When Winning Is Losing

The picture of international track and field now emerging from the Canadian government’s inquiry into drug abuse by members of its Olympic team is sad and shabby.

According to the investigation’s star witness, sprint coach Charlie Francis, the use of performance-enhancing anabolic steroids is epidemic among world-class athletes. By his own admission under oath, Francis--abetted by unscrupulous physicians--took the lead in inducing runners he coached to make these banned substances part of their training regimen. Among his unfortunate victims, Francis testified, was Ben Johnson, who was stripped of the gold medal he won in the 100-meter race in the Seoul Olympics after tests showed he had used steroids.

Francis said he took steroids during his own career as an Olympic sprinter, and urged them on the runners he later coached because their international competitors were taking them. In making this charge, the Canadian implicated, by innuendo though not by name, at least four leading American track and field figures.

The testimony now being given in Toronto appears to confirm widely held suspicions aboutthe use of performance-enhancing drugs at the highest levels of international amateur athletics. Many knowledgeable people also believe such substances are widely employed by professional athletes in the United States.

Thus, an American investigation similar to the Canadian probe seems to be in order. But when and if it occurs, it ought not to take on the vengeful spirit of a witch hunt. The real victims here are the athletes themselves.

Most of those Francis coached, for example, were poor, young immigrants from the West Indies. On the other side of the finish line, they saw undreamed of wealth and approval. And if the extra step they needed to cross it could be found in a pill or injection everyone else was taking anyway, who could resist? This was doubly true when the pills and needles were in the outstretched hands of older, more experienced people they trusted.

These matters need setting right, but that won’t happen if a few celebrity athletes are made the scapegoats for an international sporting establishment whose obsession with winning has bred a tolerance of the unsavory and the dangerous.