SUMMER SHAMES
With Tokyo Olympics on horizon, so is specter of drug cheats
The Olympics are coming, and cheating should be on your mind.
This summer in Tokyo, we will see a display of the greatest athletes — and the greatest performance-enhancing drugtakers — in the world. They’ll be all over the place, muscles ripped, lungs inflated, internal organs askew, performing wondrous feats for the glory of mankind.
And a boatload of them will be cheaters. That’s just the way it is.
Every few years, we think that we have caught all the steroid, EPO, andro, cream and clear users from the past, that it all has been fixed and that what will be broadcast to the world is the beauteous affirmation of human achievement in athletic competition.
Yup.
A new documentary by the German investigative team ARD has uncovered evidence of current massive doping systems in weightlifting programs around the world. Not only is rampant doping going on but so, apparently, is drug-testing fraud.
The reasons are too complex and intricate to spell out completely here, but suffice it to say that the International Weightlifting Federation is about as cheesy a gang as you’ll find; that anabolic, muscle-building, recovery-assisting drugs work amazingly well, especially on women; and that athletes will do almost anything to win, including risk their health, reputation, integrity and very moral existence.
ARD did a lot of the exposing of the systemic Russian sports cheating in recent years, a government-approved, if unofficial, policy of loading up athletes in all sports on whatever illicit drugs might help them excel.
Caught up in the fraudulence were the president of the AllRussia Athletics Federation, the director of the World Anti-Doping Association lab in Moscow, the head coach of the Russian trackand-field team and even former KGB spook and now Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Russia is so dirty that it has had 43 Olympic medals stripped from its athletes — four times more than any other country — and there were efforts to get all Russian athletes banned from all global sports events for, well, forever. Of course, politics got in the way, and Russia is the fungus that can’t be cleansed.
But the countries earmarked in this documentary are mostly poor, lesser ones. That almost always happens in exposés because those are the places lacking great sophistication in their cheating.
But don’t think the United States is above the cheating game. Remember Marion Jones, C.J. Hunter, Mark McGwire, Barry Bonds, Tim Montgomery and even recently disqualified swimmer Conor Dwyer. Oh, and Lance Armstrong, the greatest lying, cheating creep ever. The seven-time Tour de France winner used an entire charity, the supposed existence of which was to help cancer victims, as cover for his deviance.
Though the documentary is in German, it has been subtitled online and has given pause to Olympic and weightlifting officials worldwide.
Examples of the accusations? A coach says that, in Moldova, it costs $60 to pass a national urine test and $200 to pass an international test.
Weightlifters have used lookalikes to take their tests for them.
Athletes test positive one day and negative the next by using someone else’s urine.
In Thailand, an Olympic medalist who works in a gym there — and who doped but passed all her tests before the London Games in 2012 — says to a hidden camera: ‘‘We take stuff that is undetectable for 24 hours. Another substance is more effective but detectable for three days.’’
She adds that lifters will start doping as young as 13.
As you might suspect, lots of money changes hands at the top level of supervision, some of it in ‘‘fines’’ for testing positive, some of it for cover-ups.
My earliest introduction to the realities of doping was when the East German women took over the Olympics in the 1970s. They appeared like monsters out of a B-level horror movie, looking and sounding like men, sometimes with whiskers and jaws like them. Roughly 10,000 athletes were doped by East German government officials during the Iron Curtain era, more than 1,000 of whom ended up with severe health problems because of it.
It’s a dirty business. And it won’t end. All that can be done is a continual dance to stamp out the flames of cheating as they spring upward.
I’ll never forgive nasty little Irish swimmer and now-disgraced Olympic gold medalist Michelle Smith de Bruin for trying to sue me for writing in this paper that she was a doper. Thankfully, that ended after she ‘‘peed’’ an out-ofcompetition urine sample that was mostly Irish whiskey.
The Olympics are coming. Be prepared.