because the little old ladies of the Prohibition Era raised sons who now control TAC, the IOC, the USOC, as well as the NBA, NFL and MLB and other sports regulatory bodies.
No one can dispute how fast Ben Johnson ran. Nor Marion Jones. You cannot take a record back. That is absurd.
People should not take steriods. There is an argument to be made, however, that the label "performance enhancing drugs" is no more sensible than "death tax."
Anabolic steriods are training enhancing drugs. They allow athletes to train harder, and repair faster. Their use does not necessarily imply or result in enhanced peak performance.
Steriods constitute a health risk. We need some perspective.
We have a president who denies global warming. Insurance companies refuse to pay to help dying clients. North Carolina considers smoking a protected civil right[1,2]. Would the beef from Krogers pass a drug test for steriods?
I advise you to not use them.
I also advise us not to criminalize them.
Any substance will be much simpler to track if it is legal. (I would apply the same logic to other classes of currently illegal drugs, but that is a topic for another time.)
We should have steroid classes of events. We have age groups. We stratify winners based on gender. We have races for various special groups. Why not a "master men doper" 10k at the Crystal Palace?
It would be a sin to cheat, and enter into the non-doping class when you dope. We should continue to test. There would be little incentive to cheat like that if not for the little old ladies' sons who now run sports.
I need a champion for this cause.
I
wonder
what
Jack Kevorkian
is doing
these days?
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2 comments:
Ahhh! I can't wait to get back to the post, but in the mean time, you've beened memed!
Ha! Yes, we see eye-to-eye on this. From one generation to the next, there are enormous advancements in performance enhancing _______________ (fill in the blank). From shoes, to track surfaces, to vitamins, to health care, to diet, to digitized training regimens.
Really, deep down, we want to see the best performers . . . regardless of what got them there. If there were two classes of the Tour de France, one with dopers (the one that exits right now) and one with nondopers (the imaginary one), which race do you think people would watch? I say hands down, the one that’s performance enhanced.
So I think for the most part that we are hypocritical. We don’t want people to get caught, because that person is a cheater, but we continue to tune into the NFL or any other pro sport that is filled with ‘roid users. I mean, either there are enough freaks of nature to fill up 30 NFL teams, or there are a lot of steroid users there.
I would be very cautious about criminalization as well. Unless it makes your head explode as soon as it touches your lips, then caveat emptor. Actually the enforcement of the steroid ban HAS RUINED track and field. That sport has not had good press since Mary Decker’s spill in ’84.
I agree that truth in reporting one’s status as user or not would be good, but I would feel sorry for the nonusers. Would you rather see a 3:42 mile or a 3:51 mile?
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