Beauty of Sport Totally Sullied by Drug Scandal

By: Linda Robertson
Posted In: Sports

MIAMI- The beauty of a baseball player’s home-run swing or a runner’s stride across the finish line makes the heart pound with joy and amazement.

The ugliness of Jason Giambi injecting his buttocks with steroids or Marion Jones sticking a needle full of human growth hormone in her leg makes the stomach turn with disgust and disillusionment.

Breathtaking grace?

Sprinter Kelli White said she ingested such a smorgasbord of drugs that her skin broke out in acne, her voice turned to gravel and her arms and legs looked like Popeye’s. Her body was so confused she was menstruating every other week.

Finely honed talent?

Barry Bonds, who says hard work enabled him to reach his thick physical peak at age 37, admitted he used mysteriously named substances called “the Clear” and “the Cream,” but it never occurred to him that they might be illegal steroids, and he never bothered to ask what was in the liquid and lotion that entered his temple of a body.

Relentless competitive drive?

To improve his hitting, Giambi relied on a cattle-fattening drug and a female hormone. To become the world’s fastest man, Tim Montgomery put on his spikes and opened his medicine cabinet.

Sports may someday be killed by absurd salaries, escalating violence or simple oversaturation.

THE REAL KILLER

Or death could come in pill form. Juiced-up, broken-down athletes will no longer be able to perform. And fans who once marveled at the feats of their fellow humans will get bored watching chemically-enhanced mutants smash ever more meaningless records.

New leaks of grand jury testimony in the Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative (BALCO) case and BALCO founder Victor Conte’s confessions on TV’s 20/20 have served to confirm the badly-kept dirty secret of sports: Athletes cheat and get away with it.

As more grotesque details emerge, there’s no use trying to deny what’s been true for decades: A “level playing field” does not exist- only one sloping downhill for doped-up runners and one with closer fences for doped-up baseball players.

Who can watch Bonds or Jones again and not feel skeptical of what they’re seeing? Conte said fooling drug testers was “like taking candy from a baby.” He called Major League Baseball’s belatedly implemented program “a joke.” He called the Olympics “a fraud.”

And the reason a former funk band bassist and kooky nutritionist like Conte can beat the multi-billion dollar sports machine is because sports has looked the other way. Of all the money invested in lavish contracts, stadiums and marketing, only a crumb has been invested in catching the dopers.

QUICK FIX

White was a mediocre sprinter who was transformed into a double world champion using Conte’s regimen of the designer steroid THG, Human Growth Hormone, insulin and the stimulant Modafinil, which she and other sprinters said they used to treat their narcolepsy- a sleeping disorder of apparently epidemic proportions among fast runners.

White now says she was a freak, and she was taken aback when she saw her bulging muscles on TV. Winning “got to be so easy that I was actually disappointed,” she said.

Right there she has nailed the crux of the doping crisis. As much as drugs inflate their abusers, they deflate the integrity of fair play. It’s no fun to watch a rigged game and it’s no fun to win one, either.

Conte and his clients can rationalize all they want with the exaggeration that “it’s not cheating if everybody is doing it.” Apologists can say some of the drugs were not banned at the time the athletes took them and that athletes have a right to use any advantage to maximize their income. But just because something isn’t illegal doesn’t mean it isn’t unethical.

These drugs did not give Bonds better hand-eye coordination. They did not give Jones better sprinting technique. But these drugs do give athletes the ability to train harder, to stave off injury and fatigue longer. They can give athletes just enough of a push to be No. 1 when milliseconds and millimeters count.

DRAMA GONE

Where’s the excitement in Bonds’ home run record chase now? Statistics are the lifeblood of baseball. But what if that blood is tainted? Is Hank Aaron cringing? Is Babe Ruth turning over in his grave?

Bonds has adamantly denied using drugs, just as Jones and Giambi have. None tested positive. Yet the smoke around them can’t be ignored. Bonds’ personal trainer, Greg Anderson, is among the indicted. Conte gave Anderson drugs. Bonds took the stuff Anderson gave him. Bonds encouraged Gary Sheffield to take the stuff, too, but, according to Sheffield, told him, “Don’t ask questions.”

Giambi, who looked like an anorexic version of his former cartoonish self when he showed up for the first season of baseball’s new testing program, testified he got steroids from Anderson. His season was cut short by a pituitary gland tumor. The Yankees will now try to void the remaining $80 million on his contract because the All-Star they signed was a fake.

Jones was married to a steroid cheat and is the girlfriend of Montgomery, who is one appeal away from a lifetime ban. Conte said he began her drug program weeks before the Sydney Olympics, where she won the 100 by an astonishing margin. He’s no longer employed by Jones and Montgomery, both of whom failed to make the 2004 U.S. Olympic team in the 100.

GUILTY CONSCIENCE

Kelli White came clean. Her conscience got to her. She was disturbed by what the drugs had done to her and her sport. She knows of the harmful effects of steroids- the increase of masculine traits in women and of feminine traits in men; liver, cardiovascular and fertility problems; mood swings.

Athletes such as Giambi need to follow her lead. If they don’t care about their own health, they should care about the kids who emulate them. Taylor Hooton, a 17-year-old Texas football player, injected the same Deca-Durabolin that Giambi used. Hooton, suffering from depression, hanged himself last year.

It’s difficult to look at the ugly side of sports. As Conte said, “it’s time to kill the monster and start over.”

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c 2004, The Miami Herald.

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Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.

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