That includes you, Mr. Logan

Over here in the UK we’ve recently had a case with one of our sprinters Dwain Chambers.

He was trying to overturn the British Olympic Committees decision which bans all UK drug cheat athletes competing in the Olympics for life – he took it all the way to the High Court, fortunately common sense prevailed.

This guy cost his 3 team mates a gold 4×4 100m medal because of his stupidity.

Unfortunately the combination of Money + Fame, and the highly competitive nature of top level athletics is always going to lead some down the wrong path.

Ian

Not every athlete who lines up in Beijing will be a cheat, no. But everyone in the finals, will be, certainly in the sprinting events. As said you simply cannot compete clean at the top level otherwise. And even then it’s sometimes not always enough. Nobody is saying the drugs alone make everybody a 9.68 runner – that’s foolish. But Tyson Gay isn’t a 9.68 runner without that magical combination of X, Y and Z.

In an ideal, drug free world I’m pretty sure the final placings in this year’s 100m final would be roughly the same. The only difference is the times would be perhaps as much as half a second slower.

Jones got caught, and so did Justin Gatlin, Tim Montgomery and Johnson. But that’s the only thing that separates these guys from their peers – that they failed a test.

Well, that and she was involved in bank fraud and impeding federal investigations into such.

On a more serious note, I don’t believe that every athlete in Beijing is doping. I’m not quite that cynical yet. And getting caught is a HUGE difference. If you get caught, then you should face the consequences, and those consequences should be harsh.

Until you are caught, though, the athletes have rights and they shouldn’t be scapegoated and assumed to be cheaters. If they do cheat, then they deserve whatever they get.

I don’t think she should be pardoned, but there’s a blatant hypocrisy in all this. Any reasonable analysis will show that nobody has broken 10 seconds in the men’s 100m dash that probably wasn’t drug-assisted. Tyson Gay’s recent wind-assisted 9.68 was a full tenth of a second faster than Ben Johnson’s 1988 drug-enhanced performance. Let’s not be naive about this – every person who lines up in the 100m final at Beijing, man or woman, is using illegal substances.

(And in most of the other events, too. I believe it’s still true that in all of the world of sports, only field hockey and figure skating have never had an athlete fail a drug test.)

It’s only a level playing field if you’re taking the same stuff as everybody else. Nobody can compete ‘naturally’ anymore; you won’t even make the finals at the Olympic level, let alone have a chance to win it.

Jones got caught, and so did Justin Gatlin, Tim Montgomery and Johnson. But that’s the only thing that separates these guys from their peers – that they failed a test.

What I don’t like is people making Jones out to be some kind of demon because the reality is she’s no different than anybody else. Even with what she was taking she still couldn’t get anywhere near Florence Griffith-Joyner’s times. Jones did herself no favours in the way she acted, but what was she really going to do – own up? Nobody does that until they’re busted. Too much to lose, too much at stake, and too much pressure to win. But the media needs a spacegoat, some way to take the eyes off of everybody else. Johnson was this person forever, and then Jones become public enemy number one (and to a lesser extent Mark McGuire and pro baseball as a whole).

Much like the Tour, there’s an enormous amount of hypocrisy going on here. The guy finishing number two or number ten behind Lance Armstrong fails but people seem to cling on to the infinitely small possibility that Armstrong himself recovers from cancer and wins seven straight tours racing clean. I mean: really?

It’s an impossible situation, because nobody wants to see a 100m final where the winner runs 10:10 because everybody is 100 per cent drug free. TV audiences demand world records, but without chemical enhancements, you not only will never see a sprint world record again, you won’t see the athletes going anywhere *near* current times.

I’m not sure what the solution is, but clearly the athletes are mostly one step ahead of the testers. My opinion is the powers-that-be scapegoat some people while sparing others – rumours have persisted for years that six of the athletes in the 1988 final failed their tests, including Carl Lewis, but the Olympic Committee feared it would ruin the sport beyond repair. But I think that only the truly naive think top-level athletics is clean (or any professional sport, for that matter).

I’m not sure we can ever have a world where an ‘anything is allowed’ approach to athletic competition would work, but clearly whatever we have isn’t working now. There’s a really fine line here – audiences want records, and TV networks want the audiences. To keep both parties happy, the athletes need drugs. Otherwise, athletics is dead. But as the Tour increasingly becomes more and more of a farce, ultimately every new world record (in pretty much any sport) is always clouded in suspicion. It’s an impossible situation, but I’m not sure that vilifying one athlete is ever the answer.