Improved Olympic doping has created athletic abominations

Editor,

Although the Beijing Olympics are over, their many abominations are not. Twenty years after the 1988 Seoul Olympics doping scandal, athletes around the world still say that if Canadian sprint star Ben Johnson had been a U.S. athlete, he would have kept his gold medal. The world did not know that when Carl Lewis exchanged his silver for Michael Johnson's gold, he too had tested positive, not for a steroid, but for a stimulant.

However, you don't even have to have tested positive to be guilty of fraud. We know this from sprint star Kelly White, who won two gold medals in the 100-meter and 200-meter races in the 2003 World Championships where she tested positive for a stimulant. White had the decency to admit to the use of other substances, like that of Bay Area Laboratory Company's synthetic drug THG, a steroid designed to be undetectable. Her confession implicated other U.S. athletes like Marion Jones, who had passed more than 165 doping tests. In the end, Jones couldn't fend off accusations without entangling herself in a web of lies that made her step into the trap of perjury. Today, she has confessed to her guilt and returned her three gold and two bronze medals she won in the 2000 Sydney Olympics.

Most athletes don't get caught when their extra fuel takes them to the podium. Only the stupid with less-sophisticated support get caught. The rest get rich with fraud. The "Doping Open" of China shattered one fabulous world record after another with results that were deemed unreachable 20 years ago. Ever-new Frankenstein creations Ö la Michael Phelps and Usain Bolt contaminate the human spirit to be addicted to the fantastic and impossible, unwilling to know that an athlete's day gets lengthened with druggishly shortened recovery times to insert more intense workouts. In the end, life gets shortened. Florence Griffith-Joyner died in 1998 at age 38 after her second heart attack. Her world record of 10.49 seconds for the 100-meter dash from Seoul still stands. Ben Johnson had lowered the men's to 9.79. When he tried a comeback without drugs, he could no longer break 10 seconds and was closer to FloJo's record than his own annulled, which says a lot about the incredible new record of 9.69.

Jamaica's Bolt plays and jokes with his field like Lance Armstrong did at seven Tours de France, suspiciously unable to lose. Bolt's record is arbitrary. He could have run 9.3 seconds had he really run the full length. To dispel suspicion, legends get created. Armstrong was once asked whether he was genetically superior to his competitors. To this day, the press suppresses his positive EPO test from the year he won the Tour the first time. We may soon be talking about the American, Chinese or any other national gene of superiority to explain the incredible gold rush, especially of China and the U.S. in these recent games. Researchers are developing methods to insert genes into athletes, induce mutation and create genetically modified athletes. We have arrived at Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, where anything goes and everything is offensively permissible so we may continue to worship the fantastic, sensational and monstrous gods of capitalism and nationalism to advance corporate wealth.

Joachim L. Oberst

UNM faculty