The reality, though, is that “Mark Starr Meets” wouldn’t make for a very good TV series. We sportswriters have conversations across a notepad with hundreds of athletes, but meet very few in the real sense of the word. It’s the rare athlete who has an inclination for any intimacy with the press. But every so often an athlete steps outside of the bounds of that limited formula and sits down with you, breaks bread, maybe even hoists a glass. Under those circumstances, it’s possible to get past the tortured constraints of athlete-reporter relationships and simply converse as two human beings. And that’s when you can really get an education.
There is one of those occasions I think about more often than any other. It was a dinner with an Olympic champion swimmer, one of the brighter and more personable athletes I’ve encountered. And by the shank of what had been a fairly liquid evening–and I’m not talking about the water in the pool–the conversation had turned remarkably candid. And so I popped the question: “How many top American swimmers use illegal performance-enhancing drugs?”
The rapid-fire response was clever and mostly, I believe, candid. “Everyone but me,” the swimmer said. And I took that to mean “everyone including me,” since it’s hard to fathom an athlete so pure, not to mention so superior, that he or she would disdain drugs despite a firm conviction that every other competitor was using them.
The important thing to note is that we were talking about Americans. This was not a discussion of the heyday of commie labs, not East Germany and its sinister athletic machine, not the drug regimens that have been passed off as herbal treatments in the Chinese swimming empire. It was the American program that this Olympic hero said was replete with cheating–red, white, blue and very, very dirty.
The reason I recall this conversation so frequently is that the issue of drugs in Olympic sports rears its ugly head so very often. As it did again this week. An Oregon man has become the third member of a four-man U.S. cycling team from 1990 to sue USA Cycling. He alleges that–without his knowledge–he was given illegal drugs by the U.S. team trainer per instructions of the U.S. team coach. Anabolic steroids in his “vitamin” injections. Amphetamines in his water bottle. And then there’s stuff about a suppository you don’t even want to think about. The whole illegal kit and caboodle that has left a residue of used needles and test tubes littering cycling courses around the world.
The U.S. has long led the world in finger-pointing on the drug issue, but has always run for cover when the finger has been pointed its way. No cheater ever just fesses up and says, “You got me. I did it.” So we should be somewhat inured to the denials and protestations. And we don’t believe them for a second when they come from a Jamaican sprinter (you know that ganja culture) or a Bulgarian weightlifter (just look at the moustache on her). Yet when a clean-cut American lad or lass insists someone must have spiked their water bottle or that their diet supplement must have been tarnished, we just nod along.
Well it’s time to stop nodding along when it comes to our Olympic establishment. This country may be no worse than any other when it comes to drug abuse in sports, but it is certainly no better, either. And it is far and away the world’s leading hypocrite. A little more than two years ago, the director of the U.S. Olympic Committee’s antidoping program resigned, alleging in his resignation letter that the USOC was “deliberately encouraging the doping of athletes without regard to the consequences of their health.”
What did the USOC do? It moved quickly to discredit Dr. Wade Exum, who is black, as a man who was bitter–of course, for no good reason–about what he perceived as racism in the USOC, as a man who was about to lose his job and as a man who demanded millions for his silence before he made those accusations. The matter soon descended into the hands of lawyers, so it was impossible to get to the truth of Exum’s underlying motivations. But he was the USOC’s own man at the helm of the drug program for almost a decade, and nothing I’ve seen or heard since makes me question the fundamental truth of his allegation.
That’s why the rest of the Olympic world took such obvious delight, at the 2000 Games, in the public humiliation of shot-putter C.J. Hunter, who back then was married to American track queen Marion Jones. America’s track-and-field governing body was apparently sitting on the secret of his failed drug tests. So Hunter was outed as a drug cheat in the tabloids, even though he was not going to compete in Sydney. Canada’s Dick Pound, who leads the Olympic anti-drug agency, has singled out USA Track & Field for its indefensible, obstructionist tactics, protecting known offenders under the charade of U.S. “privacy” laws.
There is, of course, rampant drug abuse in many of America’s most beloved sports franchises, be it Major League Baseball or the National Football League. But none wrap themselves in the flag, muster such sanctimony and purport to adhere to this nation’s highest ideals in quite the fashion our Olympic movement does. The new year will mark the start of another Olympic cycle bringing a host of those cheating sports–track and field, swimming, cycling, weightlifting–back into prominence, headed for center stage in Athens in 2004. Enjoy it. I wish I still could.
