 
|
|||||||||||||
              
|
 Shontz: Widespread drug use makes every athlete a suspect
Tuesday, September 26, 2000 By Lori Shontz, Post-Gazette Sports Writer
SYDNEY, Australia -- All I need to do is close my eyes, and I can see the pictures that forever shaped the way I do my job.
My junior year at Penn State, I took a course titled "The Ethics of Sport." One day our guest speaker was Penn State professor Charles Yesalis, one of the world's experts on steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs.
He spoke for a while on the prevalence of drugs in sport, backing up his statements with scientific data. Then he showed overheads to illuminate his stories, including one with two pictures taken from a German magazine.
The picture on the left showed Florence Griffith-Joyner the year before she became a worldwide track star. She looked like a strong, athletic woman. The picture on the right showed Flo Jo in 1988, the year she won three gold medals at the Seoul Olympics. She looked like a freak of nature.
The entire class gasped.
The physical difference was so striking, the time difference so short ... no one doubted that Flo Jo had used quite a bit of chemistry to obtain such results.
Maybe she didn't. But no one in that classroom needed any other proof.
To most of my classmates, the pictures and the lecture provided material for a brief debate and information to remember for the test. It was different for me. As an aspiring sports writer, my goal was to someday cover the Olympics. I knew I would probably one day find myself in such a situation, writing stories about an athlete whose wonderful story could be awfully fishy.
I asked myself how to report such stories. That's a conversation I've had repeatedly since then, with myself and my colleagues. I've never found a good way to do it.
The facts are these:
So what do I do?
Well, often nothing. I try to avoid the issue. I don't write glowing profiles about athletes who have obvious question surrounding them. But I cover their results, and I give the facts about their situation. The readers are free to draw their own conclusions, which -- like mine -- could be right or wrong.
Asking questions is difficult, and the answers don't always matter. After most of the swimming events last week, medalists trudged to a news conference and were asked if they felt that their records and/or victories were tainted by the suspicion of drugs. All acted indignant. All said the right things. No one, as far as we know, tested positive.
But what are the chances all of them are winning naturally? Irish swimmer Michelle Smith acted plenty insulted when reporters questioned whether she was clean after she improved dramatically and won three gold medals at the Atlanta Olympics, and two years later her urine sample was spiked with enough vodka to kill her.
The Irish thought American reporters were awfully quick to jump on the "Is Michelle juiced?" story -- and hypocritical because they weren't subjecting American stars to the same scrutiny.
The same opinion is prevailing in the press rooms here, especially with all the drug questions at the swimming venue. The Dutch, particularly, are getting irritated that Inge de Bruin and her fellow gold medalists get peppered with versions of the Michelle Smith questions every time they approach a microphone.
Now deBruin has dropped nearly three seconds from her 100-meter freestyle in the past two years, which is surprising for a 26-year-old. But American Dara Torres, 33, has come back from seven years away from the sport to win two individual bronze medals and two relay golds, a far better showing -- with faster times -- than she made in her younger years. And she hasn't faced as many questions.
When two Americans tied for the gold medal in the men's 50-meter freestyle, a reporter from the Netherlands was quick to get a microphone in the news conference. "I am going to ask the Americans about drugs," he said, "because all the Americans have asked Dutch swimmers about drugs."
Now my colleagues and I find ourselves in an awful position. C.J. Hunter, the husband of one of the Games' most prominent athletes, tested positive for two steroids at a competition in late July.
We have to write about it. About how Hunter said he withdrew from the Olympics because he hadn't recovered from knee surgery. About how this news about her husband will affect Marion Jones, who still has four events remaining in her quest for five gold medals.
And I wonder, should we have asked more questions about how she won the 100 meters by such a wide margin? Or how she won a 1997 world championship 10 weeks after she rededicated herself to the sport?
And what about the other athletes who, like Hunter, made the Olympic team but withdrew from the Games for various reasons? What do we do about them?
The last fact is this: There simply aren't any good answers.
|
||||||||||||
Every spectacular performance, every dramatic drop in time and every incredible increase in distance is haunted by the question, "Yeah, but could that have happened naturally?"