The Doping Sagas Continue
Steroids. Human Growth Hormone. Juice. Blood Doping. Epo. Performance-enhancing drugs. Ways to gain an unfair advantage. Ever since I can remember, the subject has been at the heart of track and field competition. Where a sport like baseball can claim (falsely or not) to have a “steroid era,” track and field seems to be a sport in which all eras have been steroid eras.
Deciding where one stands in regards to this issue can be difficult and complex, because it’s not as simple “cheaters never win, and winners never cheat.” Truth is, cheaters often win, and winners often cheat. Sometimes cheaters get caught, sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they have to return their medals, sometimes they get to keep them forever.
Here in 2015, it seems that the issue of the use of performance-enhancing drugs is as lively as ever. Four major storylines are dominating the track news scene this year, all of them drug-related:
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1) Justin Gatlin’s re-emergence as a force in the 100 and 200 meter dashes. After serving a four-year ban, then easing back into the swing of things in the past couple years, nobody expected him to have a year like this, where he is running faster than he was on the juice. As a result, controversy surrounds him everywhere he goes. While he is out to prove that he can run as fast clean as he ran dirty, many track aficionados assume he’s still dirty, or that he’s still benefitting from the long-term effects of his dirty days. Despite having a dominant season, he is not on the ballot for the IAAF athlete of the year award, he was not allowed to participate at a Diamond League meet in China, and many consider him to be an example of all that is wrong with the sport.
2) The Alberto Salazar mess. From various news reports, it’s apparent that Salazar has been juicing his athletes for quite some time. People from his camp are speaking out, and he’s on a mission to discredit everything they say. Of course, since he coaches two of the best distance runners in the world (Galen Rupp and Mo Farrah), the assumption is those two are on the juice. Which, to many of us, explains why they’re running so fast.
3) Dennis Mitchell being the sprint coach for the US World Championship team. Mitchell is most famous for explaining a positive test by claiming his testosterone levels were high because he had made love to his wife and drank a lot of beers the night before. So the argument is, how can a known drug cheat who was busted during his own career as an athlete be allowed to coach the national team? What kind of message does that send?
4) Reports that the IAAF was covering up or turning a blind eye to suspicious drug tests over the past ten years, and that many Olympians – not just medalists – have had suspicious blood profiles. Sebastian Coe vehemently denies such allegations, but the doubt has already been planted in the public’s mind. If the IAAF is giving cover to drug cheats, then God only knows what the national governing bodies are doing.
My attitude toward the issue of performance-enhancing drug use in our sport has changed over the years. When I was in high school in the 1980’s I was totally oblivious that such a thing even occurred until Ben Johnson got busted at the 1988 Olympics after destroying Carl Lewis and the rest of the field in the 100 meters. When Johnson appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated, shamed and disgraced, I felt like the bad guy had been caught, that the good guy, Carl Lewis, had been vindicated.
I’ll come back to that in a minute. But first I’ll jump ahead to Marion Jones and the Balco scandal of the early 2000’s. Because Jones trained at North Carolina State University – where I would often go to train my youth athletes – I saw her and her teammates on the track quite often. I witnessed how hard she worked, how demanding her workouts were, and how humble she was. I remember one time a couple joggers were coming around the curve and veered to the grass on the infield in order to stay out of her way, as she was working on her start. “Don’t wanna get in your way Marion!” one of the guys said. She laughed and said, “You have just as much right to the space as I do.”
Out there on the practice track, Jones never came off as arrogant or self-absorbed. She was cool, approachable. So when the rumors started spreading that she was taking performance-enhancing drugs, I defended her to anyone who tried to put her down. “She wouldn’t do it,” I said. “And she was always fast, it ain’t like she just suddenly dropped a whole of time in one season. And look at her body. She didn’t put on a whole lot of muscle. All the obvious signs of steroid use – she ain’t showin’ none of ‘em.”
So once she finally admitted to it, I was crushed. I felt like I had been lied to. I felt like she had betrayed me, and all of us who had supported her through all of her denials.
Then there was Tim Montgomery, and many others from that same training group. Then Gatlin in 2006. By the time Gatlin got busted, I had read Speed Trap by Charlie Francis – Ben Johnson’s coach. In that book, Francis made it clear that there was a pervasive drug culture in the sprints. He argued that he had no choice but to introduce his athletes to performance-enhancing drugs or else he was putting them at a competitive disadvantage. Everybody cheats, he said.
Including the great Carl Lewis, winner of four gold medals in the 1984 Olympics. When I looked it up, I found that there had, in fact, been allegations that Lewis had tested positive prior to those Games, but that USA Track & Field had covered it up. Who knows if it’s true or not, but the suspicion is there.
After reading that book, I began to understand that no one was beyond suspicion. I had always liked to think that just the Russians, East Germans, and other Eastern Bloc countries from back in the day had nationwide drug use among their athletes. But not the United States. We’re the ones everyone’s trying to catch. We’re the reason everyone else does drugs, but we don’t need to.
I’m embarrassed now when I look back on my naiveté and ignorance and blind faith in the American way.
My overall attitude toward performance-enhancing drug use is one of resignation. In my heart, in my gut, I remain an idealist, a purist. If you won but you cheated, then you didn’t really win. But I am also resigned to the fact that performance-enhancing drug use is here to stay, that it’s not going away – not in our sport, nor in any sport. Look up “steroids” or “hgh” or “performance-enhancing drugs” in relation to a smorgasbord of athletes across a wide range of sports, and you’ll find article that will raise your suspicions. Lebron James, Dwyane Wade, Tiger Woods. We already know baseball is filled with juicers. And football is doing all it can to keep its hands over its eyes. You get the occasional four-game suspension here or there, but how can so many dudes be that big and that fast and be clean?
Common sense starts to kick in. If you read an article alleging that Lebron James’ name was found on a package, you start to think about how ridiculously big and strong he is, about how his head is the size of a watermelon, about he plays an 82-game season, playoffs all the way to the finals, then plays for the USA Basketball team in the summer. He’s doing all that clean? Maybe he is. But in this day and age, it just makes more sense to assume the worst.
But sports like baseball, basketball, and football are part of the entertainment culture. Plus, the rewards of cheating aren’t as obvious. In sports like track, swimming, and cycling, you get to the finish line faster. You win because, all else being equal, you cheated and your opponent(s) didn’t. In a team sport, you can take steroids but your team still sucks. When it comes to a Usain Bolt – who is probably the only track athlete commonly known among people who don’t follow track – all track fans hope and pray that he is clean, because if he were to ever get busted, that would push track further back into the background of the collective consciousness. When Barry Bonds and Marc McGwire and all those homerun hitters were discovered to have cheated, baseball took a bit of a hit but nobody said, “Baseball is dirty; I’m not watching anymore.” If Lebron James or Kevin Durant were proven to have taken PED’s or HGH, people aren’t going to stop watching basketball games.
As I’ve grown older and have coached athletes who have gone on to compete at the collegiate and professional levels, I can see what damage the PED culture does to athletes. That is why I cannot remain indifferent. Shoe companies like Nike and Adidas can afford to pay top dollar to sponsor big-time track athletes, and if an athlete gets busted, these big corporations can drop the athlete without having their own name tarnished. So of course athletes feel pressured to take PED’s if the difference between keeping a contract and losing a contract lies in their performance and world ranking.
Any athlete who competes at the professional level will need to address the question of whether or not s/he will travel down the juice road, so to speak. As one athlete once explained to me, it becomes a career choice. A sprinter stuck at 10.10 after three or four post-collegiate years, for example, can continue to race on the chitlin circuit by staying clean, or he can get on the juice, get himself under 10.00, earn a contract, and race in Diamond League meets. Same for that male hurdler stuck at 13.30, or that female hurdler stuck at 12.90. I would argue that nearly everybody who takes PED’s doesn’t initially intend to. Somewhere down the road they become convinced that they need to, or they should, or that they have no other option.
What I tell my former athletes is, it’s not worth it. At the end of the day, a gold medal, a world ranking, a big contract, isn’t worth the price of your integrity. You have to be able to look yourself in the mirror. I’ll never forget the fact that when Antonio Pettigrew died a few years ago – found in the backseat of his vehicle, having evidently committed suicide by taking sleeping pills – the headlines the next day talked about “Drug Cheat” Antonio Pettigrew being found dead. Nothing about how he was the sprint coach at the University of North Carolina at the time, about how he had coached a high school team in Raleigh, NC before then. Nothing about the impact he had made on the lives of young people he had coached over the years. The articles focused almost solely on the fact that he had taken steroids and had an Olympic medal taken away. It was almost like they were saying he deserved to die.
Justin Gatlin is going through the same thing now. Is he clean now? Let’s say he is. I want to believe that he is. But it doesn’t matter. He will always be known as a drug cheat. And if he wins the gold medal at this month’s World Championships, he will not be celebrated as the comeback story of the year; he will be scorned and vilified as a fraud. Think, for example, of the fact that the long-term benefits of steroids was never a major topic of conversation until recently, when people are looking for explanations as to why Gatlin is running so fast at age 33. Maybe he is clean, these articles imply, but he’s still running off the juice he used ten years ago. Now, I’m no scientist, and I don’t know what the facts are about that. My point here is to point out that taking the juice isn’t worth it, because once you’ve lost your integrity, your credibility, you can never get it back.
Athletes are competitors. Winning matters. Self-esteem, self-worth, self-identity, are tied into performance. So athletes are always looking for an edge. Of course, as the stakes get higher, the idea of finding the edge in an illegal manner will come to mind. A few months ago I was watching two ESPN analysts – both former NFL players and former New England Patriots – arguing about the Deflate-gate thing. One analyst, Ted Bruschi, vehemently argued that Tom Brady didn’t know anything about the footballs being deflated. “He said he didn’t know anything, and I believe him,” Bruschi firmly stated.
The other guy – can’t remember his name, believed that Brady did know what was going on. “So you don’t believe him?” Bruschi asked, obviously pissed off.
“It’s not that I don’t believe him,” the other guy said. “But he’s a competitor. He’s looking for an edge. Anything that can give him an edge. All of us who play this game are looking to gain an edge on our opponents.”
So it comes back to what Francis said in Speed Trap. If your opponents are taking PED’s or you have reason to be suspicious that they are, then you have no choice but to do so as well.
My answer to that conundrum is simple. If you’re a 13.3 hurdler, and that’s as fast as your hard work and natural gifts will allow you to run, then be a 13.3 hurdler. At some point, you have to disconnect from the insanity, accept your limitations, and accept yourself for who you are.
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