public caning?
Geez, I just spent (wasted?) an hour cruising around on Google and Letsrun to read about testosterone and other PED’s (acronym for performance enhancing drugs) and I am feeling truly sick to my stomach. Even my delicious cup of 
coffee and a heavenly, ultra-rich pecan bar can’t take away my nausea … because it’s a nausea of spirit, not unlike what Sartre describes:
In Nausea (New Directions Paperbook), “Antoine is facing the troublesomely provisional and limited nature of existence itself; he embodies Sartre’s theories of existential angst, and he searches anxiously for meaning in all the things that had filled and fulfilled his life up to that point.”
(from wikipedia)
My beloved sport, track & field, is beginning to lose all meaning to me. After reading accounts of East Germans, the Finns, the Chinese, the Russians, the Portugese, the Americans (a damn long list), English, Belgian, Romanian, African, Turkish, and Cuban cheats, I wonder … was it ever clean? I read of East German swimmers who didn’t even know they were taking drugs as young girls, only to find out after their babies were born with severe defects. Missing limbs. Mongoloid features. Mentally retarded.
What other defects are we birthing in our win-at-all-costs culture?
Will this sickness trickle down to middle school cross-country, pee wee football?
The whole Floyd Landis thing has taken on a life of its own, hasn’t it? I guess after Barry Bonds and Justin Gatlin, Landis’ gaffe reached the tipping point for mainstream media. Even our local storage rental store had this posted on its street-front letter board: “Oops, Floyd.” It’s no longer news that professional athletes are using drugs; drugs become newsworthy only if the athletes are stupid, or sloppy, or unconnected enough to get caught. And what happens after they get busted? In track & field, it’s a measely 2-year slap-on-the-wrist ban or what is laughably lax - a “public warning.”
Public caning would be more effective.
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Subscribing in part to the conspiracy theory raised by Landis as his 48th defense to his positive drug test this week, I do have one question: how is it that with all of the testing done during the tour, Landis was the only athlete to test positive? Are there positives that are being covered up in an effort to avoid tarnishing cycling’s image even more? And was Landis, as an American, targeted with the positive test release? Clearly, half of the peloton is on some sort of illegal, performance enhancing drug, so how are they all beating the tests? Are they that far ahead of the testing procedures? And are Landis and Phonak so incompetent that Floyd was the only person caught after three weeks of testing on 180 riders? It seems unlikely.
Comment by Steve — 8/9/2006 @ 11:06 am
I have no doubt that it is trickling down and has already reached the high school level and is probably in middle school as well at some places. All you need is an older brother/sister with a supplier. I’m sure my wife can find out from one of her talkative students. Hey, it’s a good thing that teenagers aren’t impressionable or this could become a real problem huh.
I read an interesting piece in ESPN The Magazine where Landis spoke about winning the Tour once and being set for life. His words were that he could “put it in park.” The author wondered if that kind of temptation was enough to make him risk all for the chance he would slip through. Apparently it was. It almost worked Floyd. Shame on you. That’s what I want to put on the back of my truck window in big white letters, “Shame on you Floyd!” Maybe that’s what we need to reverse this trend. Every billboard and bumper sticker condemning it.
Comment by Jimmy B. — 8/9/2006 @ 11:27 am
You know, I can understand the temptation.
My son is about 6′1″ (at 14 years old) and he has feet the size of flippers. I told him that he should go out for the swim team, and then it occurred to me - is that fair to other swimmers that Silas has this natural advantage?
So why wouldn’t folks do everything that they can to gain every advantage? No, I’m not CONDONING cheating. I’m just saying that I can UNDERSTAND why folks would cheat.
Let’s face it - I will never, ever, EVER be as fast as you, Joan. I never could have been, no matter how much I trained or how much I starved. I simply don’t have the genetics for it. In fact, truth be told, I don’t have the genetics for ANYTHING.
So there are no truly level playing fields, as long as we have different phenotypes (or is it genotypes?
Some of us will be better able - naturally - to compete at this or that.
An unbiased observer mightsay “hey - that’s not fair! Why should one person get to win purely by picking the right parents?” and might argue that anything that somebody wanted to do to attempt to improve his performamnce is totally reasonable.
We all agree that it’s okay to train, it’s okay to sleep, it’s okay to eat anything that we want to eat while training, all of which might be performance enhancing - but we draw the line at certain chemicals and call them “drugs”. Why do we do that? The only rationale that I’ve heard is that it’s because those drugs are *dangerous*, and that we don’t want to encourage their use, so we outlaw them so that NOBODY can use them.
But overtraining is dangerous. Starting a sprint cold is dangerous. Lots of things are dangerous. So I can see how somebody might think that there isn’t any real reason to outlaw those chemicals.
Of course, the problem is that that means the person breaking the rules is BREAKING THE RULES, and therefore it’s not a level competition. But I don’t think that it’s totally and blackly *evil*. It’s just misguided.
Although I’d like to say, for the record, that I’m always in favor of public canings : )
Comment by Fat Charlie the Archangel — 8/10/2006 @ 6:37 pm
I think that only when cheating is seen as a serious and unacceptable infraction in society will this ever change. However, this seems to be getting worse as many kids in school see it as the norm and not necessarily a bad thing to cheat on exams and to plagiarize. This leads to Enron type behaviour and to drug cheats in sports. By the way, Joan, what is the acceptable “English” for comments on this site, US or UK (Canada). That is, labour or labor, color or colour
Comment by George (Canada) — 8/11/2006 @ 6:22 pm
Georgue -
U may use the English “u” whenever u want, just as long as u don’t pronounce herb with the hard H. I ate that!
Herb is someone’s name, not something that grows in my neighbour’s garden.
Comment by Joan — 8/12/2006 @ 8:53 am