TheAgitator.com
Some Honesty About Steroids
Thursday, January 17th, 2008A refreshing cut-through-the-bullshit piece by sportswriter Dan Le Batard.
Can you picture it? The scandalous swirl that envelops Marion Jones and Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens (but, inexplicably, not Shawne Merriman) being countered by one brave and defiant athlete standing in front of the cameras and saying the following to America:
“Yes, I used HGH. Used it all the time, illegally, under the supervision of trainers I pay well to keep me at optimum efficiency. My body is a business and a source of great profit in the entertainment industry, and I’ve hired the best mechanics to keep this machine running right. I’m sorry that is something you tolerate from the governor of California and Rambo but not me.
“What I do for a living hurts physically, and the hormone helps me heal. Craig Biggio destroys his stomach lining by taking 12 Advil a day. I did this, which is actually safer. I’m not sorry for that. I’m sorry you don’t understand the world where I work. I’m sorry I’m surrounded by ignorant judgments and name-calling and sports McCarthyism. But I’m not sorry for being competitive and looking for advantages in medicine the same way I did in film work, scouting reports and training techniques.
“I take cortisone, a steroid, to keep my shoulder and back from screaming. I had Lasik surgery, lasering my eyes, to improve my vision. But with your arbitrary moralities, you are blurring the line for me so much between what is allegedly natural and allegedly unnatural that not even those Lasik lasers help me unblur it. There is no sense of proportionality here. The difference between pain-killers such as cortisone and healers such as HGH isn’t nearly as large as the difference between how you react to the former and the latter.
Here’s a related piece from Wired that looks at the challenges sports will begin to face as prosthetics enable amputees to compete at or above the level of able-bodied athletes. In the comments thread to my last post on steroids, someone brought up Tiger Woods, who got Lasik surgery not just to correct his vision, but to actually make his vision better than “perfect.” I think the point is entirely relevant. Thus far, the steroids/HGH debate has been a chorus of hysterical, one-sided posturing. Sports have never been as pure as some have made them out to be, and they never will be. When does technology cease to be a training aid (computer analysis of a golf or bat swing, nutrition monitoring, extensive monitoring of vitals while training) and start to become an unfair advantage (Lasik? Prosthetics? Tinted contacts that help an athlete read greens or pick up the spin on a baseball?) Lance Armstrong was permitted to get artificial HGH to recover from testicular cancer. Did that give him an unfair advantage in the Tour de France? If so, does that means he should have had to choose between getting treatment for losing a testicle and competing in cylcing?
Kenyan runners who were born, live, and train at high altitudes have abnormally high doses of hemoglobin. Is this an unfair advantage? What about wealthy or sponsored athletes who move to Colorado Springs to train, for the same purpose? What if an athlete is born with a genetic defect that results in abnormally high hemoglobin content in his blood? What about athletes who purchase expensive altitude tents to sleep in, which mimic the same effect? All of these things are legal in most sports. But a drug called EPO, which does the exact same thing as all of the aforementioned, is banned in almost every sport. EPO is much less expensive than an altitude tent or relocating to Colorado to train. Why is one legal, but the rest aren’t?
At some point, athletes, rules makers, fans, and ethicists are going to have to drop the hysterics, and begin a serious conversation about all of this. Shaming, prison, and witch hunts aren’t going to make these issues go away.
I may have to consider how much I despise Le Batard from his painful PTI appearances.
*reconsider*, that should be.
Radley ya missed the first link.
http://www.realcities.com/mld/miamiherald/sports/columnists/dan_le_batard/18222231.htm
More from it;
“Why are you gasping? Too honest? You wanted a bowed head and contrition and lies like those from all my broken peers who aren’t really sorry for what they did as much as they’re sorry for how you react to it? All I’m sorry about is that you folks have become irrational because of absurd Congressional hearings and the feds trying to wiretap middle reliever Jason Grimsley and a flimsy Mitchell Report that cloaked gossip in credibility and smeared names just to justify 20 months of work and $20 million in wasted dollars.”
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We need to make congress pay for this, as well take back their pay increase! It’s obvious they have not earned it. As well that they are more of a waste than much else.
Who says rules in sport have to make sense? If the governing authority of a sport decree that no one can compete wearing green shorts, and someone then competes wearing green shorts, then they’ve broken the rules and should take the punishment.
They are free to break away and set up their own green-short wearing league if they wish, if they can get enough people to watch.
Wade,it’s not that simple.Most high revenue sports are dependent on and have favorable tax laws from local,state and federal governments.The NFL,NBA,MLB and NCAA all have tax funded venues and anti-trust relief.NASCAR is the the only major sport that is mostly free of taxpayer support.Of course the sport was founded by bootleggers trying to beat a unwise law.
I’ve always felt that if you’re competing on a national level in a sport, be it NFL, NBA, NHL, MLB… whatever…. you’re already as close to the top of your game as you can be naturally. You sacrifice a lot to be there. If you make the choice to have that edge that steroids gives you, and you are willing to live with the consequences, more power to you. You’re more fun to watch.
wade is actually 100% correct. the debate shouldn’t be about whether or not PEDs are safe, effective, dangerous, ineffective or anything else.
the governing bodies of sport – whether it be MLB, NHL, the Olympics – have stated that participants cannot use PEDs. those who use are breaking the rules are cheating, whether or not there are screening tests to catch or deter.
using PEDs is akin to barry bonds using an aluminum bat, roger clemens using a smaller baseball, tiger woods using an unapproved ball or club or carrying an extra club.
if you want to argue that athletes should be allowed to use whatever substance that they want, fine. if you want to argue that baseball – or other leagues – shouldn’t be allowed to prohibit certain behaviors, go ahead and try.
but the bottom line is that the powers can set the rules and that anyone who breaks them is cheating, especially in the case of PEDs. it’s an antiquated notion, but there is such a concept as abiding by the rules.
The rules of sports are arbitrary by definition. Basketball might by more exciting to watch if the players were allowed to throw punches, but it wouldn’t be basketball. If the people that run pro basketball decide that EPO isn’t part of the sport, then it isn’t.
That said, it would certainly be smart to make these kinds of decisions on a rational basis, talking into account the the health of the athletes, the fairness of competition, and the entertainment value for the spectators.
In any case, other than enforcing the contracts, there’s no reason to get the government involved.
HGH (Human Growth Hormone) is the most common hormone in the pituitary gland, which is at the center of the human brain.
This isn’t about whether athletes should follow the rules of their chosen sports. This is about whether the government may claim ownership of your body–that includes everyone, not just athletes. The steroid hysteria is driven by the government’s fear that people will start to reject the premise that the state has absolute ownership over your person.
Windypundit said it best. Cheaters are people who break rules, period. Even without an actual advantage gained. The sports should make the rules and the corresponding punsihments.
But at the same time we should always be having intelligent debates about how those rules are crafted and what our response should be as a society to cheaters. The Merriman comparison is great: This guy used steroids, and no one really cared. He was punished, and he came back. People will likely always judge him, but no one really hates him and he’s certainly not being prosecuted or investigated. I think the most likely explanation is because a) we sort of accept that a little more in football, and b) he’s not chasing any historic records. Do those reasons really amke much sense though? I don’t think so.
“I think the most likely explanation is because a) we sort of accept that a little more in football, and b) he’s not chasing any historic records. Do those reasons really amke much sense though? I don’t think so.” I think they make a lot of sense. I knew a lot of college baseball players who were taking steroids. Some of them got messed up, some didn’t, but I understand why they did it. Compare that to Barry Bonds, who was arguably the greatest batter of all time before the steroids. I think it’s reasonable for sports fans like myself who were just a couple steps or a little power away from being professionals themselves to be pissed that people blessed with so much natural athleticism want another advantage. There’s definitely too much hysteria in all this, but from my personal experience, I think some of this downplaying what steroids can do (both positively and negatively) is pretty hysterical itself.
Baseball execs knew (or should have known) about steroid usage by players. They were happy to condone the usage. Players could hit the ball farther and throw it faster. It made the game more exciting. These same execs only care about making steroid usage against the rules when Congress threatens to get involved. All professional sports leagues are sucking at the teat of the government. Now the owners need to act shocked, shocked!, when players are found to use steroids or risk losing their corporate welfare.
Just another reason to hate professional sports in America. Get government out of the game and let the owners make their own rules.