Athletes Have Always Been Contemptuous of Sport’s

Athletes have always been contemptuous of sport's attempts to regulate drug use, but they tended to keep their mouths shut. Most resented the whip hand that testing gave management, but they were too afraid of being caught, punished, embarrassed to speak up unless they were squeaky clean, retired or busted.

Until last week [July 1998], when bicycle racers briefly disrupted the Tour de France as a protest against what they claimed was a witch hunt, athletes have never so publicly and boldly stood up to drug testing.

One knee-jerk reaction to the slowdown in the Alps was that the inmates were taking over the asylum, another that the so-called athletes' revolt had begun again after 30 years of simmering. A day later, the race continued, probably a tribute to favors and deals. But that little mountain uprising may yet turn out to be a historical turn in the road: athletes are finally expressing justified disgust with a capricious system that seems to be, in these days of what the University of Texas professor John Hoberman calls "the therapeutic ideal," simply out of date.

If drugs like Prozac and Viagra can be taken without apology by everyday people who want to enhance their performance in a competitive world, why shouldn't athletes, prized as models of "human capacity," be allowed, nay, encouraged, to try out drugs for the rest of us?

Unfair drug testing

Drug testing has not been fair--few marquee names have ever been brought down--nor as effective a deterrent as both sides would have fans believe. Athletes have gone along with the lie as long as it kept reporters from snooping around their specimens. Also, athletes have tended to stay ahead of the drug police.

As the rewards for victory have spiked, a growing network of underground pharmacologists have concocted drugs too new to be detected in addition to masking agents for the old drugs. This competitive cat-and-mouse game, risky, expensive and hypocritical, has allowed athletes to continue seeking the edge while management kept the appearance of control.

That game began unraveling along with the Tour last Wednesday [July 29, 1998]. When word reached the 140-rider pack that the police had raided a team's hotel and forcibly tested riders' urine, hair and blood for drugs, cyclists slowed down, quit, tore off their numbers, canceling the day's race.

By Thursday, with a half a dozen teams out of the competition, some 101 of the 198 riders who started on July 11 in Dublin were again rolling toward Paris and $2.2 million in prizes. Apparently, the most consistent performance enhancing drug is still money.

Nevertheless, two interlocked issues, one about control and the other about appropriate drug use, were once again out of the bottle.

Not since the 1960's, when Harry Edwards, Tommie Smith and John Carlos used the Olympics as a platform against racism; Muhammad Ali used the heavyweight championship as a pulpit; and Billie Jean King led tennis players--eventually all players--out of the desert of sham amateurism, have athletes rebelled so dramatically against management.

Current labor skirmishes, including the [1998] N.B.A. lockout, can also be seen in that context. The testing for drugs, recreational or performance