Juiced Olympics: Part one.

I’m not usually a huge sports fan. I only watch a few events in the Olympics, disdain the Super Bowl, and on Monday nights, football is pretty much the last thing that I think about, even if excessive drinking is involved. One thing about sports that does interest me is the debate about performance enhancing drugs.

There have been several major scandals in the past year and the past few months in particular that piqued my interest in this issue. The first being the Tour de France rider who was stripped of the yellow jersey for use of steroids, and more recently the drug use “scandals” surrounding Michael Phelps and Alex Rodruigez.

I’ll tackle the tour bit first. My brother, an avid bicyclist, follows the Tour religiously, and I heard a lot about Floyd Landis having the win taken from him. Every cycling fan who I heard from was pretty much as angry as Rush Limbaugh when he learned that his Oxycotin prescription was through. Since cycling is an endurance sport, and a sport where individuals tend to have more to gain, doping is a much wider spread issue than with some other sports. My brother told me that when Landis got busted, most people weren’t really that surprised, since his team is notorious for drug use.

This really led me to believe that Landis was in the wrong. If there are teams that have stricter guidelines about doping, then people like Landis have an unfair advantage over the rest of the racers. He didn’t achieve his victory through hard work or by having one of his testicles removed to reduce drag resistance (Armstrong in ’09 baby!). He did it by cheating, plain and simple, and there is no reason for him not to be banned from the sport outright.

Then I stumbled across this article. It gives a nice perspective on two more recent events in sporting. Namely: the Micheal Phelps bong fiasco and A-Rod’s admission to having fun with needles. This collumnist gave a really reshreshing spin on the stories. I guess that it would be easiest for me to adress them one at a time.

First with Phelps. So I’m guessing that everyone is already aquainted with the specifics of his “irresponsible and immature mistake.” But for those of you who know little about anything aquatic, I’ll reiterate. The fastest man in water (ever), Michael Phelps, was caught on camera taking a bong hit at a frat party at Univeristy of North Carolina. Somehow, it got leaked to a British tabliod, and everyone freaked the hell out. Sponsors withdrew their funding, Wheaties asked for the giant check back, and every high school swimming coach in the Bible Belt recoiled in fear.

But, by certain demographics, there was no negative reaction whatsoever. On Facebook, someone started a group entitled, “I bet I can find a million people who don’t care that Michael Phelps smoked weed”, which gained members faster than any other non-political “1 million group” to date. Several of my stoner friends started dedicating their bong hits to Phelps, and almost all of my non-pot smoking friends expressed nothing more than mild amusement.

To me this expresses a certain contrast of ideas in our society. From what I can see, it is perfectly acceptable for Michael Phelps the citizen to smoke pot, but it completely unacceptable for Michael Phelps the role model or Michael Phelps the athlete to smoke pot.

When I saw some of the headlines, it seemed like a total farce. A few of them looked like they were right out of the Onion: “24-year old World Class Swimmer Caught Having a Good Time at Frat Party!” It seemed like it was hard for the media to make a big deal out of it, because, for the most part, it wasn’t a big deal. To tell the truth, I doubt that anyone was surprised at all. I mean, this is a man who consumes 2,000 calories for breakfast every morning, so he has got to blazing some strong shit to keep up that kind of appetite.

My personal opinion is that people really shouldn’t be talking trash about what Phelps does on his own time. This is a man in his mid twenties who has accomplished more in the realm of organized sports than any other individual EVER! The only person who should be able to diss the fastest man in water is the fastest man on land, and Usein Boldt is Jamaican, so I doubt that he’ll be giving any press conferences about the bong fiasco in the near future. If your kids want to be like their hero Phelps, tell them that they have to win at least 8 gold medals in the Olympic Games be fore they can light up.

To be continued…

Next time: A-rod’s dabbling with steroids, and my modest proposal to solving the doping problem in the Olympics.