Athletics as Chemical Warfare

The athletes call them ‘roids. They are sure they are shortcuts to immortality. The come-on is, everybody uses them; don’t be a sucker.

Athletics have become chemical warfare. Bulk up or butt out.

Weightlifters have used them since they came out. Bodybuilders, shotputters, hammer throwers were always in search of more muscle. It was easier to get them out of a bottle than out of a gym.

The whispers began first in Eastern Europe. Athletic supremacy was politically important to countries that called themselves, “Democratic Peoples’ Republic.” They not only weren’t very democratic, they weren’t very amateur. The athlete was as much a creation of the state as the statue of Stalin in the park. Your track team came out of a laboratory.

You can’t hide it when a swimmer weighs 165 pounds with a caved-in chest at one Olympics and, four years later, looks like Mr. America and swims like a shark.

But most of us thought chemicals were only good for the whales of the sport. The weight men, the field men. We never thought the thin, reedy milers, the short, quick sprinters could find them useful. We didn’t think the 100-yard dash called for power lifts, prescription pills or artificial growth hormones. Only God could make a tree--or a sprinter. Dr. Frankenstein could build you a pole vaulter or a javelin thrower but not a hurdler or a runner. Steroids didn’t help the lungs.

Then, along came Ben Johnson. The athlete who had finished third in the Los Angeles Olympics looked as little like the monster who took the blocks in the Seoul Olympics as King Kong does a wet dog.

When he showed up at the World Championships in Rome in 1987 and ran an astounding 9.83 seconds, everyone thought it was a tribute to Canadian cooking and a lot of time on a weight room lift.

His time in Rome time took a full 10th of a second off the world record--which had been set at altitude--and should have lifted eyebrows all over the world. His rival, Carl Lewis, was a lone voice crying skepticism, but other trackmen piously held that Johnson was just a freak of nature, not chemistry.

The Seoul Olympics let the genie out of the bottle, so to speak. Johnson’s 9.79 could have been ticks faster (he slowed to taunt his rival, Lewis), but when the Olympic medics got through with his specimen, it became clear this rare Ben Johnson got his speed from a needle. They reported, among other things, that his testosterone levels were 15 times below normal, indicative of longtime (multiyear) steroid use.

It’s a depressing state of affairs, so much so that when Johnson, whose “lifetime” ban was lifted in time for him to get ready to defend his reputation, if not his stripped Olympic title, started his comeback, the sport of track and field hoped mightily he could make it.

It’s becoming clear he can’t. The man who got the world record down to 9.79 (and could have made 9.74, in the opinion of many) cannot get below 10 seconds. He cannot get below 10.4. That would have won you the 1956 Olympics, none since.

The world record (official) is still only 9.90, by Leroy Burrell. In his heralded rematch with Lewis in northern France two weeks ago, Johnson was nowhere, i.e. seventh. His time was 10.47.

It’s too early to close the book on Ben Johnson. He could return to form and skewer the world record below 9.8 again.

That’s not the way to bet. The bad news seems to be he was setting his records and escaping detection for years before his Seoul trip-up.

Which is the object lesson for sport? That if you take the drugs and beat the tests, you will run fabulous world records? Or that if you take the drugs and set the records, you may never get to enjoy them?

Drugs were put in for the war on pain and sickness. Steroids are prescribed for anemia, not world records. Indiscriminate, toxic use can cause liver damage.

Lyle Alzado, whose sport, football, has been a happy hunting ground for the steroid purveyors, claims that his steroid use has caused brain cancer. The medical profession disputes him. His contention that his tumor could be linked to steroids is not probable, not even likely, it holds. The medical profession would not, for a minute, want the public to think it would desecrate its Hippocratic oath by prescribing or administering a substance that could destroy rather than cure or enhance a body.

Wherever the truth lies, so long as performance-enhancing drugs are in the marketplace, the likelihood is they will find customers. A gold medal in the Soviet Union or Eastern Europe was the equivalent of winning a lottery. You were in the power elite for life, with all the material rewards that entailed. A liver was a small thing to risk.

Nobody ever took a ‘roid to pass math. Sport--and the rest of society--would be better served if Ben Johnson, clean, could return to form and show that the benefits of steroids are purely illusory. So long as they appear to help hit homers, break records, win medals, sport is going to continue to be chemical warfare. Never mind that it’s banned by the Geneva Convention. Hussein can’t use it, high jumpers can.