Marion Jones, regret over....being caught.

Yeah, this type of story never fails to make me madder than....well...almost as mad as I get when thinking about the RIAA lawsuits. Yet another track athlete, sprinter, has admitted using, and lying about using, steroids. Big freakin' surprise. It's not even surprising that she blames her coach or that the period she admits to using is...you guessed it...exactly AFTER her 5 medal win at the Olympics.

Oh no, your honor, I never used them before I won my 5 medals. That was all my own skill.

Sure. So, what happened, you got worse after using them?

But really, does anyone find this the least bit surprising anymore? I saw one quote on a talk-back page suggesting that for every 1 track athlete caught using steroids, 5 go undetected. At least in the 100m sprint I feel that statement is hopelessly naive. Personally, if there are any Olympic finalists of the 100m sprint that aren't using steroids I'd be incredibly surprised.

Take the men's 100m world records: almost for every sub-9.85 record that stands, there is another that has been disallowed because of steroid use ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Record_progression_100_m_men ). This stretches back to the days of the now infamous Ben Johnson. Furthermore, if you graph this data, you see a smooth trend (allowing for the outlier of 1956 that was probably delayed due to WWII) showing that the times were decreasing but were reaching an asymptote of about 9.9s (suggesting this to be the maximum possible for unaided humans)--from about 1968 through to the mid 80's the rate of decrease had almost flattened.

Enter improved synthetic chemistry and big money. Since the mid 80's the downward trend reasserted itself. In other fields, such a break in the trend is considered a 'paradigm shift'. It happens, for example, when studying the develop of computer technology every time a fundamentally new technology is developed. And what it suggests is that something fundamental happened to the sport in the 80's. My guess: steroids.



So, the only surprise in this recent bout of discoveries is that the athletes are American. What I mean is, those of us non-American have long believed the top US track athletes were using steroids, however, the surprise is that they were finally caught. Not that the US Olympic system wanted to catch them, the signs have been there for a long time. No, they were caught from the inside with the anonymous release of information on the production of designer steroids at a San Francisco lab a few years ago. The US sport organizations had no option. To save face, they had to sacrifice the scapegoats.

Your mission, should you accept, is to bring glory to your country by winning the Olympics any way you can. Should you be caught using illicit substances, we will disavow any knowledge of it.

Anyway, in a sport like the 100m, I truly believe no modern champion is drug free. It's no longer possible. Steroids give such an edge to competitors in certain events that one must use them to compete at the world-class level. And the chemists will always be ahead of the detection methods (hey, chemists/biochemists make the detection methods).

So you know what I'd like to see? A steroid Olympics. Let's see what the human body is truly capable of when boosted to the maximum. What's that, you say, it would send a negative and dangerous signal to the young, hopeful athletes. How so? It would be the most honest Olympics since they were held in ancient Greece (maybe even more so). And besides, the drug-warped bodies of retired champions would serve as a very obvious sign to new athletes of the consequences of the path they were taking. And if steroids are invented that don't cause bodily harm? Then I say, bring on the 8 second 100m sprint!