Doping? This time around, no Olympian is above suspicion
There were more than just fireworks in the Omaha air on the night of July 4. There was doubt and debate, too.
Earlier in the evening, 41-year-old mother Dara Torres had set an American record in winning the 50-meter freestyle at the U.S. Olympic swimming trials. And while thousands of fans in the Qwest Center roared in admiration of Torres' feat, the one lower-level section reserved for former Olympic swimmers was more muted.
"We were all just looking at each other," one former Olympian said.
They weren't sure how to react. Some were startled by the achievement, some were unsettled by what they thought might have fueled it. Could a woman Torres' age -- who had come out of a six-year retirement, then undergone two surgeries within the past year -- really be doing this without doping?
Later that night, after a fireworks show at Rosenblatt Stadium ended and everyone filled the downtown bars and restaurants, the swimming community was buzzing about Torres. Some elite former swimmers vehemently relayed their belief that Torres, who has volunteered for extensive testing through the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency and vowed to be an "open book," is doing it clean. Others vehemently shared their doubts.
The same debate raged outside the sport.
"It's not natural for people, as they reach their 40s, to have the best performances of their lives in sports requiring speed and power," said H. Lee Sweeney, chairman of physiology at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and an adviser to the World Anti-Doping Agency.
Now that we've moved on to Beijing, doubt is the official emotion of the Olympics.
Not just doubts about Torres. Doubts about everyone. From badminton to boxing and beyond, no Olympian can be completely above suspicion.
"You could make a case that almost any athlete would benefit from some sort of performance-enhancing drug, no matter what his sport is," Sweeney said.
Sweeney said he will enjoy watching the great athletic feats in these Olympics even though he knows that a number of them will be artificially enhanced.
"You still can't take away from the fact that they're incredible athletes," he said. "It's just a shame where, in our society, everyone has gotten to the point where they feel they have to cheat to win."
That's sad, but that's the sporting life in the 21st century. We came by our doubt the hard way -- by being suckered time and again. Awe has been replaced by cynicism, and cynicism has become the athletic gift that keeps on giving.
If a Bob Beamon moment were to happen today, the reaction would be literal disbelief. That's the price we're paying for decades of covert tampering with the natural boundaries of the human body.
The legacy of distrust was born for many in the 1970s and '80s, when Eastern Bloc women built like men were dominating some Olympic sports. Then it really hit home when Canadian Ben Johnson was stripped of his 100-meter gold medal and world record at the Seoul Games in 1988. In Johnson, the Doping Age acquired a recognizable face and a household name, and the Olympics probably died a little bit that day.
From there, the cheating never stopped, and the testing never caught up. The Chinese women made a sudden swimming impact at the Barcelona Games in '92, then saw their program decimated by an avalanche of positive drug tests in ensuing years. At the Atlanta Games in '96, Irish swimmer Michelle Smith rocketed from international nonfactor to three-time gold medalist without a failed test -- until '98, when she spiked an out-of-competition test with what would have been a fatal amount of whiskey.
And then along came Jones. Marion Jones. America's leading lady of the Sydney Olympics won five track and field medals and charmed everyone with her smile. There were no positive drug tests. It took the BALCO eruption to unmask her as an incredibly brazen fraud.
The BALCO scandal dealt the final blows to the façade of fair play, especially in America. And it irrevocably changed the way other countries have viewed American athletes. Sweeney is an expert in the area of synthetic genes, and when he visited China in 2006, he found a scientific community suspicious that the U.S. was on the verge of using gene doping to advance its athletic prowess.
"Worldwide, more people are worried about the U.S. because of the technology and drug development in this country and the financial resources a lot of athletes have at their disposal," Sweeney said. "Look at BALCO. I think BALCO is what has done this."
BALCO helped spread cynicism beyond Olympic sports, but it might still be strongest there. With plenty of fresh reason to doubt.
We arrive in Beijing without American swimmer Jessica Hardy, who tested positive for clenbuterol at the trials. And we arrive without five elite Russian female track and field athletes, who were ensnared in a major doping scandal, alleged to have provided someone else's urine samples. And we arrive without 11 Bulgarian and 11 Greek weightlifters, who tested positive for banned substances.
We also arrive with the IOC predicting a record number of positive drug tests. IOC president Jacques Rogge is expecting "30 to 40 positive cases" among the 4,500 tests that will be performed. There were 26 positive tests in Athens four years ago and 12 in Sydney in 2000.
The good news in Rogge's prediction: Testing will be more widespread and more sophisticated than ever -- especially in the area of human growth hormone testing -- so more of the cheaters should be caught. The bad news: The testers clearly have yet to develop a sufficient deterrent to doping, or athletes wouldn't still be trying to beat the tests.
"[In previous Olympics], the chances of being caught were low enough, and many athletes thought that if they didn't do it, they'd be at a competitive disadvantage against others who were doping," Sweeney said. "I think as the testing gets better, it may have the effect of decreasing the doping."
Hopefully, that's true, but in Beijing, some of the cheaters almost assuredly will stay a step ahead of the testers.
In the next few weeks, you will hear people say that performance-enhancing drugs in sports are merely an extension of the performance enhancers we embrace in everyday life. From Botox to Viagra to teeth whiteners, society has bought into artificially pumping up our bodies.
But they don't award gold medals for virility or youthful countenance; they award them to the swiftest and the strongest. And since our earliest days as a civilized species, we've had a thing about playing fair. There were plenty of rules in the Ancient Olympics and fines for those who broke them.
Even back then, admitted cheaters rarely were championed. That's one reason modern dopers almost always lie when they're caught -- they know they're instantly disgraced for betraying the ancient ideal of honorable competition. Better to concoct a tale about inadvertently ingesting a tainted supplement or having a urine sample sabotaged than to say the two ugliest words in sports: I cheated.
Athletes will be cheating in Beijing. How much, and how many are caught, we don't know. But you're forgiven for having reasonable doubt about all of them.
Pat Forde is a senior writer for ESPN.com. He can be reached at ESPN4D@aol.com.
