A super athlete? Presume cheating.

I'm trying to post two times a week on substantial topics, but in doing so, I'm endangering now my goal of 2,400 words to read on my novel. After days of working on the topic I want to write about, (Slut-Shaming) and discovering I have too many thoughts requiring too much background and documentation, I've decided, for this deadline, to fall back on a different topic. This is the way I'll have to write this blog, small, simple topics interspersed with bigger, more complex ones. It's called lowering expectations.

Speaking of lowered expectations, I hear that Lance Armstrong is considering a public confession of his doping. After all the vehement denials, he's thinking of coming clean. I'll believe that when I see it. This is somebody who couldn't restrain his ego and competitiveness to give himself anything less than seven Tour de France titles.



Was anyone truly surprised when the news of the US Anti-Doping Agency's report came out in October? We had a hint of it, like his winning the Tour de France seven times in a row with testicular cancer in between. Whenever an athlete doesn't just break, but smashes a record, we should all presume now that they're cheating, doping and enhancing their body chemistry. Furthermore, they're probably doing it with cutting edge bio-technology because you can assume everybody in the sport is probably doing it as well. To stand out as much as Armstrong did, he needed something innovative.

Anybody in professional football should be suspected of doping at some time. Fifty years ago, you never saw football players who were 6'2", weighed 215 pounds who ran the 40-yard in 4.4. Either they were taking hormones in high school, or evolution has them on the fast-track.

I remember soon after the baseball strike in the 1990s, the big home run race between Mark McGuire and Sammy Sosa. Babe Ruth never had to face the pitching these guys did. Steroids use was the obvious answer. Any fan conversation in St. Louis at the time would mention steroids. The only people who didn't seem to suspect were the sports reporters. At the time, they looked the other way. Baseball had to recover its fan base after the strike. A race to break baseball's most iconic record was just the circus needed, and a scandal over it would be like a stink bomb at the party. 

Instead, sports writers waited until it was over. Then as investigations unfolded, you got these columns and commentaries that said, "Golly-gee. Cheating? How did we miss that?" No, they didn't miss it. They pretended it wasn't happening. I remember when baseball cracked down on doping, and suddenly pitchers began getting no-hitters like crazy. It seems steroids favored the hitters. That's the problem for the record books. How many asteriskes do you put in there?

There are exceptions. Such as I'm (almost) certain that Wayne Gretzky never doped. For one thing, he was smashing records as a child. I mean, he got 378 goals in a season playing in the pee-wee leagues. For another, hockey had expanded very fast and the talent pool was very diluted when he broke into the WHA and the NHL. Hockey was where pro-baseball was when Babe Ruth was playing. When better players began to stream into the NHL, and when lesser players began to muck, and grab and obstruct, Gretzky's record-setting seasons stopped.

If Lance Armstrong could win the Tour de France seven consecutive times, doping becomes the obvious answer. The United States Anti-Doping Agency's report in October was devastating and irrefutable. It included testimony of twenty-six witnesses, eleven of whom were teammates of Armstrong's. He not only doped himself, but he insisted that teammates take his drug regimen or be replaced. He paid the physical price for his use: testicular cancer, which he recovered from on chemo only to win the Tour that year, too. He insisted his teammates dope, and he insisted on being the winner of the Tour, his peers must have despised him.


In an age where there's so much money at stake in an athletic careers, we are never going to get rid of doping. Maybe athletes will learn to curve their egos and not crush their opposition when they have the most cutting edge drugs in their systems. They wouldn't call attention to themselves the way Armstrong did.

Sports isn't just child's play anymore. It's big business. It's somewhat instructive to see what people are willing to do when they mean business as opposed to what they do for mere fun. Athletics is now a topic for science fiction writers.