CFL DRUG TESTING OVERDUE

Every regular season for the past 29, the Saskatchewan Roughriders
finished behind our Edmonton Eskimos in the Canadian Football League standings.

A masochistic Rider fan recently calculated the colossal odds of this
occurring are more than half-a-billion to one.

One wonders if a similarly slight probability governs the CFL's
chances of someday implementing a drug-testing policy.

Saskatchewan will finally break its streak of futility this season by
finishing ahead of Edmonton.

But it's still unclear when the CFL will snap its own sorry skid and
develop a badly needed anti-drug program.

World Anti-Doping Agency head Dick Pound said last week during a book
tour that it's "inconceivable a professional football league in our
day and age" doesn't test for drugs. He's right.

The reasons for testing are as subtle as a roughing penalty: drug
cheats don't belong in sport, steroids and hard drugs are dangerous,
and the league's credibility suffers without such a program.

Unfortunately, Pound, a hyperbolic sort who ramps up the rhetoric at
book-selling time, then called the CFL "a summer camp for (NFL)
players serving out their suspensions" and a league "where you spend
your jail time."

That kind of pee-wee-football smack-talking doesn't advance the
debate, and the CFL shouldn't start drug testing just because Dick
Pound says so.

But it would be gratifying if the league finally moved the sticks on
an important issue it has been studying since the early '90s, around
the time former Eskimos lineman John Mandarich died of cancer and
steroid use in 1993.

CFL spokesman Perry Lefko said the league has been too preoccupied
with its financial health over the past decade-and-a-half to deal
properly with the drug-testing issue.

While there is indeed chronic instability in CFL markets such as
Regina, Ottawa and Hamilton, this defence is a little porous. The
league's administration can surely tackle a few big issues at once.

Pound has said a small ticket surcharge could fund a testing program,
and his own agency would run it on a non-profit, cost-recovery basis.

The CFL's inaction looked even sillier Wednesday when the junior
Canadian Hockey League, with its teenage hockey players and
relatively tiny markets, announced it will start drug-testing this
season for substances ranging from marijuana to steroids.

Lefko does say the CFL could "quite possibly" start drug testing "in
the next year or two."

Maybe it will.

Or, maybe, the CFL will be overwhelmed by discussions about a new
salary cap or recalcitrant ownership in Ottawa or the myriad
headaches the league perennially deals with.

Let's be optimistic, and say that a new CFL drug-testing policy next
year will fit nicely next to the Eskimos' rightful crushing of the Roughriders.