Bigger Stronger Faster

Hi There,
Not sure how many people watch the CBC. But last night they had a documentary as part of their Passionate Eye series called “Bigger, Stronger, Faster”* *a side effect of being an American.

http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/bigger-stronger-faster/

The guy that produced the doc had tried steroids in the past but then gave them up as he felt like it was cheating, throughout the documentary he talks to people about the use of steroids. What worried me is the number of people that he talked too that said steroids are safe. The vast majority of people interviewed either thought steroid use was A) safe and could not understand why they are portrayed as being evil and B) was using them for a long time. The only people that seemed to have a problem with steroid use, was congress and his parents. However when one their sons dead lifted over 700lbs they looked like they had won the lottery (to use the producers own words)

The majority of people he interviewed that used steroids were bodybuilders/power lifters (one guy lifted 732lbs, don't tell me he wasn't juiced up). He did speak to a couple of athletes such as Floyd Landis, Ben Johnson and Carl Lewis. Interestingly here for me is that Ben Johnson and others don’t think they are/were cheating since everyone else was doing it. This reminds me of something I heard back when the Festina Scandal broke in 1998, “we’re not cheating, we’re leveling the playing field” or we’re not cheating since everyone cheats on something be it exams, taxes, wife’s, husbands or whatever. It is amazing to me how people that take steroids to get super performances will A) Deny, deny, deny that they used them and then B) how they can justify the use of steroids to themselves and their families. One of the producers brothers said that if he thought using steroids was wrong he wouldn’t use them, but since he didn’t think it was wrong.....he had no problem with their use.

I have a problem with the use of doping in sports. It’s wrong, to me sport is something that we do for fun. Even though I'm sometimes (to others it seems) like I'm pretty serious about it. I know that we’re not going to be world Champions or get to the Olympics (first of I’m not dedicated enough and secondly I maybe a little old). I just don’t see why you would need or want to use them. Mostly because I think if I can’t do it on my own then I wasn’t meant to do it. If I started to produce world class times, I think you would have to start questioning the improvement. There is a quote from Chariots of Fire when Sam Mussabini tells Harold Abrahams that “you can’t put in what god left out!” or I'm sure you've heard you can't turn a donkey into a racehorse. Maybe I’m naive but I’d like to think that there are not many people out there that use steroids to run in Alberta. This begs the question - What has happened to our moral compasses that we think that cheating is not a bad thing?

It also makes me wonder if there should be drug testing at a provincial level, maybe not for things like Franks Wednesday X-Country league, but for the championship races and the marathons.

Your thoughts?