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Once again, the limit for human performance and potential has been shattered as Asafa Powell set a new world record of 9.77 seconds in the 100m. The Jamaican, who beat Tim Montgomery's time of 9.78 seconds yesterday at the Athens Olympic Stadium, claims he can go faster.
And he's clean.
Or is he?
Nobody liked Montgomery's record, because although he was never caught (though he did testify to doping at one point in front of a grand jury), suspicions of his chemical enhancement were, uhh, more than suspicious. He is, of course, now married to Marion Jones, who was also supiciously accused of doping after given a healthy endorsement by the founder of BALCO, and whom also suspiciously dropped out of the track & field world when her previous husband, a shot-putter, was caught juicing up, thus putting a tight leash around her activities and subsequently resulting in a suspicious decrease in her performance. How suspicious!
But the thing that really gnaws on the US track program (and especially in the wake of the baseball steroids scandal) is to admit that for several years they are no different; for quite awhile US athletes have been just as junked up as East German swimmers, they're just better at not getting caught. Carl Lewis himself tested positive three times for banned substances at the 1988 Olympic trials, but the USOC kept a tight lip about it and decided to let him compete in the Games anyway (because, you know, they just had to beat the Communists at sports. That's really fucking important). In the infamous finale, Lewis was just as juiced up as Ben Johnson, he just 1) wasn't fast enough and 2) didn't get caught. US track athletes won 19 juiced up medals in those games alone.
The US Olympic Committee has been covering up positive tests for years, they just kept things hidden away until the USOC's director of drug control administration turned over 30,000 pages of documents in 2003 (long after he retired) which included the positive test results.
As good ole Uncle Joe Stalin used to say: "Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything."
So after all this, can we really tell who's clean? Who's being smuggled through? Who's tests are being tampered with? Who's using obscure and arcane chemical concoctions cooked to confoible the conclusive pee-cup counters?
At this point, I imagine that running clean in track & field is like obeying the speed limit: no one does it. What they are looking for, then, are people who instead of cheating a little (like say going 5 miles over, which everyone does), cheat a lot (going 80 on city streets). When result times are being measured in hundredths of a second, every athlete will try any angle they can to achieve maximum performance on a given day. They are going to dope. They have doped. They will dope. And there's nothing we can do to stop them.
So then, I submit that instead of catching everyone in the act of doing something that they all do but deny anyway............why not just make all drugs legal, and let the best dry-mouthed, cotton-spitting, acne-riddled, pupil-dilated superhuman win? I know, it immediately harkens images of the All-drug Olympics skit on Saturday Night Live where the Russian weightlifter tears his arms off, but seriously: why not?
We've officially sanctioned all matters of performance-enhancement equipment, training techniques and regimens, but not drugs. Why? How is shaving your legs for aerodynamicness allowed, and swallowing a pill for a few slivers of microscopic muscle fibres disallowed? What is the line between what you can do or what you can't do to enhance your performance? When the clap-skate came out for speedskating, it was shattering records on a daily basis. No one ever complained that it was an unfair performance enhancement, which it was to every speedskater in an era where the clap-skate did not exist. Despite what we want to say to ourselves, life is not a level playing field. People are going to be better than others. Whether that's because they worked harder, obtained better equipment or consumed a more correct quantity of drugs, what difference does it make?
In my lifetime, I want to see 5 second 100m times, 200 mph fastballs, basketball hoops raised to 20 feet and power forwards who can dunk that high. With the rise of bio-technology and implants, in 20 years doping is going to be the last thing on any athlete's mind. Imagine swimmers with webbed toes and gills, baseball pitchers with springloaded hydraulic gears in their shoulders, skeet-shooters with zoom-lens eyeballs, football linemen who don't need pads (their skin is hardened turtle shell), super blood that can carry 60% more oxygen, resulting in a 2 minute mile. What are we waiting for? If the future of human performance is the goal, and doping is not allowed, then technology is the only way we're going to get better than we are.
But will that happen? Will FIFA let a cyborg team compete at the World Cup? Will NASCAR let a robot car at Daytona? If you thought the line between clean and juiced was blurred, imagine 50 years from now the debates between who is genuinely human and who's had artificial implants. If you want my advice, I say go for broke. It's up to the athlete to decide whether it's worth risking their life achieving it. If they want to go for it, I say let them. Sports is a tough business. It's not for those who want a level playing field. Go hard or go home, loser.
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