By Conway Hill Thursday, December 27 2007 2:58:54 PM

I ask this question of myself, and the sport, as it has become quite fashionable these days to simply throw athletes "under the bus" once they either test positive or are forced to admit that they have indeed cheated the system. We label them "cheats," call their coach's bums, and equate their "suppliers" to Columbian drug lords. All the appropriate people - the heads of all the Alphabet Acronyms - grab a microphone and profess their outrage and disappointment at all involved. And then we get back to "business as usual" - never bothering to take a look at the situation to see how we can "avoid" these issues in the future!
 
In "real life," when you have a problem you typically try to figure out what went wrong, so that you can implement a plan of action to prevent the problem from reoccurring. Perhaps it's time that we take a look at the sport to see if there is anything that can be done to stem the tide of drug use that is beginning to seriously affect it.
 
The first thing that hits me when I look at "performance enhancement" in track and field is that it really isn't a "new" phenomenon. As big as the Marion Jones announcement, BALCO, and Gatlin cases have been, the Ben Johnson bust back in 1988 was an even bigger headline grabber. We've also learned since the fall of the Iron Curtain that East Germany had a systematic doping program that extended back into the 1970's! Going back to the 1950's distance runners tried using pure oxygen to double blood count and boost performance. And looking even further back at the history of the sport, competitors in the very early Olympiads attempted to use crude combinations of berries, herbs, and mushrooms to try and enhance their performances. So clearly this need to "enhance" performance is as old as the sport itself!
 
So the next question then becomes: why have athletes...