Last year, the NFL suspended eight players for violating its drug policy. The league doesn’t announce what substances those players tested positive for. In many cases, it’s assumed to be marijuana.
None of those suspensions were longer than six games. None made real news.
Have you watched an NFL game lately? Does it make sense to you that of the assorted 275-pound men who run like competitive sprinters, only 0.5 per cent of them are doing some sort of banned drug?
It does not. But the NFL has discovered a way around that problem. Don’t ask too hard, and no one cares if you tell. Hockey, baseball, basketball, soccer – all the big-money sports – have established similar regimes.
Every once in a while, some ding-a-ling who doesn’t understand how wink-wink works will get caught. They are the grist that proves the testing mill still grinds. But the vast majority of players – the good and the bad – understand how the game works.
Other sports – what might be called Olympic sports – continue to add another layer to this charade. They test as if they care, but don’t pull the net tight. The ones who struggle can free themselves.
Canadian curler Briane Harris has just been scooped up in one of these dragnets. She was the mysterious disappearance at the recent Scotties Tournament of Hearts. Now everyone knows the cause (though everyone had guessed it already).
Harris has reportedly tested positive for a substance called Ligandrol, a muscle builder. Provisionally, she has been suspended for four years.
On Wednesday, Harris told CBC she didn’t do it, but may have encountered the drug through “bodily contact.” Now the back-and-forth of the international sports appeals process will begin.
The first clue that none of this is meant to work is the length of suspension. Four years is what you get for an armed robbery. In sports terms, it’s half a career.
Maybe a gold-medal shot putter who’s been mainlining Stanozolol until he has to have shirts sewn directly on to his body deserves four years. But no one anywhere believes a curler should get four years for anything short of assault.
In a rational world, nobody would bother testing curlers at all. It’s not like they require superhuman strength. It’s billiards in stretchy pants. As long as they’re not doing bumps off the rocks, who cares what drugs curlers do?
The only point of four years is front loading the penalty so that when it is knocked down on appeal, the people in charge can still claim a message was sent.
Former world No. 1 tennis player Simona Halep was banned for four years. Her sins – testing positive for an illegal stimulant, as well as irregularities in her doping passport that suggested tampering.
Like everyone else put in this position, Halep wasn’t just upset. She was outraged.
Has there ever been an athlete who, when caught, puts up his hand and says, ‘They give me a bunch of pills and I take them. So who knows?’ Because that would be a lot closer to the truth.
Once caught, every athlete is cleaner than clean. They all talk about how they make the sign of the cross whenever they walk past the ‘Cold and Flu’ section at the local pharmacy. Harris went this route with CBC, using her aversion to Tylenol and Advil as an example.
Halep is her north star now. The Romanian tennis star appealed. A week ago, the Court of Arbitration for Sport reduced her penalty to nine months – coincidentally, the amount of time she’d already served.
Halep and her team called it a victory, but nowhere in there did the CAS exonerate her.
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Instead, it ruled that she hadn’t meant to do the drug she was caught doing, and accepted that she didn’t intend to compete after giving the blood sample.
In other words, Halep did all the things that got her suspended. But the people in charge felt she’d learned her lesson and gave her a reduced sentence.
So why bother suspending her for four years in the first place? The only plausible explanation is so that Halep and all the colleagues watching her case could be scared straight.
We’ve tried this one already. It didn’t work with high-school you and magic mushrooms, and it doesn’t work now with millionaire pros and synthetic growth hormone.
Everyone is looking for a small advantage – even those advantages which don’t exist. At the same time as she was accidentally doing illegal substances, Halep was plummeting through the world rankings.
There have long been a million reasons why a top pro would do drugs, and now there are also a million excuses: ‘I mixed up my medicine;’ ‘I ate a bad burrito;’ ‘I had sex with someone who was doping.’
If you’re going to accept one, you might as well accept them all. The only way a truly rigorous drug regime exists is through zero tolerance.
Again, this is something we tried in the real world. It didn’t work. It doesn’t work in sports either. Sports knows that, but can’t say it out loud.
The smart leagues have stopped talking about it or trying to catch anyone. The drugs will always be illegal. Were they not, the NFL, NHL and so on would be setting themselves up for the mother of all class-action lawsuits. But if you won’t prioritize your longevity, why should they?
In those circumstances, the logical thing to do is stop testing altogether. But that would mean admitting the truth. So the testing, such as it is, continues.
Tennis, curling et al. go one hypocritical step further. They’re still pretending the goal is a level playing field. That no one anywhere should ever do drugs, even the ones who do.
Since they don’t have the steel to make their own penalties stand up, their only weapon in this fight is embarrassment.
Every time you follow one of these pantomimes through its eternal progression – humiliation; denial; bargaining; release – does it strike you that any of the participants is embarrassed?
Cathal Kelly