The oldest track & field blog on the internet

Sunday, May 10, 2009

Bill Simmons Understands Doping

Bill Simmons, ESPN's Sports Guy, has a column describing how he might be looking back at baseball's "steroid era" five years from now. Substitute "track stars" for "baseball players", "1980s" for "steroid era", and "see the USA & western Europe beat the East Germans & Soviets" for "see the Red Sox win a World Series", and you've got the experiences of most every track fan born before Watergate.

He gets it. Yeah, in retrospect you'd have to be deluding yourself to not know they were pretty much all juiced to the gills. But the desire to see your own team win can blind you to what is clearly outside of our common moral boundaries. And it's not just limited to sports; how else can you explain large numbers of Americans defending the use of torture, if not for the desire to be with a winning team?

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