Is it football season yet?
Well, the answer to the "first serious injury of training camp" goes to LeCharles Bentley of the Cleveland Browns. Bentley, acquired in the offseason to bolster the Browns' offensive line, injured his knee in an 11 on 11 drill last week and is likely out for the year. Sorry to see that, since I think the Browns are heading in a positive direction under Romeo Crennel. I'm not sure how far this sets them back, but it's not a good thing.
Time for a rant...and it has to do with doping in professional sports.
I'm sure everyone has read (ad nauseum) the stories about Barry Bonds, Floyd Landis, Jason Giambi, and others. This little rant is not to opine about the guilt or innocence of any of these guys, but to address what I believe to be the deeper issue: a disturbing lack of personal accountability.
A guy I work with brought up an interesting argument. He noted that Tiger Woods had corrective eye surgery (his eyes were already 20-20), and that some golfers wear colored contact lenses to allow them to read the greens better. Is this not "performance enhancing," and, ergo, akin to taking substances to make you stronger, faster, bigger?
Is it the same? I don't necessarily think so, but I think there are some philosophical similarities. Both practices are altering the physical characteristics of the human body to perform better. But so is a guy with 20-200 vision wearing glasses when he plays. Both practices give the individual an advantage over a competitor that hasn't gone that route. I think the big difference lies in the fact that one is a legal practice, while the other isn't. In my opinion, sports has always been about honest competition, hard work, dedication and talent. I don't believe that the purity of sports includes (or has ever included) the artificial adaptation or improvement of the human body by chemical means.
This is a difficult argument to present clearly, because there are a lot of "yeah, but what about...?" questions out there. I'd like to think that the professional athletes today are capable of putting the ideals of the sport they play ahead of their desire to push the performance envelope through the use of banned substances. Evidently, there are some that have found it difficult to do so. For whatever reason, they decided that it was morally acceptable to do something that is not in keeping with fair play. Those that have violated that fundamental principle have no business in competition, and should be kicked out immediately (and, for the record, I do NOT buy the 'unknowingly ingested' argument), fined any performance bonuses, and have their statistics expunged from historical records.
I'm against baseball's current discipline policy (one and done is the way I think it should be), mortified that there is no accepted HGH test for all sports yet, and sickened by the rampant cheating in certain arenas (cycling, track and field).
There has got to be a standard of honest competition in sports, or there really is no reason to hold these guys/gals in the regard that we do now.
Rambling? Probably. Coherent? Probably not. But, it felt good to get it off my chest.
Time for a rant...and it has to do with doping in professional sports.
I'm sure everyone has read (ad nauseum) the stories about Barry Bonds, Floyd Landis, Jason Giambi, and others. This little rant is not to opine about the guilt or innocence of any of these guys, but to address what I believe to be the deeper issue: a disturbing lack of personal accountability.
A guy I work with brought up an interesting argument. He noted that Tiger Woods had corrective eye surgery (his eyes were already 20-20), and that some golfers wear colored contact lenses to allow them to read the greens better. Is this not "performance enhancing," and, ergo, akin to taking substances to make you stronger, faster, bigger?
Is it the same? I don't necessarily think so, but I think there are some philosophical similarities. Both practices are altering the physical characteristics of the human body to perform better. But so is a guy with 20-200 vision wearing glasses when he plays. Both practices give the individual an advantage over a competitor that hasn't gone that route. I think the big difference lies in the fact that one is a legal practice, while the other isn't. In my opinion, sports has always been about honest competition, hard work, dedication and talent. I don't believe that the purity of sports includes (or has ever included) the artificial adaptation or improvement of the human body by chemical means.
This is a difficult argument to present clearly, because there are a lot of "yeah, but what about...?" questions out there. I'd like to think that the professional athletes today are capable of putting the ideals of the sport they play ahead of their desire to push the performance envelope through the use of banned substances. Evidently, there are some that have found it difficult to do so. For whatever reason, they decided that it was morally acceptable to do something that is not in keeping with fair play. Those that have violated that fundamental principle have no business in competition, and should be kicked out immediately (and, for the record, I do NOT buy the 'unknowingly ingested' argument), fined any performance bonuses, and have their statistics expunged from historical records.
I'm against baseball's current discipline policy (one and done is the way I think it should be), mortified that there is no accepted HGH test for all sports yet, and sickened by the rampant cheating in certain arenas (cycling, track and field).
There has got to be a standard of honest competition in sports, or there really is no reason to hold these guys/gals in the regard that we do now.
Rambling? Probably. Coherent? Probably not. But, it felt good to get it off my chest.
posted by HappyValley at 8:38 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home