by Zach Bigalke

Created on: December 19, 2007   Last Updated: October 31, 2008

Back in the sixties, revelations of amphetamine use in athletic competitions around the globe brought to the public attention the prevalence of stimulants in sport. One sport, battered by the skepticism of a public toward the source of the revelation and without a defining turning point or rallying cry, did nothing to remedy its drug problems for another thirty years. The other sport, left with a couple of corpses, took a larger public-relations hit but began implementing nascent programs which have evolved over the decades into stringent testing programs today.

Cycling has long been regarded as a "dirty" sport on this side of the pond. The 1960 Rome Olympics saw Danish cyclist Knud Jensen fatally collapse on his quest for gold. Seven years later, British champion Tom Simpson tumbled on the side of the road up Mont Ventoux in the 1967 Tour de France. Despite the protests of the riders - five-time Tour champion Jacques Anquetil famously quipped against drug testing, "We cannot race on mineral water alone..." - the governing bodies of the sport began testing riders for synthetic pharmaceuticals which could lead to another tragic fatality.

Baseball, the national pastime of the rising superpower on the "New" continent, denounced that there could possibly be a problem with amphetamines in clubhouses across the country. Even after pitcher Jim Bouton released his 1970 memoir Ball Four, which revealed rampant use of "greenies" during the course of his final season in Major League Baseball, the information was lightly regarded by the powers that be. No substantive agreement to test for amphetamines, with penalties, came about until 2004... thirty-four years after the casual sports fan started hearing references to amphetamines in the sports pages.

The highly-anticipated Mitchell Report is expected to come out any day now. Baseball may never be the same... or this could turn out to be just another hundred or so pages of ineffective bluster. Study groups seem to have become all the rage lately. Have a problem? Start a study group. What was once confined to small rooms in campus libraries is now the domain of all of America's most crucial issues. But for all the documentation and critical thought produced by these high-powered brainstorm sessions, few real results ever seem to come out of them. George W. Bush was able to effectively shrug off the work of his father's confidant and Secretary of State, James Baker, and continue to plot his own course on the disaster that has

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