Just catching up after a couple weeks vacation . . .
Lance Armstrong and all athletes accused of doping, or having
tested positive for doping, would look much more credible - and forever give
the naive of this world a needed reality check - if they would come out and
say, "you know, yeah, I used performance-enhancing drugs. Wake up, people.
You want superhuman performances, well, here you are. How else do you expect a
human body to get on a Tour de France bicycle every day for a month, each year
for seven years, and ride xxxx kilometres up and down mountains, or run regular
sub-10 second 100 metre dashes, etc. etc., without such help in terms of
training, recovery time and so on?"
Lance Armstrong after winning the 2000 Tour de France/The Associated Press
Say, for instance, the ultimate in unaided human achievement for the 100-metre dash is 10.8 seconds. High school friends of mine ran it in 11.0 and I know they weren't using drugs. How impressive, then, would be such 'elite' level times to the lay person? Not very. But 9.58, the current world record time set by Usain Bolt? Impressive. Super human, even.
None of this means that these doped-or-accused-of-being-dped athletes are not dedicated,
they are. They train. One cannot do steroids or other performance enhancing drugs tonight and be transformed into a world-class
athlete by morning, which seems to be what most lay people - and sports
journalists - think as they freely toss the word 'cheat' around.
Is it cheating if nobody else is doing it? Sure, one
supposes. If athlete A is on drugs, he can train longer, recover in shorter
time, etc. than athlete B. And if
athlete A is not at the natural level of athleticism as athlete B, then the
drug factor can make him so (unless athlete B also dopes, of course).
But consider that it's not so much about performance enhancement
but about how one DEFINES performance enhancement based upon one's own moral
and ethical code. There was a time, for instance, when weight training was not
an accepted part of sports training. Then someone started lifting weights and,
no doubt, outperformed his opponent whether it was on a football field, in the
shot put or whatever pursuit. Was this athlete, who chose weightlifting to
enhance his performance, cheating? Or simply being more advanced in his
thinking, at least temporarily, than his competitors who then, no doubt, began
lifting weights. They had to, to stay competitive.
Look at golf clubs of today compared to those of decades
ago. Are today's golfers, even the weekend hacker cheating, 'technologically
doping' as the saying goes, or simply using the current tools of the trade? The same applies to assorted technologically advanced swimsuits, some of which have been banned.
One
of the tools of the athletic trade for eons now has been drugs. It’s the way it
is. Heck, popular music icons and other creative folk have long used drugs as
performance enhancement and are PRAISED for it
Aldous Huxley, best know for Brave New World, for instance, wrote about mescaline in The Doors of Perception after experimenting with the drug. Why is that 'OK' yet . . .
Yet somehow in sports, when a needle or other form of ingestion comes into it, the reaction is dismissive use of the term 'cheater.' Sorry, I don't buy it. Ben Johnson was a good sprinter, for instance and it took 11 years from his disgraced time of 9.79 seconds at the 1988 Olympics against what most now consider to an entirely doped field to be equalled by Maurice Green, himself (like most sprinters) the subject of drug-use speculation.
People should be realistic.
It’s likely that the only true, legitimate athletic
competitions occur in our youth when it’s all about pure athletic ability. Then
the realities of life, commerce and competitiveness grab hold in all pursuits,
cynical – though realistic – as it may sound, and here we are. It’s the human
condition, after all.
