July 31, 2008 6:06 AM

When "success" is more important than integrity, this is where you end up

(thanks to Ginger for this one....)

By the time they arrive in Beijing, most athletes have resigned themselves to the possibility of undergoing a battery of tests for banned substances, like anabolic steroids and certain cough medicines. But some female athletes may find they are asked to submit to an entirely different examination -- one that will test whether they are, in fact, women. Organizers of the Beijing Olympics have set up a sex-determination laboratory to evaluate "suspect" female athletes, the official Chinese news agency Xinhua reported Sunday. The lab is similar to ones set up at previous Olympics in Sydney and Athens, and will draw on the resources of the Peking Union Medical College Hospital to evaluate an athlete's external appearance, hormones and genes.... Although only athletes whose gender has been questioned will be tested in Beijing, the lab is a relic of an earlier Olympic era, when every female athlete was required to submit to a sex-verification test before competing in the Games. The tests emerged in the 1960s, when the Soviet Union and other Communist countries were suspected of entering male athletes in women's events to gain an edge.

When I first read this story, my first reaction was an intense sense of deja vu. Having grown watching Olympics in which the gender identity of certain Eastern Bloc female athletes was...um, questionable, it would seem we've returned to an era when it really does seem that if you're not cheating, not only are you not winning, you're not trying hard enough. When athletes and coaches devote as much energy to chemicals as they do to training, when helping athletes evade detection has become a cottage industry, ALL athletes are tarred with the same brush. How many of us look a the Tour de France as an untarnished spectacle of astonishing athletic and mental endurance? If you're like me, the first things that come to mind are things like EPO and other performance-enhancing drugs...or, as I like to simplify it, CHEATING.

How low have we as a species sunk when the drive and desire to achieve success trumps all else- decency, fair play, respect for the game and your fellow competitors? How pathetic have we become when in order to merely compete on a level playing field, an athlete has to seriously contemplating cheating? You know the train has left the tracks when an Olympic swimmer like 41-year-old Dara Torres has to demand to be drug-tested in order to prove that she's clean. How truly and incredibly sad that an athlete feels compelled to prove that she's NOT cheating, eh?

I've been accused of being somewhat cynical (I prefer the term "realism"), but I don't plan on devoting much time or energy to the upcoming Olympics. If I want to watch a sport tainted by cheating, I'll watch an NBA game for the referees. It's sad, really, because I used to love the Olympics. In fact, a shared love for the Olympic Games was just about the only thing my mother and I ever had in common. Now I'm sick to death of the crass commercialism, the rampant nationalism, and the cheating. Especially the cheating. I've got better things to do with my time than watching the artificially enhanced and the chemically assisted display skills they might not possess if left to their own devices.

When success trumps integrity, you can't claim to be surprised when you alienate those- like myself- to whom integrity is more than a mere abstract concept. Somewhere, Baron Pierre de Coubertin is weeping.

blog comments powered by Disqus

Technorati

Technorati search

» Blogs that link here

About this Entry

This page contains a single entry by Jack Cluth published on July 31, 2008 6:06 AM.

More unfiltered wisdom from the C-Student-in-Chief © was the previous entry in this blog.

Today's signs that the (McCain) Apocalypse is upon us is the next entry in this blog.

Find recent content on the main index or look in the archives to find all content.

Contact Me

Powered by Movable Type 5.12