COLUMN: Who’s Cheating?
It is so difficult to decide what cheating really is. Everybody cheats and everybody lies, and anybody who says they don’t is cheating himself or herself with that lie. We all draw invisible lines and negotiate borders more dangerous than those of Palestine.
This all works quite well in traversing everyday life, but when it comes to sports, all of a sudden we have rigid boundaries. How much is too much? I read one investigative report about Barry Bonds that said he not only had King Kongish muscles, but he actually gained an inch in height at age 35. This should have been the headline around the world: “Barry Bonds has growth spurt in middle age.” There have been science fiction B-movies produced with less of a premise.
This would all seem indicative of going too far as would, say, growing a third lung or an auxiliary heart to make you a better distance runner. Those are the sorts of things easy to agree upon.
On the margins, things get a lot fuzzier.
Back in the fuzzy, sepia-toned past when I was running competitive track, there were all sorts of supplements too. There were bee pollen, liver tablets, goat’s blood and high-altitude training. This was before you could make any money in a sport like track, and only one player on each team made $1 million. I dreamed only of free shoes and maybe my name in the newspaper. Even with those un-lofty aspirations, I must say I would have swallowed just about any pill that would have made me instantly better. Why? Because I was 21 and the long-term consequences seemed like living to 52 instead of 55. What 21 year old cares about that?
What is an artificial supplement anyway? Is a concentrated, naturally occurring substance natural or artificial? I used to argue with friends that orange juice was an unnatural supplement because you were concentrating a whole bag of oranges into a glass rather than peeling the oranges and eating all the pulp and seeds as nature had intended.
I don’t know much about football, baseball and basketball, but I was hip deep in track and field. Blood doping sounds so barbaric compared to today’s standards, but that was the drug of choice then. Then it went a step forward to blood doping with your own blood to blood doping with other people’s blood. Then came the chemical age and drugs that do not automatically make you stronger and faster, but they allow you to train harder with less fatigue so you can become stronger and faster.
Hey, what’s wrong with that? It’s not like you are taking a magic pill. You still are actually working out. Most elite athletes are gym rats anyway.
There is some evidence that the new generation of drugs actually make you “better.” That is, see better, react faster. As a bonus, you don’t even have to stick a needle in you butt.
Sports that have become a pharmacopoeia nightmare are easy to attack, but what should be legal? Only food that everybody can buy at a grocery store? Only equipment available at retail sporting goods stores? In the real old “Chariots of Fire” days, even having a private, paid coach was cheating. The answers are not easy.