DRUGS AND SPORT: TIME FOR A RETHINK?

Athletes have always been contemptuous of sport's attempts to regulate
drug use, but they tended to keep their mouths shut. Most resented the
whip hand that testing gave management, but they were too afraid of
being caught, punished, embarrassed to speak up unless they were
squeaky clean, retired or busted.

Until last week, when bicycle racers briefly disrupted the Tour de
France as a protest against what they claimed was a witch-hunt,
athletes have never so publicly and boldly stood up to drug testing.

One reaction to the slowdown in the Alps was that the inmates were
taking over the asylum, another that the so called athletes' revolt had
begun again after 30 years of simmering. A day later, the race
continued, probably a tribute to favors and deals. But that little
mountain uprising may yet turn out to be a historical turn in the
road: Athletes are finally expressing justified disgust with a
capricious system that seems to be, in these days of what the
University of Texas Professor John Hoberman calls "the therapeutic
ideal," simply out of date.

If drugs like Prozac and Viagra can be taken without apology by
everyday people who want to enhance their performance in a competitive
world, why shouldn't athletes, prized as models of "human capacity,"
be allowed, nay, encouraged, to try out drugs for the rest of us?

Drug testing has not been fair--- few rnarquee names have ever been
brought down---nor as effective a deterrent as both sides would have
fans believe. Athletes have gone along with the lie as long as it kept
reporters from snooping around their specimens. Also, athletes have
tended to stay ahead of the drug police.

As the rewards for victory have spiked, a growing network of
underground pharmacologists have concocted drugs too new to be
detected in addition to masking agents for the old drugs. This
competitive cat-and-mouse game, risky, expensive and hypocritical, has
allowed athletes to continue seeking the edge while management kept the
appearance of control.

That game began unraveling along with the Tour last Wednesday. When
the 140-rider pack found out the details of the police raids on teams'
hotels where they had forcibly-tested riders' urine, hair and blood
for drugs, cyclists slowed down, quit, tore off their numbers,
canceling the day's race.

By Thursday, with a half a dozen teams out of the competition, 101 of
the 198 riders who started on July 11 in Dublin were again rolling
toward Paris and $2.2 million in prizes. Apparently, the most
consistent performance-enhancing drug is still money.

Nevertheless, two interlocked issues, one about control and the other
about appropriate drug use, were once again out of the bottle.

Not since the 1960s, when Harry Edwards, Tommie Smith and John Carlos
used the Olympics as a platform against racism- Muhammad Ali used the
heavyweight championship as a pulpit, and Billie Jean King led tennis
players, eventually all players, out of the desert of sham amateurism,

have athletes rebelled so dramatically against management.

Current labor skirmishes, including the National Basketball
Association lockout, can also be seen in that context. The testing for
drugs, recreational or performance-enhancing (another distinction that
is blurring), has always been the most subtle and insidious way of
enforcing that control.

And just last Monday, two American Oympians, the sprinter Dennis
Mitchell and the shot-put champion Randy Barnes, were suspended for
possible doping offenses. Mitchell reportedly tested above the
acceptable levels of testosterone.

On Friday, Barnes's: B sample turned out positive, too, showing a
banned nutritional supplement, androstenedione, a naturally occurring
substance in the body that is available in health food stores.

The: most significant incident however, may have occurred four years ago
when the marathoner Alberto Salazar ended a long streak without a victory.

With the help of the antidepressant Prozac, which he was using legally as a
training aid, he won the 56-mile Comrades Marathon in South Africa.

For the ever-provocative Hoberman, who wrote "Mortal Engines: The Science
of Performance and the Dehumanization of Sport" in 1992 Salazar's drug of
choice "forged a high-profile link between doping in sport and the wider
world of pharmacology that affects us all."

Hoberman expects that "pharmacological Calvinism" will be increasingly
harder to enforce in sports as drugs are "gentrified." In particular
he thinks that as more elderly men, and even women, use testosterone
to enhance their lives, it will become impossible to prohibit the drug
from enhancing sports performance.

The real issue for the future will be the legalization of drugs that
cross the artificial line between therapy and performance enhancement.
Hoberman's vision includes Olympians at the starting blocks 'their
drug company logos gleaming m the sun."

Checked-by: "Rich O'Grady"