Published: February 22, 2006
The Winter Olympic Games in Turin have been accompanied by the usual controversy over athlete steroid use.
Officials say that the Turin games have the most rigorous performance enhancer testing of any Winter Olympics to date. About 1,200 samples are being tested, a 72 percent increase over the number tested at the Salt Lake City games in 2002.
Most recently, an athlete was stripped of her gold medal because she tested positive for a banned substance, carphedon.
She and her coach claim that a doctor prescribed her a painkiller containing carphedon without informing her of its ingredients.
Steroid scandals almost always involve a mad rush to pass the buck to someone else. But somehow, the public always escapes blame.
We watch the Olympics expecting athletes to win and to break records. None of us are interested in seeing them achieve the same goals over and over again, but we all want to be watching when someone sets a new standard.
Some record-breaking performances can be achieved through innovative training techniques, but some cannot. Human beings have physical limits, and there comes a point at which performance enhancers are the only thing that provides that extra nudge toward the superhuman standard that we have come to expect from athletes.
It’s wrong for an athlete to cheat by using performance enhancers, but on some level, we want them to, so how can we blame them?