Random Drug Testing: Some Positive Effects

If the threat of drug testing thinned out the field, in a manner of speaking, for Sunday’s Pepsi Invitational track and field meet at UCLA, well, it could have been worse.

Imagine if The Athletics Congress had placed Pepsi on its list of performance-enhancing substances. This might have led to embarrassing situations. Carl Lewis sets a world record in the Pepsi 100 meters but is disqualified when traces of Pepsi are found in his urine.

It would have given new meaning to the Pepsi Challenge.

As it was, TAC’s drug testing, announced two weeks prior to the meet, seemed to scare off only the big boys, the shotputters and discus throwers. Or maybe that was coincidental. Maybe they all pulled a hamstring.

The Pepsi meet was chosen at random as part of the TAC effort is to keep America clean this Olympics year. But the mass desertion of his star-studded shotput field left meet promoter Al Franken fuming.

Fortunately for Franken, most of the other top performers showed up, your Steve Scotts, Willie Bankses and Denean Howards. Otherwise the day’s feature race might have been Antelope Al Franken vs. Senator Alan Cranston, the Dashing Democrat, in a 20-meter Battle of the Over-the-hill Als.

The only large guys who showed up Sunday were the javelin throwers. Three of them. A new style javelin has turned this into more of a finesse event and opened it to fairly normal-sized people.

Mike Barnett, who is 6 feet and 225 pounds, won with a throw of 262-0. He was not one of the 12 athletes in the meet chosen at random to be tested. Barnett says he doesn’t touch the stuff anyway, although he has been tempted.

“Yeah, definitely I’ve been tempted,” Barnett said. “But I am a Christian, and I believe God’s power has given me the ability to throw this far. I do it through Him, and not with drugs.”

Let’s not let the Eastern Bloc nations hear about this. They might lobby to have God put on the list of banned performance-enhancers. At the Olympics in Seoul, athletes would have to pass through Bible detectors. Anyone caught packing Scripture would be drummed out of the Games. After all, God hasn’t registered with TAC or the IOC.

Franken wasn’t the only guy at Sunday’s meet not in complete sympathy with the testing. Mike Tully, who won the pole vault with a meet record 19-0 3/4, and wasn’t tested for drugs or cork in his pole, isn’t sure he likes the concept of America cracking down on the jock druggies.

“The idea of testing is to make the competition fair between the countries,” Tully said. “If the Soviet Union is doing the same at their meets, I’ll go along with it. I just want it fair. But I’m brainwashed. Maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t believe the East German and Russian shotputters are getting tested in their meets right now.”

This, of course, would give those athletes an edge in training for the Olympics, assuming any of them use the steroids and other enhancers.

“Obviously, if you want to be world class in the shot or discus, you gotta have some (chemical) help to compete with other countries,” Tully said.

One expert tells me that Americans are unnecessarily paranoid, that the Soviets and other Eastern Blocers have advanced beyond steroids and are using more natural and effective substances and training techniques. They plan to beat Westerners at Seoul by being smarter, not dopier.

So maybe this is a good time for us to dump the drugs, too. Willie Banks, who won the triple jump Sunday, didn’t mind the testing.

“TAC isn’t trying to surprise anyone but to put people on notice we’re not going to tolerate drugs in our sport,” Banks said. “We can’t do anything about (alleged lack of testing in Eastern Europe). All we can do is police ourselves.”

And so we did Sunday. TAC officials selected 12 athletes at random. Each chosen athlete, upon completion of his or her event, was handed a card saying, in essence, “Uncle Sam wants YOU.”

Each was assigned a blue-blazered TAC bodyguard, to make sure the athlete didn’t eat or drink anything except TAC-approved bottled water, until after supplying a urine sample.

One TAC bodyguard thought she spotted an athlete-to-be-tested bending over a drinking fountain.

“No, no, no, no!” the TAC woman shouted. “No water out of the fountain!”

Sound advice, that, considering the pollutants teeming in our tap water these days. You’d hate to see an athlete disqualified because he tested radioactive.

The fountain sipper, it turned out, was not a testee, and thus was allowed to proceed with his drink. But it was good to see the TAC people so diligent.

It’s also nice to see that in a world being taken over by chemicals, there is some semblance of purity. Never mind that this meet was sponsored by Pepsi, which is not bottled directly from a high mountain spring, and Glaxo, a major pharmaceutical company.

It was nice that at least 12 athletes could walk away from Sunday’s meet bearing the stamp: “Contains no artificial additives or preservatives.”