is part of the most efficient and most effective means by which we can reduce greenhouse gas emissions with the least cost to the economy.''

Well it's good to hear he still has the appetite for putting a price on carbon. There I was thinking that maybe there were secret briefings that told him an Ice Age was coming anyway and made all global warming redundant or something, but clearly that's not the case.

It's nice to know it's on the agenda-radar again.

The Health Deal We Had To Have

A cool article from Peter Hartcher here.

Once the NSW Premier had landed in Canberra on Sunday, Rudd zeroed in on her as his first target. He assessed Kristina Keneally as the most likely of the three recalcitrants to yield because the NSW Government was in the weakest political position of the three, facing an election it's likely to lose, and was the one most in need of a deal to deliver more hospital funds.

Under the offer already on the table, NSW stood to gain an extra $964 million in upfront Commonwealth health money over four years.

Before going to the dinner that Rudd was to host for all the premiers and their treasurers that night, the Prime Minister sweetened the offer to NSW by hundreds of millions of dollars and asked Keneally to commit immediately.

Keneally was not as desperate as Rudd had hoped, however. She refused to commit and said she needed time to think about it.

Just before all the premiers and treasurers were due to arrive at The Lodge for dinner, the treasurers' invitation was cancelled. They were told that they would be dining separately at the Hyatt Hotel, with the federal Treasurer, Wayne Swan, as their host. The state treasurers were unimpressed when they were led into a small, windowless dining room next to the hotel cafe. They were even less impressed when they tried to discuss key issues with Swan and he rebuffed them.

The state treasurers also asked Swan about the forthcoming Henry review of the tax system. ''No one will be worse off,'' Swan told them, and otherwise wouldn't tell them a thing, not even the date of its release. ''It'll come when it comes,'' he said.

To round out the experience the states again went at each other about the health deal, with John Lenders and NSW's Eric Roozendaal defending their decision to reject the Rudd plan.

The state ministers concluded that Swan had been sent to ''mind'' them so that Rudd could corral the premiers and try to win them over. It didn't work.

That evening the state delegations heard unofficially that Rudd intended to hold them for a day longer than they had planned, into Tuesday.

The blow by blow of how these people staggered to the finish line is very interesting. Kristina Kenneally is still a stinking mess of a premier and really, this does not raise her from the low estimation in which I hold her; but all the same she did all right to bluff to K-Rudd that "we-was-not-so-desperate-yeah?"

David Ortiz Was On PEDs In 2003

What Am I Supposed To Feel? Good?

Since the A-Rod thing in spring, we've seen Many Ramirez suspended for testing positive to PEDs, and now we find that he along with David Ortiz were two of the 103 names on the list of players who tested positive to random tests in 2003.

Remember how they were supposed to be confidential? A-Rod found out otherwise. Now the leaked names are Ramirez and Ortiz. What's slightly (and I do mean ever so slightly) interesting about the revelation is that if one team seemed mostly spared by the steroid allegations of the Mitchell Report, it was the Red Sox. Of course, Yankee fans copped the brunt of the steroid circus as Jason Giambi, Roger Clemens, Andy Pettitte and Alex Rodriguez all had to weather the allegations. Of the four, three have come out (for want of a better expression) and admitted the use, while Clemens remains defiant in his denial.

If you're a regular reader, you know I've made peace with the steroid era. However, in burying that era, it's rankled that Red Sox fans have been on their little moral high horse for some time about the Yankees' players who got busted. In this light, it's nice to see that, no, the Red Sox were not magically exempt from the steroid era - indeed they were net beneficiaries as much as any other team, if not more. After all, uhh, count their rings this decade.

Unlike with A-Rod who had to have a terrible press conference this year, it doesn't seem likely David Ortiz is going to have one. It seems unfair, but that is the difference between being the first and the second in having your name leaked from a confidential list.

Jose Canseco as per usual has said he's not the least bit surprised.

Jose Canseco, whose 2005 book arguably started the cascade of revelations and an investigation into the performance-enhancing drugs in baseball, barely raised an eyebrow when he was told David Ortiz and Manny Ramirez are reportedly on the list of 104 players who tested positive in 2003.

“When you tell me something I didn’t already know, I’ll be surprised,’’ Canseco told ESPN. “And I’ll tell you this, Major League Baseball is going to have a big, big problem on their hands when they find out they have a Hall of Famer who’s used.”

When asked to name who that Hall of Fame player is, Canseco refused to divulge who he believes it is.

“It’s not about naming names,’’ he said. “I’ve never had anything against the players. It’s always been against Major League Baseball. I know who’s on that list, but like I said, it’s not about attacking the players. It’s about the machine that allowed this to happen. What I speak out of my mouth is the truth. It burns like fire. Just remember, I have never lied about this subject.”

..."If you were in the game in the last 20 years, there’s a 95 percent chance you were knowingly using something,’’ Canseco said. “I said 80 percent back then because that was the number of players that I knew were on. But that number was greater.’’

Great.

In any case, it's been a day of reckoning for Red Sox fans. Watching them try to talk their way around it is a bit embarrassing in as much as there were Yankee fans who tried to do the same. They'll eventually have to come to the same conclusion that we were all a party to it.

It doesn't make me feel any better in the sense that the other 100 names are still hidden and until they actually release those names, then there's going to be this on-going drip effect. And even if they did release it, it's grossly unfair to the players in that the test results were confidential at a time when PEDs weren't banned, and we're clearly judging the past from a different standard that was applied back then.

Then, it's also been unfair to A-Rod. But then we're used to the media double-standard there. In any case, the Schadenfreude is nowhere near as good as hoped - I don't hate Manny or Ortiz. I just like seeing Red Sox fans suffer, but all this is just not the same as making them sit out October.

Roger Clemens' Denial

What To Make Of This?

He really sounds like he means it when he says he never did it. Either he's got extremely selective memory where he's totally blocked out the fact that he did do it. I don't think I've ever heard somebody have such conviction in their denial, but we all think he's a liar on this subject, right?

The seven-time Cy Young Award winner also continued to deny that he was given steroids and human growth hormone by his former personal trainer Brian McNamee, saying it was "impossible" that drug paraphernalia supplied to federal prosecutors by McNamee has his DNA on it.

Clemens also said he still considers former teammate Andy Pettitte a friend, though he also held firm to his assertion that Pettitte "misremembers" a conversation in which Pettitte said they discussed performance-enhancing drugs.

"It's piling on, it's hurtful at times," Clemens said of the allegations that have been made against him. "I'm trying to move on."

Clemens, who is under a federal grand jury investigation for perjury following his testimony before Congress, said he decided to end his silence and react to the book because he plans to leave his Texas home for a week's vacation.

"I was informed this book was coming out and thought we ought to talk about it," Clemens told "Mike and Mike in the Morning." "It's important for me to do that."

What a mess. I have no rational reason to believe he didn't do it, and I have no rational reason to believe he did do it. It's all circumstantial or bordering on hearsay, the accusations that are being made are simply staggering, and we just get to sit there and condemn the man in a kangaroo court of public opinion. It's even worse than A-Rod in the sense that Clemens' denial itself has become a some thing to ridicule - just as much as A-Rod' apologies on admission. They can't win. You can't win. The press can't win. The courts can't win. Nobody wins. What a friggin' mess!

Athletes As Role Models

Matthew Johns, Group Sex Enthusiast

It's coming to light that Rugby League celebrity Matthew Johns participated in a bit of group sex with the lads. He's apologised for 'it' though it is unclear what bit exactly for which he is apologising.

ONE of rugby league's famous faces and a much loved personality, Matthew Johns, is horrified that old claims of sexual misconduct in New Zealand made when he was playing for the Cronulla Sharks have been publicly revisited by the woman involved.

"I am very sorry for all the trauma and embarrassment this has caused for everyone, but particularly for my family," said Johns about the public outing of his involvement.

Channel Nine, which employs Johns as a rugby league expert, last night went public with his response to the yet-to-be aired allegations about footballers and group sex scheduled for Monday night's Four Corners on ABC1.

Johns says he had consensual sex with the woman seven years ago and he was upset, particularly for his children, that the woman was making the claims again.

At the time it was known that three Sharks players were allegedly involved in the incident after a preseason game in Christchurch. None of the players was named publicly.

But privately Johns had spoken to his wife Trish about the incident. Last night Johns fronted his usual Thursday night television program, The Footy Show, and spoke emotionally about the drama. "It put my family through enormous anguish and embarrassment and once again for that I can't say I'm sorry enough … there has been a lot of pain and embarrassment to a lot of people."

Awesome! Sweet!

What kind of man has Group Sex? In a day and age where we say, "not that there's anything wrong about that!" about gay sex, we sort of have to ask this question in order to get a sense of what the social norms might be pertaining to this heterosexual activity of group sex by football players. And it has to be said, it is kind of weird to want to have group sex as portrayed by these articles. I'm not sure I would want my team mates watching me shag a girl in a hotel room, and then watch them do the same girl. If I were more poignant, I might point out that I'd rather not have 'sloppy seconds' either; so this whole group sex thing has got to be a sub-cultural phenomenon of League players, right?

Then there's the question of consent in such a context. How do you get consent for something like this? How does a girl find herself consenting to this sort of thing with a group of footballers? I don't mean to blame the victim here, but it does strain credulity for Johns to say it was all consensual. I mean, did they pass minutes around and counter sign it before hey all joined in the orgy? how the hell does this all work?

Maybe I'm a little squeamish. Then again, I'm pretty squeamish about gay sex as well so I'm in the crowd that says "not that there's anything wrong with that!" with a great deal of irony.   Y'know, there just might be something *wrong* about it on my own personal level.

Didn't Seinfeld joke about this sort of thing? I think he said that if one joins in the 'orgy crowd', one must change friends, clothes and everything else, and then grow a mustache. Perhaps that is what that Reg Regan's mustache is all about?

Meanwhile Manny Gets Done


Turns out Manny Ramirez too was on PEDs. He was on Gonadotropin, which he claims was for a sexual dysfunction, but is something that raises the level of Testosterone. Great.

Manny Ramirez is always going to have this 50-game bust for performance-enhancing drugs hanging over him, no matter what he says, no matter whether he comes back strong in July, no matter that he says he tested clean 15 times in the past five years.

With his suspension on Thursday, Ramirez joins Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire, Rafael Palmeiro, Roger Clemens, Sammy Sosa, Jose Canseco and ultimately Alex Rodriguez and Miguel Tejada on the mental list of players who were dirty, or probably dirty.

Ramirez and his helpers can issue all the statements they want about his having been given a drug for a personal health issue and that it turned out to be illegal under current baseball rules, so he must technically take the blame. That is just not going to work.

Too many of us are beyond the giddy time when we could say, poor feller, he should have checked the label on the teabag while he was having a cuppa with the queen. They are responsible. They know that. Athletes spend much of their waking hours not just studying their opponents’ moves but also accumulating information on what will make them bigger, stronger, faster. These people could pass a pharmacologist examination.

It's quicker to count up the guys who have 300+ HRs that likely aren't on PEDs now. The currelynt untainted list starts at Ken Griffey, Jim Thome, Carlos Delgado, Chipper Jones, Vlad Guerrero, Jim Edmonds. Of this list,  I feel less confident about Thome, Guerrero, and Edmonds, but I have no proof whatsoever. Count me a Ken Griffey Jr. and Chipper Jones fan for them to make the Hall - until proven guilty, as we're finding out.

Just to recap for us, here's Jayson Stark:

We'd all love to believe that Manny's intent, in taking this drug, was pure and well-intentioned. We'd all love to believe that his "personal health issue" was serious enough to require unorthodox treatment that isn't even approved by the FDA.But face it, friends, if all the reporting is accurate, that would take the sort of leap of faith only Robbie Knievel ought to attempt.

We also need to recognize something important about baseball's testing program: Its intent is not to catch innocent people who are using run-of-the-mill prescription medications because of pesky "personal health issues."

Basically, the list of substances that can get you flagged fall into three categories:

1. Stuff you'd use to cheat.

2. Stuff you'd use to push the envelope as far as possible in the hope of legally enhancing performance.

3. Stuff you'd use to treat a condition that falls under baseball's limited list of "Therapeutic Medical Exemptions," such as ADD.

But there are no indications that either Manny or his doctors ever contacted the union or MLB seeking any type of Therapeutic Medical Exemption. So there goes that potential for an innocent mistake. And if that's out, what does that leave?

He was using whatever he was using to enhance performance. That's what.

And the rest of the world's response is hand-wringing and rhetoric. I've come to terms with the PED-infested era in my own way. I just look at it as one big load of PR turkey that has come back to roost. We were all doomed the moment we bought into the significance of numbers. They're just numbers.

In case you want to see a columnist do a mental somersault just to cope, here's Bill Simmons. Welcome to the world of Yankee fans, Red Sox fans. It truly sucks.

Enhancing A-Rod

The Olympic Ideal of Performance

I was walking on a flat paved road a couple of days ago, pondering how a flat track pavement would have been a bit of a marvel to a caveman. Maybe it was a marvel even to a human being in the ancient world. You see, I walk across an uneven lawn park to get to the stretch of pavement that leads me to the place where I get lunch. So the difference is noticeable when it goes from the uneven grass in the park to the pavement.

I thought to myself that one could imagine that the ancient olympics might have started this way; that some guys boasting about how fast they ran or how far they could throw stuff, so they decided to create a neutral ground to eliminate the discrepancies of uneven grounds and came up with a flat track. And on this extremely artificial phenomenon of a flat track, they would standardise the conditions for the contestants and let them run.

Nobody really knows how the Ancient Olympics started in the ancient world, but you'd have to figure it had to be about settling who gets the bragging rights as fastest man over 100 cubits or whatever. The point is that the notion of fairness goes hand in hand with the notion of standardised conditions.

All the same, we compare records across time. When somebody breaks a record, it is often in slightly different conditions to when the previous record was set. For instance, in the modern Olympics have been getting tracks that are 'faster' then the older tracks. Swimming pools have bee built so as to remove adverse waves, which in turn produce faster results. Modern shoes have been engineered to better specifications than say those of Emil Zatopek. Do we dare even go into the engineering and technologies that go into regattas and bicycle riding?

In all of these cases, what nobody is saying out loud is that technology is helping the athlete more than for which the media or punters give credit. Nobody really questions the records that get broken by historically newer athletes, with better equipment, even though it seems mightily unfair to compare these numbers. After all, we'll never know what Dawn Fraser would have been able to do in the Sydney Olympic Park Aquatic Centre's pool at her peak. Clearly technology is playing a part in all these accomplishments.

Which of course then brings us to PEDs, notably those used by the East Germans in the 1970s. Some of the records set then have taken a long time to break precisely because it has taken that long for the other technologies to compensate for the absence of the biochemical technology used by the East Germans way back when. Yes, it was grossly unfair that the East Germans were using them and the other athletes were not. Yet it seems to me today that the basis for this 'fairness' which creates the moral outrage is actually not quite as cut and dry as WADA and the IOC and the other anti-doping agencies make out.

For instance, Shane Warne underwent a year of being banned from the Cricket because he took a banned diuretic (to look better). It was doubtful he took it to enhance his performance, but he was banned on principle. We won't go into the fact that this is in stark contrast to Murali who regularly gets pinged for his dodgy action, or the unlikelihood of the diuretic assisting Warnie in getting wickets. The logical corollary of banning Shane Warne is that anybody who is a leggie bowling for the weekend club is going to have their performance enhanced. Not many people buy this corollary to be likely.

The point is that the benefit of the biochemical technology may not be as significant as people give it credit, while other technologies in sport are influencing the outcome to a degree that it might not just be the flat-track that people still believe it to be. As far as I know, nobody has been able to quantify just how much drugs are in sport, and yet any time a name gets linked to it, we turn it into a witch hunt, demonising the person.

Let's face it, games like cricket and baseball have actually been less influenced by technological agencies as say, even tennis or squash with their new-fangled racquets, or for that matter swimming.  I mean, yes, PEDs in swimming might be a bigger problem than in cricket, but nobody talks about those pools and the borderline-buoyant swimming costumes.

Which brings me I guess to A-Rod. When I look at A-Rod's accomplishments, I can't imagine I could do what he has done even with PEDs. It's not just guess work, it's probably a statistical likelihood that had I taken gobs of PEDs since my teenage years, I still wouldn't have ended up playing baseball professionally, let alone reached the pinnacle of performance as he has. Seriously folks, I wanted to be the slugging 3B for the Yankees and be their franchise player but it sure wasn't to be! :)

That would be because I have insufficient talent, as in I suck; And I didn't try at all once I realised I sucked. Steroids and their ilk alone would not have carried me there.

Given that it does takes more than just getting injections of weird steroidal chemicals to get to where he has got, I think it's time to actually give some credit back to the effects of true talent and hard work. Barry Bonds and Alex Rodriguez and Roger Clemens and Mark Magwire  are/were all amazingly talented dudes who made sacrifices to do what they did. We're over-rating the effects of Performance Enhancing Drugs every time we subscribe to the witch hunt.