Yes

by Zach Bigalke

Created on: July 10, 2007   Last Updated: October 31, 2008

It is not so much that athletes in international sports such as track and field or cycling are more guilty of doping offenses. Rather, it is American athletes who are allowed to get away with using substances banned in international competition. Because red flags go up whenever a positive test result appears, Americans are skeptical of the legitimacy of sports where athletes test positive at a prodigious rate. But the mainstream American sports media and casual fans alike fail to look deeper than just the positive announcement. They chastise and belittle unfamiliar sports and athletes, whether they test positive for truly nefarious substances such as steroids or benign, legitimate prescription medication.

For example: I was listening to a baseball game last night on ESPN Radio. The announcers were talking about a player trying to recover from a nagging injury. They casually tossed into the conversation the fact that this baseball player had received cortisone shots in an effort to get back on the diamond quicker. A seemingly harmless and all-too-common treatment for sports figures in the United States...

Except that this athlete would be looking at a minimum two year ban from his profession if he had chosen to be a cyclist or a track star rather than a baseball player! What American audiences fail to recognize in the myriad positive drug tests is that, even with properly filed medical exemptions, international athletes can be sanctioned for using legitimately prescribed pharmaceuticals essential for their mere survival. The recent one-year suspension of Italian sprinter Alessandro Petacchi is a sobering case study of the stringent limits some athletes face in balancing their health with the draconian demands of their profession.

Petacchi is one of the most decorated cyclists of his generation. With a feared finishing sprint, Petacchi has been one of the most prolific cyclists of his generation. Petacchi has claimed forty-five stages in grand tours as well as the 2005 Milano-San Remo classic. He has amassed this brilliant decade-long career despite struggling with chronic asthma. Like most asthma sufferers, Petacchi has been prescribed an inhaler to open his restricted airways. But, despite his long-standing prescription and explicit permission to treat his medical condition from cycling's governing body, a positive test result for salbutamol during the 2007 Giro d'Italia has forced Petacchi out of work for the next twelve months.

Petacchi's crime? One too many asthma attacks; one too many puffs off his inhaler. Salbutamol, because of its ability to quickly burn fat for the purposes of bodybuilding, is listed as a banned substance by the cycling's international body, the Union Cycliste Internationale. Likewise, track star Justin Gatlin endured a two-year sanction in 2001 for his documented, everyday use of a legally prescribed medication. Suffering from Attention Deficit/Hyperactivit y Disorder, Gatlin was issued a prescription for Adderol. This drug, commonly doled out by American doctors for ADHD and narcolepsy, utilizes amphetamines to help suppress excessive quantities of certain amino acids (especially dopamine) which cause the disease. Yet Gatlin, like Petacchi and countless other international sports stars, was denied the right to compete because he had treated his ailment in a medically-approved manner.

Whereas someone like Brett Favre can eat Vicodin like Pez to play through pain and injury, a cyclist or track star or other international athlete must be more judicious with their treatment. The pill-driven American society is quick to support athletes who take medications familiar to themselves; Vicodin is an easily-accessible pill which provides immediate results. But even admitted steroid users in American sports are given relatively lenient punishments and free passes back to the pinnacle of their sports. A baseball player must sit fifty games after a positive steroid or amphetamine result - roughly losing two months of earning power. National Football League stars like San Diego linebacker Shawne Merriman only sit out four games after failing steroid tests, one month gone from their otherwise undisturbed careers. With testing systems in American professional sports decades behind the international sporting community, the United States too often sees recidivist performance enhancers continue to ply their trades with absolutely no consequences to dissuade their illegal actions.

By no means am I attempting to downplay the doping crisis in sports such as cycling. This sport has the most well-documented history of struggle against drug use. Amphetamines, erythropoietin, testosterone and a plethora of other pharmaceuticals have been ingested, injected and absorbed over the years by the peloton in search of a competitive edge. Despite an astronomical increase of both in- and out-of-competition testing, there will always be a percentage of athletes seeking synthetic success. Spanish authorities, during their Operacion Puerto investigation, uncovered in 2006 a homologous blood doping ring based in the Madrid offices of Doctor Eufemiano Fuentes. Linking bags of stored blood to over two-hundred athletes in European football, tennis and cycling, the investigation revealed that no stone will be left unturned by the unsavory characters of sport in their quest for illicit potential. Even Gatlin, after successfully appealing his two-year ban and returning to his sport to claim Olympic gold and equal Asafa Powell's world record in the one-hundred meter dash, is now serving an eight-year ban from the track after cooperating with authorities in the wake of testing positive for excessive testosterone levels.

Cycling and other international sports, however, are doing everything they can to combat the scourge of doping in their sport. Cycling especially has done more than any other sport over the past four decades to curb the use of otherwise-legitimate pharmaceuticals to illicitly enhance athletes' performance. The UCI and World Anti-Doping Agency, in cooperation with national federations, conducts thousands of urine and blood analyses on professional cyclists each month for over two-hundred banned substances. Understandably, some athletes slip through the cracks as the science of doping advances faster than the science of drug detection. At the same time that the UCI was taking a proactive stance, though, Major League Baseball and other American sports were naively standing by as their representatives on the playing field turned into bodybuilding monstrosities.

Now, the UCI has requested that its athletes sign a pledge which would bind them to full disclosure of any positive results, their full cooperation in providing DNA samples to cross-examine with the blood confiscated from Fuentes in Operacion Puerto, and the payment of a fine equivalent to a year's salary toward the fight of doping if found guilty of themselves committing a doping offense. In addition, individual teams such as T-Mobile, Unibet.com and CSC have implemented in-house doping controls and independent testing of their riders above and beyond the sanctioned tests of the UCI and WADA. In contrast, Major League Baseball only made amphetamines legal this season, nearly forty years after pitcher Jim Bouton revealed their widespread use in his 1970 expose "Ball Four".

It is easy for American audiences and sports news outlets to criticize events like the Tour de France for the reprehensible actions of some athletes. It is much harder to turn a critical eye to those athletes whom a majority of audiences see every day on the baseball diamond or football field. The real problem with doping lies with the organizations which police athletes. And, in this respect, at least international organizations are making a concerted effort to curb the use of performance-enhancin g drugs. And, while their draconian policies might sometimes unjustly unseat an athlete's career, the intentions of the sanctioning body are at least couched in noble intentions. Most American sports seem content to watch unnatural feats on the field, waiting to make examples of certain athletes to protect its chosen stars. The hypocrisy of criticizing certain sports for their disclosure of positive results while glorifying other sports who willfully cloak their cheaters does little to solve the real problem of performance enhancement across all athletic competition.

Learn more about this author, Zach Bigalke.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.