I think it says something about the current state of sports that we had a new subcategory in the briefs section this past week.
Stuck between “Football” and “College sports” we had multiple stories listed under “Steroids.”
I don’t believe we used that header before, but since there were three stories listed under it (two of them being the longest briefs in the whole collection) the wire seemed to think it was appropriate.
While we haven’t reused the header since it first appeared last week, I have a feeling it’s not gone.
I’m not a big sports junkie. At best I’ll catch the big games or pause for my favorite teams when flipping through the channels. Nevertheless, I hate seeing how steroids keeps casting a pall on different sports.
It has often been said we’ll never know for sure how many baseball records set over the past two decades were tainted. And whether you believe Tour de France winner Floyd Landis’ story about the mistakes in the testing lab, the whole debacle took a way a lot of the shine Lance Armstrong had build up for in the preceding seven years.
The debate is most likely going to stick around because I still don’t see a lot of honest exchanges going on. The center question is where to draw the line for those seeking an edge. After all, mere practice is technically a “performance enhancing” activity, as is eating right and taking vitamins.
We’re having a hard time defining what stretches beyond the normal reach. Is sleeping in an oxygen tent bad? Is it too much to try an experimental supplement that isn’t illegal because others don’t know about it?
I wonder if in the days of “Shoeless Joe” Jackson (who I primarily know about because of the movie “Field of Dreams”) they could have imagined the current scandal. It’s not that we have players throwing games by not playing hard enough. Our problem is that we have athletes winning games by playing “too hard.”
“Say it ain’t so, Joe.”
