Doping Distress

By Brenda Taylor

One of the greatest aspects of track and field competition is that it is a purely objective sport. Black and white. Everyone starts at the same time and the man who reaches the finish line first always wins. Case closed. This year in track and field, however, the story was anything but black and white. Sports headlines weren’t filled with wins and losses or times and records, rather they were dominated by Victor Conte, Balco and the biggest athletic drug scandal in US history. Conte claimed that 27 athletes, including 15 track and field superstars, a champion boxer and swimmer and several NFL and MLB players, had received illegal athletic aids from San Francisco Bay area supplement maker Balco Laboratories. The mistakes of those few athletes, however, cast a shadow of suspicion over athletic competition that grayed the lines of success in every sport—particularly in track and field and at this year’s Olympics.

Olympic competition is the ultimate competition for an athlete. The games are the oldest international athletic festival and still embody the purest spirit of competition. Each athlete competes wearing the colors of his or her country and therefore transcends the more mundane sports contest of man on man or team against team. Because those wearing the U.S. uniform represent not only themselves but the public as well, there is an expectation not present in professional sports that the athletes comply absolutely with the rules of fair and honest competition.

I participated in the women’s 400 meter hurdles in this summer’s Olympic Games. As an athlete the current focus on eliminating drugs from sports is utterly embraced and yet wholly wearisome. The joy for me is that catching the cheaters will ensure that the playing field will be just a little more level. However, a great deal of focus on a few athletes’ ability to take advantage of the system undermines the accomplishments of clean athletes—whose hard work and steadfast discipline yield substantial performance improvements. Although the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency has subjected athletes the most rigorous testing in history, making it more difficult for athletes in Olympic sports to cheat, newspapers filled headlines with the idea that this has not changed the problem.

Often a clean athlete’s biggest fear is that no one will appreciate their hard-earned success as honest. In allowing this suspicion to dominate our sports psyches, we lose two of the most extraordinary traits intrinsic in athletic competition: appreciation of the natural capabilities of the human mind and body and fair play (i.e. that everyone really is starting from the same line).

In professional sports we have often allowed these expectations to take a back seat to our own entertainment. As a society, we’d rather sweep Barry Bonds’ drug allegations under the rug and pay huge ticket prices to see him continue to break records than to watch just one more average player. We are a culture that reveres achievement at any cost whether in the board room or on the playing field, and in a year dominated by corporate, political, and athletic scandal it’s evident that as long as our expectations are so high, some people will always take any risk necessary to be better than the best.

When Olympic athletes were asked if they would take an unknown drug that could take up to 10 years off of their life, but would guarantee an Olympic medal, some 85 percent said yes. Such is the dramatic desperation for success that we would trade years of our life to be at the top (but then with 60 hour work weeks, the kids in daycare or in front of the TV, don’t we do that anyway?). The issue here isn’t necessarily the desire for success, but rather the scale by which we measure it. Success does not come in achieving victory at any cost or by taking a short cut just to cross the finish line first, rather success comes in the daily struggle and dedication to achieve a goal. There’s nothing black and white about it because greatness means something different to each person.

The challenge is that competition by nature involves more than one person and there is no way to ensure that all competitors will subscribe to the same standards of integrity. In a period of rapid medical advancement and designer steroids, will the playing field ever be even again? And as long as there are dirty athletes competing, can the clean guy win?

The World Anti-Doping Agency has taken steps to ensure that the answers to both of these questions are optimistic. Blood and urine samples from the Athens games will be held for four years and periodically retested as new drugs and doping methods are uncovered. As a result of this new measure, several track and field athletes refused to submit samples at the games and two were subsequently stripped of their medals. At the very least the measure has already served as a useful deterrent. In a period of medical advancement, I’m not sure that drug testers can ever be ahead of the game—making these retroactive tests imperative in deterring doping.

As an athlete I am left comforted by the fact that my success isn’t governed by the seven other athletes on the track but by my body, my mind and the objective ticking of the clock. Thus, regardless of the choices of other athletes that I cannot control, my dedication, my goals and my motivation will remain the same: to improve my time and to cross the finish line first. And that is black and white.

Brenda Taylor ’01 is a member of the USA Track and Field team. She competed in the 400 meter hurdle finals at this summer’s Olympic Games.