Canada is such a decent country, and Ben Johnson such an impressive athlete, that it came as a shock when the Canadian sprinter got stripped of his Olympic gold medal in 1988 for steroid use.
At the time, doping was associated with communist regimes such as East Germany’s, where the women swimmers looked like Monsters of the Midway. The Johnson affair showed that no nations and no athletes could be trusted without a system in place to verify their integrity.
So along came the World Anti-Doping Agency, run by Canadian swimmer-turned-attorney Dick Pound, who is making plenty of enemies with his crusade against performance-enhancing chemicals as the 2004 Games open in Athens.
Pound believes he has dopers on the run. Let’s hope so. Because despite allegations of hypocrisy and heavy-handedness leveled against him, Pound is carrying out a vital public service.
For a lot of important reasons, we need our Olympians to be clean. And, unfortunately, we have reason to believe they’re not.
The 531-strong U.S. team arrives in Athens under the shadow of a doping scandal. More than 20 track-and-field athletes are in the crosshairs of an ongoing investigation into the BALCO drug supply network. The team faces the disheartening prospect of winning medals during the Games only to lose them after further testing.
The outspoken Pound is taking heat for supposedly coming down too hard on the U.S. and other nations whose athletes his 5-year-old agency has targeted. The family of a banned Australian cyclist absurdly claims that Saddam Hussein is getting fairer treatment.
Others are putting forward ludicrous rationalizations for the use of substances that provide an unnatural edge. The Economist, a British newsmagazine, has proclaimed that drugs and the Olympics “are going to mix, whether you like it or not.” Thanks to Viagra, Prozac, Ritalin and the rest, the magazine says, performance-enhancement is an accepted part of modern life.
Some say today’s drugs confer no more of an advantage than legitimate training techniques such as the use of pressure chambers simulating high altitudes to build red-blood cells. The public wants records to fall, the thinking goes, so bring on the genetic engineers.
Regular folks won’t stand for such nonsense.
We hold Olympians to a very high standard. Isn’t that the idea behind the Olympics, after all?
Every sport has its rules. Doping is foul play, nothing more or less. Because it can be tough to detect, leadership and resources must be devoted to rooting it out.
Failing to do so works against the upstanding athletes who play it straight. Pound has the right idea in his effort to impose common drug restrictions across all sports and all countries.
It’s not just a matter of fairness or of protecting the health of competitors. It’s important to set the right example.
Remember the reaction among all those decent-minded Canadians to the evidence that Johnson was a cheat? It was a cleansing wave of public humiliation, followed by a rigorous testing program. Shame on those who would condone doping and criticize the effort to stop it now.
