Athletes Have Always Been Contemptuous of Sport's

Athletes have always been contemptuous of sport's attempts to regulate drug use, but they tended to keep their mouths shut. Most resented the whip hand that testing gave management, but they were too afraid of being caught, punished, embarrassed to speak up unless they were squeaky clean, retired or busted.

Until last week [July 1998], when bicycle racers briefly disrupted the Tour de France as a protest against what they claimed was a witch hunt, athletes have never so publicly and boldly stood up to drug testing.

One knee-jerk reaction to the slowdown in the Alps was that the inmates were taking over the asylum, another that the so-called athletes' revolt had begun again after 30 years of simmering. A day later, the race continued, probably a tribute to favors and deals. But that little mountain uprising may yet turn out to be a historical turn in the road: athletes are finally expressing justified disgust with a capricious system that seems to be, in these days of what the University of Texas professor John Hoberman calls "the therapeutic ideal," simply out of date.

If drugs like Prozac and Viagra can be taken without apology by everyday people who want to enhance their performance in a competitive world, why shouldn't athletes, prized as models of "human capacity," be allowed, nay, encouraged, to try out drugs for the rest of us?

Unfair drug testing

Drug testing has not been fair--few marquee names have ever been brought down--nor as effective a deterrent as both sides would have fans believe. Athletes have gone along with the lie as long as it kept reporters from snooping around their specimens. Also, athletes have tended to stay ahead of the drug police.

As the rewards for victory have spiked, a growing network of underground pharmacologists have concocted drugs too new to be detected in addition to masking agents for the old drugs. This competitive cat-and-mouse game, risky, expensive and hypocritical, has allowed athletes to continue seeking the edge while management kept the appearance of control.

That game began unraveling along with the Tour last Wednesday [July 29, 1998]. When word reached the 140-rider pack that the police had raided a team's hotel and forcibly tested riders' urine, hair and blood for drugs, cyclists slowed down, quit, tore off their numbers, canceling the day's race.

By Thursday, with a half a dozen teams out of the competition, some 101 of the 198 riders who started on July 11 in Dublin were again rolling toward Paris and $2.2 million in prizes. Apparently, the most consistent performance enhancing drug is still money.

Nevertheless, two interlocked issues, one about control and the other about appropriate drug use, were once again out of the bottle.

Not since the 1960's, when Harry Edwards, Tommie Smith and John Carlos used the Olympics as a platform against racism; Muhammad Ali used the heavyweight championship as a pulpit; and Billie Jean King led tennis players--eventually all players--out of the desert of sham amateurism, have athletes rebelled so dramatically against management.

Current labor skirmishes, including the [1998] N.B.A. lockout, can also be seen in that context. The testing for drugs, recreational or performance enhancing (another distinction that is blurring), has always been the most subtle and insidious way of enforcing that control.

And just last Monday [July 27, 1998], two American Oympians--the sprinter Dennis Mitchell and the shot-put champion Randy Barnes--were suspended for possible doping offenses. Mitchell reportedly tested above the acceptable levels of testosterone.

On Friday [July 31, 1998], Barnes' B sample turned out positive, too, showing a banned nutritional supplement, androstenedione, a naturally occurring substance in the body that is available in health food stores.

Doping in sport and in life

The most significant incident, however, may have occurred four years ago [in 1994] when the marathoner Alberto Salazar ended a long streak without a victory. With the help of the antidepressant Prozac, which he was using legally as a training aid, he won the 56-mile Comrades Marathon in South Africa.

For the ever-provocative Hoberman, who wrote "Mortal Engines: The Science of Performance and the Dehumanization of Sport" in 1992, Salazar's drug of choice "forged a high-profile link between doping in sport and the wider world of pharmacology that affects us all."

Hoberman expects that "pharmacological Calvinism" will be increasingly harder to enforce in sports as drugs are "gentrified." In particular, he thinks that as more elderly men, and even women, use testosterone to enhance their lives, it will become impossible to prohibit the drug from enhancing sports performance.

The [1998] Tour ends in Paris today, and the current controversy may get a flat tire; only the squeaky clean, the retired and the busted will want to talk. But the struggle for control will continue in sports, as will the hypocrisy of drug testing.

The real issue for the future will be the legalization of drugs that cross the artificial line between therapy and performance enhancement. Hoberman's vision includes Olympians at the starting blocks, "their drug company logos gleaming in the sun."

FURTHER READINGS

Books

Ð'* Charlie Francis. Speed Trap. New York: St. Martin's, 1990.

Ð'* Bob Goldman and Ronald Klatz. Death in the Locker Room: Drugs and Sports. Chicago: Elite Sports Medicine, 1992.

Ð'* Jeffrey Meer. Drugs and Sports. New York: Chelsea House, 1997.

Ð'* Stan Reents. Sports and Exercise Pharmacology. Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics, 2000.

Ð'* Kevin R. Ringhofer. Coaches' Guide to Drugs and Sport. Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics, 1995.

Ð'* Ray Tricker and David L. Brown, eds. Athletes at Risk: Drugs and Sport. Dubuque, IA: W.C. Coo, 1990.

Ð'* Robert Voy with Kirk D. Deeter. Drugs, Sport, and Politics. Champaign, IL: Leisure, 1991.

Ð'* Ivan Waddington. Sports, Health and Drugs: A Critical Sociological Perspective. New York: Routledge, 2000.

Ð'* Melvin H. Williams. The Ergogenics Edge: Pushing the Limits of Sports Performance. Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics, 1997.

Ð'* Charles