Up in Ontario

Drugs in Sports Report

CBC has posted on its website a great in-depth report on performance-enhancing drugs in sports. The site includes a timeline of steroid cases through history to the present. Largely they focus in on drugs at the Olympic Games but major professional leagues - the NFL, NHL, MLB and NBA - aren't forgotten in the coverage.

Of particular note is a lengthy interview with Dick Pound, the head of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), about his ongoing campaign to clean up sports and to establish an universal code of standards across amateur and professional sports organizations. Some excerpts:

I don't want my grandchildren to have to become chemical stockpiles in order to be good at sports and to have fun at it. Baseball, take your kid out to the ballpark some day and you say, 'Son, some day if you ingest enough of this shit, you might be a player on that field, too.' It's a completely antithetical view to what sport should have been in the first place. It's essentially a humanistic endeavour to see how far you can go on your own talent.

...I think one of the answers is that there is an inordinate influence on the public and young people coming from professional sports. These are the farm teams for all of these professional undertakings. Basically, if you're saying to some kid in grade 10, 'If you don't weigh 265 pounds by the time you're a freshman in college, don't bother.' That's wrong. I mean, what kind of message is that?

...What I would say to [current NFLPA executive director, Gene] Upshaw is, "Have you seen these lions now in football?" Have you seen this? They're averaging 285 [lbs] and they have superhuman strength. I don't think they got that way simply by eating ma's porridge.

The report has a Canadian skew to it and focuses on the recent THG positive tests more than I might have liked, but the picture painted is bleak for athletes wanting to achieve without drugs at the highest levels. The THG scandal seems to have elevated the alarm in the anti-doping community because it points to large sums of money devoted to a systematic approach to beating the rules. If this one situation exists, then surely others must as well.

I still remember a friend who I played football with coming back from playing with the Iowa State Cyclones (a respectable Division I NCAA football program, but by no means a big-money program like Miami, Nebraska, USC, Florida, Notre Dame or Michigan) and telling us about his first day with the strength coach. The coach held up a vial of clear liquid and told all the offensive linemen that this was what they would be using for supplements. No one asked what was in the vial but my friend came back to see us that summer after his first season and he had gained 30 pounds of muscle.

No one wants to know what's happening but the evidence is right there for all of us to see, every night on the highlight reels.