I'll admit it -- I have Olympic fever. The thought of the best athletes in the world competing for their respective countries has to stir the blood of every sports fan in every nation. And the Games of the 27th Olympiad has done little to disappoint, but some of its athletes have.
I didn't want to write that half of this column. I figured that if I didn't mention, acknowledge or confirm the use of steroids in both professional and amateur sports, maybe they would go away. It is not just Americans or Canadian sprinters or Irish swimmers or weightlifters from everywhere -- by the year 2020, athletes from table tennis and archery will be hearing allegations.
I know, you are sick of hearing about them and so am I. But they are probably even more prevalent than you think or could even imagine.
I thought that maybe they would simply fade out of fashion like the tube top or bellbottom jeans. Or maybe athletes finally would have had enough time with steroids to understand exactly how it can cripple your body.
Go to your favorite Olympic web site today. What's the lead story? By the time this article hits the newspaper in your hand, there will probably be three more "Drug Busts in Sydney." You can read the C.J. Hunter story from a few days ago on your own or perhaps peruse the tale of yesterday's arrest of Mihaela Melinte, the world-record holder in the hammer throw competition.
Will this stop world-class athletes from using? I hope so. But who am I to say? What if there are 10 users for every one that is snagged by a governing body?
There was a time when "Citius, Altius, Fortius" was a goal for every athlete, but perhaps in many cases, the aspiration to be faster, (jump) higher and (be) stronger has led them down the wrong path.
And what of the athletes who are clean? If they know they are losing valuable seconds or feet as a result, why on Earth would they stay clean? Why don't we set up two divisions like the boxing world according to weight? Let the people who want to ravage their body compete against one another.
Don't get me wrong, this is not just an Olympic problem.
Recent reports from coaches around Major League Baseball have cited exorbitantly high rates of use. But steroids inflate more than just the size of a player's biceps. In this day and age, I think Ozzie Smith would have been due for about 30 home runs. This is not to say that the Wizard ever did steroids, but home runs are flying out of the park at such an astronomical rate that records set in the 20th century will probably soon be as meaningless as those set in the 19th. Statistics are going to be a lost art soon, as numbers will simply get too large to add. 80 home runs? Pshaw! That might be a decent first half in 30 years; you'll be lucky to make an All-Star game.
And do you know what the saddest part of all is to me? Sadder than what athletes bring upon themselves by doing steroids and much more melancholy than the slow evaporation of our sports records?
It's that these steroids have killed my Olympic fever more quickly than antibiotics or aspirin ever could.
The real Olympic stories get buried behind stories about the number of athletes whose urine is contaminated. I want to hear the story of Cathy Freeman -- the Australian aborigine and the igniter of the Olympic torch. Freeman ran past prejudice and out of the middle of Australia into a stadium with 110,000 Australians chanting her name as she crossed the finish line to win the 400 meter gold medal.
Or what of the "no-name" array of minor leaguers on the U.S. baseball team who defeated Cuba -- the New York Yankees of international baseball -- and won the first baseball gold medal for the country that invented the sport.
The U.S. softball team, the Russian women's gymastics team -- indeed, the list is long. Even the greatest stories of the Games now get tainted, no, splashed with a little of that Olympic fever antidote. Who's to say that your favorite athlete or team from this summer has always been clean?
You can't. All you can do now is turn the page and give every athlete the benefit of the doubt. Turn back to the NBC channel of your choice and feel your palms start to sweat again. Yes, you can catch it more then once. Here's to hoping that for the next few days the athletes won't let us cool down.
