All eyes will be on Beijing on Friday when athletes from around the globe gather to compete for gold at the Summer Olympics amid much fanfare over whether it is even appropriate for communist China to host the games. Against a backdrop in which China will herald its rich cultural heritage are pressing concerns about its human rights violations, its treatment of Tibetans, and its quest to prevent visiting journalists from pursuing any stories that might put the country in a negative light.
The story line that is getting less international attention but may have a longer-lasting effect on the Olympic movement has to do not with China, but with the athletes themselves. More specifically it is whether they can resist the temptation to cheat by taking banned performance-enhancing drugs such as anabolic steroids.
One of the premier Olympic events, the men’s 100-meter dash to crown the world’s fastest human, was needlessly tainted at the Seoul games in 1988 when Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson was stripped of his gold medal after testing positive for steroids. American sprinter Marion Jones was the toast of the Sydney games in 2000 after hauling in five medals, all of which she was forced to return after admitting last year that she’d taken banned drugs.
If athletes further tarnish the Olympic ideal by doping before events in Beijing, it will threaten the shaky faith the general public has in events such as track and field, swimming, weightlifting and cycling.
The International Olympic Committee, to its credit, has taken an aggressive approach by disqualifying dozens of athletes from these games for doping violations. But the committee can do only so much. Unscrupulous athletes and their trainers always seem to be one step ahead of the drug testers and it sometimes takes years before evidence of doping at a prior Olympics comes to light.
It is getting increasingly difficult to trust that the world’s strongest and fastest humans got where they did on the basis of natural talent and legitimate training methods. It would be nice if the Beijing Olympics could be remembered for outstanding athletic achievements rather than for another batch of dirty urine samples.
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