Send The Right Message

By Jim Ferstle

In the Fall of 1988 Dr. Helen Kelly, a Twin Cities pediatrician received an office visit from a wrestler and his mother. This occurred shortly after Ben Johnson was busted at the Seoul Olympics, testing positive for anabolic steroids. The reason for they were there, the mother told Dr. Kelly, was to request that her son could get a prescription for the drugs Johnson used. It was a not so subtle reminder that in the world of drugs in sports the best intentions can often have unintended consequences.

Sports governing bodies, such as the IOC, were employing a "crime and punishment" model in an attempt to rid the Olympics of drugs. They thought they could scare athletes into not taking drugs by warning them of the alleged negative side effects of healthy individuals consuming substances prescribed for various illnesses. They thought they could scare athletes by claiming to be able to catch them if they cheated by using drugs. Thus when Johnson was caught in Seoul the message they thought they sent to Olympic athletes was: "Don't cheat because you'll get caught." Instead the message many athletes took away from the Seoul doping scandal was that anabolic steroids "worked" and where could they get some?

The same thing happened years later when major league home run king Mark McGwire was discovered to be using a steroid precursor, androsetenedione, during his march to the single season home run record. Once exposed, McGwire's use of the "nutritional supplement" sent sales of "andro" skyrocketing. The message, again, was that this stuff works, where can I get some?

Across the "pond" in the United Kingdom, a new doping drama is playing out. Sprinter Dwain Chambers, who was banned from the sport because he was caught taking the "designer steroid," THG, as part of the crackdown on the BALCO lab in northern California, is making a comeback. Banned for two years for his BALCO transgressions, Chambers tried to win a spot on an American football team, but failed. This winter he returned to his former sport, winning the 60 meter dash in the British trials meet for this year's IAAF World Indoor Championships in Spain last weekend. According to UK Athletics rules, the athlete who wins an event in the trials and has met the qualifying standards to compete at the World meet should be selected for the team.

For the last several weeks the British papers and electronic media have been filled with the extensive debate over whether or not Chambers should be allowed to represent his country at the World Championships. The British Olympic Association(BOA) has a rule that convicted doping offenders may not compete for Great Britain in the Olympics. Numerous high profile Brits have called for lifetime bans for any athlete having committed a serious doping offense. In the crosshairs of this debate is Chambers. The message the sports authorities want to send is that if you cheat and are caught you lose your privilege of being able to participate in sports. Those, such as Flora London Marathon race director, Dave Bedford, a former world recordholder in the 10K, believe that such draconian punishments are necessary to deter today's ethically challenged athletes from giving in to the temptation to use drugs.

As with the unanticipated fallout from the Seoul doping scandals, however, the message being sent to athletes in the Chambers affair is probably quite different. The underlying message that emerges from the debate regarding Chambers eligibility is the weakness of the testing system and of the crime and punishment model for combating doping. The unintended message being delivered is that the current testing system, with its gaping loopholes, is not robust enough to catch a convicted doping offender who is perceived to be able to return to the sport wiser about how to avoid testing positive again. Once a cheat always a cheat is the assumption. We were lucky to catch them the first time, so let's not take a chance that he will elude us again.

The drug testing system is supposed to act as a deterrent for athletes who are tempted to dope. Because it is a human system with limitations, strengths, and weaknesses, it cannot be a singular line of defense against doping. It's primary job is to enable clean athletes to protect their own reputation. Enable them to refute the oft repeated mantra of the doping proponents that "everyone is doing it(doping)." It is not some real world extension of the fictional forensic television programs where the good guys always win by using science to catch and punish the bad guys. There is no real world CSI sports doping.

In the US there has been a constant swinging of the pendulum between the rights of athletes and the laws governing the testing, prosecution, and punishment of athletes. The entertainment sports in the NFL, NBA, MLB, etc. are often criticized as being too soft in their ability to test and the punishment offenders. The NCAA has a similar secretive, seemingly "cheater friendly" approach where athletes are deemed not to be at a very high risk of ever getting caught, and, if they do make a mistake, the punishments are not thought to be adequate to fit the crime. But merely upping the consequences of failing a doping test has not proved to be the "magic bullet" in the anti-doping arena. There is no convincing evidence that lifetime bans will significantly curb athlete drug use.

There is more evidence to support the notion that if you remove the incentive that athletes believe they have to cheat to win you will be doing more to solve the problem. If Chambers were, for example, able to return to the sport, be tested and monitored, and not only be clean, but be perceived to be clean, then you send a far stronger and effective message to every athlete. The message being that you can compete and win at the highest levels of the sport without having to resort to doping. The attention can be focused on the competition, on the athletes, not the gossip, rumor and innuendo of who is doing what or what drug do I need to take to rise to the top.

The athletes deserve a system that protects them from the finger pointing and suspension of belief that every time they dramatically improve it's due to some pharmaceutical assistance. We're all human. We succeed. We fail. Just because we gave in to temptation and broke the rules doesn't deserve the lifetime scarlet letter of disgrace or being branded a cheat. The system has to be strong enough to include rehabilitation, comeback stories not just from physical injuries, but from psychological breakdowns as well. The sad message that echoes from the Chambers affair is that many don't believe the current system allows for that sort of "feel good" story where a banned athlete repents and returns to glory without the use of drugs.

Unfortunately it is very human not to be able to forgive without the belief that the person you are forgiving is truly worthy of that gift. But until we get to that point the system will be unbalanced in favor of those who believe that the only way to get ahead is to bend, finesse, or break the rules. And if all our time is spent debating the complexities of trying to regulate human behavior through these rules, what gets lost is the activity we had hoped to enjoy, to celebrate. Athletics is an exercise in exploring our own and others' ability to perform. If all that gets lost in name calling and endless debate over rules, we've lost the essence of the sports we enjoy. It is just play after all, not an advanced course in public relations, pharmacology, or jurisprudence.