Drugs diminish achievements

They bolted from the locker room faster than from the starting blocks.

Marion Jones and Tim Montgomery failed to win spots on the U.S. Olympic team’s 100-meter squads in Sacramento, Calif., and sprinted away from the stadium after telling reporters it’s their fault for being on their backs all the time.

After missing a spot on the 400-meter team, Alvin Harrison ran to his lawyer’s office to discuss a lawsuit. Meanwhile, 100-meter favorite Chryste Gaines failed to make the team and didn’t have much to say afterward.

Talk about a four-by-four relay. If quick exits were an Olympic event, this team would be a cinch for the gold medal.

But at least they ran their races. Michelle Collins, the nation’s top 400-meter runner, suddenly withdrew from her race and abruptly left town. Hamstring problem, she said.

Track and field fans know these runners as world-class athletes under investigation for using performance-enhancing drugs. Montgomery, Harrison, Gaines and Collins face lifetime bans based on evidence gathered in the Balco case.

Still, that’s not a lot of people — the number of track and field fans, that is.

Baseball and football fans — now we’re talking numbers — know Balco as the Silicon Valley laboratory that cooked up a new, synthetic steroid that evaded detection for years. The biggest question involves Barry Bonds, who just may go down as the greatest slugger in baseball history.

His muscle mass grew phenomenally in a few years, which usually doesn’t happen in mature men without the help of steroids. But we’ll never know for sure. Baseball’s management and players union aren’t as serious as track and field about drug-testing. By the time baseball comes around, Bonds and the others will have retired, at most their reputations tainted but their records clean.

The best argument I’ve heard against steroids comes from Harvard political philosopher Michael Sandel.

“It is one thing to hit 70 home runs as the result of disciplined training and effort,” he wrote recently in Atlantic Monthly, “and something else, something less, to hit them with the help of steroids or genetically enhanced muscles.”

To appreciate the “deeper danger,” Sandel says, start with what people want to believe.

“We want to believe that success, in sports and in life, is something we earn, not something we inherit.”

I agree with Sandel on this point. As a society we know, deep down inside, that individual success is not always the result of hard work. It’s also about natural talent, privilege and other inherited advantages. That’s why we’ve invented social safety nets, progressive income taxes and other ways to even the playing field.

Imagine, then, a future in which we practice enhancement every day. In that world, Sandel says, the programmed successes of bionic athletes, memory-enhanced adults, designer children and other perfect ones become more acceptable– a byproduct of human ingenuity. In this world, who needs to correct social and economic inequality? Let them eat steroids!

Far-fetched? In my lifetime, yes. But remember this: Nobody broke Roger Maris’ single-season record for home runs for four decades. Then two guys did it the same season. One of them admitted later to using a performance-enhancing drug. The other’s under suspicion.


Joe Rodriguez is a columnist for the San Jose Mercury. His e-mail address is jrodriguez@mercurynews. com.