pink poodle
気が狂っている男
Yeah, I'll give you that, seems contradictory on my part.
There is a bit of backstory to my opinion on drug testing in sport. I'll try to keep it brief.
Back in the day I was selected as a junior to potentially play professional basketball. The first official day we spent training was not a very welcoming experience. We were sat down and introduced to a group of overweight people in suits from a drug testing agency. They sprooked the importance of us seeing potential performance enhancing drug users as objects and not people. We were basically being told to want to murder these people instead of playing the game and beating them on the court, was a wild experience. The staff that worked for the team we were playing for drummed it into us that they would publically condemn anyone who was proved of being a drug cheat and they'd ruin their lives. I get it, it is a scare tactic to keep us clean and not drag the club into turmoil etc etc.
This was the late 1990's. We were tested without actually knowing what we were tested for and no one was really sure of the shit they used was clean or if it was sterile. They were so many people close by that handled the samples and I even saw one dropped to the carpet. All this stuff became apparent to me later as I read into it and it was either purely done as a lesson to scare us off it or it was a total backyard operation that could produce some seriously shady results.
I made a point of getting a meeting with these people later in that same week as I had a few questions. One of the PR girls that worked for the club joined in and I had a good chat with one of the people who did the testing and turns out this guy was actually one of the ones who tested and delivered the results. He was pretty good about it and things he said stuck with me forever; hence my skeptical opinion of these tests.
Now, I was warned that this had to stay behind closed doors as it wasn't something that the general public needed to know. I see no harm in talking of it now but he put it quite simply and asked "Do I eat bananas?" Yes, I did and I still do. He asked why and I said I knew of it as a good source of energy for running around and playing sport. He also asked if I used drinks like Powerade that put some goodness into my system to help my body out when playing sport and I said yep, not the tastiest stuff but it is more refreshing than cold water or cola or whatever. He was smiling the whole time and asked the girl with us if she drank coffee, she said yes. She actually went on to tell me about the things she put in her drink bottle for her road race's that she did and it contained electrolyte tabs, cold coffee, warm Coke and orange juice. Yuck! I never forget that brew as I suggested it to an XC racer I knew and he started using it from then on. Anyway, this drug test guy asked if I knew the effects of banned substances and my only example was the things I'd heard of cyclists and Olympic sprinters getting busted. He said they were worst case scenarios and those guys had an Einstein-esque chemist working for them to maximize the chances of them outperforming everyone else, even those doing the same stuff. He went on to tell me that so many simple products that can be bought by your Mum at the grocery shop can be performance enhancing. The banana I chucked on my Weetbix, the coffee you drink before a ride, even some of the pills I could buy to help me overcome a cold or a virus. I wasn't surprised by that, I knew that stuff but what struck me as alarming is he said (remember this is the 1990's) that the system they use to detect and prove use of something that makes you perform better is such a vague way of doing it that no Australian athlete could be convicted without someone actually seeing them willingly doing a full blood transfusion ( I later looked up what that meant). In a teenager kind of way I must have sort of scoffed and said "So this drug testing you're doing is a waste of time?" and thats when I was told by the PR girl that we need to keep this between us as we don't want any drama. Old mate the drug tester chimed in and said to make no mistake, if you've got something in your guts or blood that you have taken to make yourself work out better, they'd know but any of those tests took months, sometimes half a year to get any result. He also said that you never know if you took something unwillingly and it showed up.
I was optimistic that I'd be in the top half of the guys that could potentially play for this team in a few years so I did my bit to fit in and learn. We had interaction with the pro players and they were that much better than the young guys that it either inspired you or demoralized you thinking you had no talent to compete. As young guys, we aspired to be good players like the pro's, sign autographs, pose with dancing girls etc etc. A few months after all this had gone down, two of the players were dismissed after being found to have gotten on the bongs and the story was the drug tests had shown they had it in their system. An allegation then came about that these guys were seen smoking marijuana a few weeks before their demise which left me scratching my head, the drug test wouldn't have shown that result and both players said they'd not done drug tests and couldn't be proven. The plot thickened and it was then revealed that one of the players on the team who was being outplayed by one of the guys had told management that he'd seen these guys partying on smoking joints, drinking and hustling women. The two guys were partying as alleged but neither had smoked pot. The unlikely twist was one of them did commit sexual assault at that time and the other guy was too drunk to have taken any part in it so the jealous guy who made the claim of smoking pot didn't know he actually chucked them under the bus. An investigation was done and proved the assault and proved the other guy had no part in it but the team distanced itself from that charge and said they'd gone off the rails earlier and were dismissed for a failed drug test.
The drug test never happened and it was used in haste to dismiss two guys for something that never happened. Of course one of them was a crook who abused a woman but the shitty feeling of seeing the guy I'd spoken to from the drug testing firm do a TV interview expelling these guys for smoking marijuana and the club's staff saying they don't condone drug use, its bad for our image and sets a bad example etc etc was horrendous. They'd not known of the sexual assault until much later and acted waaaaaaaaaaay too soon on bad advice from a shit player who dobbed them in trying to get his spot in the team. His father was a financial backer of the team and this guy lasted a season before being cut out altogether. This swindling jerk must have waited for his chance, made the claim these guys were on smoking drugs, got in the ear of the team staff and had them fired. Combine that corruption with suggestions from a lifetime worker in the drug testing world and you have my blunt assumption that drug test staff being made public is shit.
Funnily enough, I ran into this drug test guy a few years later when he was spectating at the Men's mountain bike race for the Olympics in West Sydney. It was brief chit chat, he was still doing the same career albeit somewhere else and I could tell I reminded him of a shit time of his life where he had been made to make a play of false accusation. He asked where I'd gotten to as all of a sudden I wasn't on the basketball scene anymore and I told him the two things that bought my demise.
During a domestic game against a Japanese college I was ejected from a game for blowing up at a ref who made a bad call in a close game. As I was leaving the court, I dropped the strides and chucked a brown eye at him. That was a blemish on my future and I was escorted from the building to the roar of the teenage crowd, they loved it. Karma got me back in the following days when playing on a weekend at a school yard court just mucking around with mates. I did a two hand dunk on this big old steel ring and I swung on it a bit. The pole snapped at ground level and it slammed into the cement while I was still hanging onto the ring. Six surgeries later, hand broken into a million pieces, skin grafts etc etc and during my time in hospital I was forced to miss the judicial hearing for my brown eye saga. I was given a lifetime ban from that particular association which just happened to be a feeder club for the professional team I was training with so there you go, big time chance all done 'cause I mooned a guy. Makes for a funny story but the bullshit chain of events that led to it turned me right off it.
You made it this far! Thanks for reading and maybe assuming my view on drug testing is super jaded because I see it as too grey an area to prove accurately, it is a tool used by others to potentially bring someone down and it makes good people out to be big time crooks. I first hand saw a drug use allegation totally destroy an innocent guy while a real bad prick who raped a girl was protected from the press and lived happily ever after.
I have to agree @Dozer, bikes are way better than basketball and chucking a brown eye is the most Australian rebuttal I know of.
