When San Francisco s Barry Bonds hit his 715th career home run last week to move past the legendary Babe Ruth into second place on the all-time list, more than a few people must have been wondering how many of those out of the park monster blasts were helped along by drugs.
Bonds is now only 40 home runs away from tying Hank Aaron for what is often called the most coveted record not just in baseball but in all of sport. Bonds also holds the record for the most home runs hit in a season – 73 in 2001, and he is a seven-time National League Most Valuable Player. But what he also might be is a cheat.
Despite his record-breaking performances, he remains an unpopular figure with many fans, having been dogged for years by allegations of steroid abuse. He has gone from denying he used steroids to saying he never knowingly used performance-enhancing drugs.
Not on Bonds’s side is a book, “Game of Shadows, which came out in March alleging he used performance-enhancing steroids for at least five years, and the conviction of four men belonging to Balco, a California sports nutrition center which allegedly supplied Bonds and many other athletes with no-no drugs.
We keep using the word alleged because there is no outright proof. While Balco was exposed in 2004 for mass producing and distributing illegal anabolic steroids, Bonds’ association with Balco founder Victor Conte, while it tainted him, it did not convict him.There are also steroids designed to evade testing, like the tongue twister
Tetrahydrogestrinone, famously and more simply known as THG, which hit the market two years ago. How was THG discovered if it’s supposed to be invisible? Not by cutting- edge science; luck had more to do with it. A ticked-off coach anonymously sent in a syringe dripping with the stuff. Call it a fortuitous delivery from a coach perhaps upset because a high-profile athlete had either ditched him or perhaps he himself had been denied access to THG for his athletes.
So, because of drugs that are not easy to trace, because some drugs are allowed in some sports but not in others, because some of the chemicals involved in some drugs were not banned at the time they were being swallowed, rubbed or injected, we wonder about Bonds, about how many other drugs are out there, flowing through athletes bodies and helping them toward gold medals and world records. We may never know, nor are we any longer sure what is and isn’t allowed and consequently, may be we don’t really care anymore.
It is now routine for athletes in endurance sports to spend their nights sleeping in altitude tents or chambers that allow them to increase their red blood cell counts without having to book a room in the Alps, Rockies or Himalayas. It is routine for athletes in sports such as tennis to travel with portable electrical stimulation machines that allow them to contract leg or shoulder muscles without having to lift a weight or a racket.
Athletes often seek an edge right up to the legal limit. They ride stationary bikes wearing oxygen masks, undergo magnetic laser therapy, hop onto neuro-mechanical stimulators that use small vibrations to activate normally dormant muscle fibers.
All of this is within the rules, but is this what we want sports to become?
It is such shortcuts that bother some of us. Innate talent aside, success in sports should be linked with effort, not some plug-in gizmo. Though you cannot consider an altitude chamber or a stimulation machine as doping in the classic sense, what they share with needle and vial is that they are quick, unnatural fixes.
That s not what sport is all about, and if sport has become that, then the athletes in question should instead go paint or write books or water their plants but not get involved in an activity that will make a complete travesty of sport.
As for the downright cheats, there will always be an incentive to cheat in sport; the professional era has seen to that. In this win-at-all-costs age, where money and fame is the end, athletes are more willing than ever to seek out an edge – whether legally or illegally.
The discovery of THG will probably not curb the use of banned performance-enhancers. More new substances capable of boosting athletic performances without detection are bound to follow. By now, in fact, chemists have probably moved on to the next designer steroid.
No one will be able to watch one game in any sport without wondering whether the winner won because of hard work, dedication and skill, or because of a good, friendly neighborhood chemist shop.
The problem seems so pervasive and so resistant to efforts to curtail it that the tendency is to just resign ourselves to the fact that steroids are here to stay. It seems increasingly unlikely that the system that creates and markets performance-enhancing drugs will ever fall apart, not least in baseball, where those who give and take drugs get away almost scot-free. Although Bonds testified at a Balco trial, it was under a grant of immunity, meaning he could not have been convicted of wrongdoing even if he had been found guilty.
For his efforts, Conte got only a four-month prison sentence. Bonds trainer Greg Anderson, convicted of steroid distribution, got three months. Meanwhile, Bonds got his 715th home run.
