so I guess I am not the first person to add my comment on this subject!
just google the words, "drugs in sport" and you'll find over 750,000 references, so where would you begin anyway? The other question is, why would I even want to delve into this topic, when it's been beaten over the head more times than Igor the bike thief has flipped used bikes...
(:
I guess it really started a few years ago, when I did some on-line writing for CBC Sports Online, over in Europe ahead of the Tour de France:
http://www.cbc.ca/sports/columns/tourdefrance/
Of course, when Ben Johnson won the Gold Medal in 1988, I and some friends ran around York University like a fool, celebrating his victory (he trained indoors here all the time and we as students felt like he was one of us)...
Two days later we felt as angry and frustrated as everyone else, but despite this I found myself at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, proudly calling myself a Canadian and revelling in the double-gold medal victory that Donovan Bailey brought home.
(I even tried to make money selling souvenir 100-meter
t-shirts back in Toronto , I still have a few, send me $10 and you can have one)!
When I started running marathons in earnest, in 1995, I started hearing the stories again, regarding certain distance athletes and whether or not they were "clean" or "dirty". Having befriended Peter Fonseca, Canada 's top marathoner, and hearing his take on the issue, made me start to see sport in a different light. Peter trained often in Europe , with some of the best Italian, Portuguese and Spanish athletes, and he seemed to think that many of his slightly faster peers were indeed taking unfair advantages to gain that small edge.
Then of course when you start to ask questions, and poke your nose around, you can quickly become pretty disillusioned with professional athletes, even so-called "amateurs" like many Olympians. One of the reasons why I started to gravitate to these sports was that I became dis-illusioned---------------
