Hypocrisy at the heart of the affair (Sports Doping)

American authorities knew long ago their athletes were drug abusers but chose to ignore it

Kevin Mitchell
Sunday October 19, 2003
The Observer

How fitting that what looks like becoming the biggest drugs bust in the history of sport should be sourced to a gym in California, whose citizens have just elected as their Governor a well known former Austrian bodybuilder.

More....

http://sport.guardian.co.uk/columnists/story/0,10260,1066188,00.html

Bikers and swimmers have been, well, the frontrunners in the sports/drugs relationship for a long time. A few years ago the Tour de France was rocked when one set of trainers got busted at a border stop, and the allegation which everyone seemed to agree with but nobody in the pro biking world would put their name to was: everyone does it. The quantity of drugs nabbed in the bust seemed to say as much. (My own suspicion is that Lance Armstrong's famous testicular cancer was not as sporadic and accidental as is pretended- it's known to be correlated with long term use of certain subtypes of steriods.) Archers and riflery people use beta blockers. And so on.

Truth is, I don't think people in the pro sports world really care all that much. The problem is only one of unfair advantages acquired, as they see it. Fans don't care if they can believe that either every pro in the sport does, or intentionally abstains from, the relevant drugs (e.g. football), or that no pro does anything of the sort that affects things (e.g. baseball).

n/t