Performance enhancing drugs in sport: cheaters upstage what’s good about sport

The situation:  In mid-April 2011, Major League Baseball slugger Manny Ramirez, most recently a member of the Tampa Bay Rays, abruptly retired in a cloud of controversy regarding failed drug tests, and homerun leader Barry Bonds was found guilty of obstruction of justice following a lengthy perjury trial that focused on whether he knowingly received steroids and human growth hormone.  This was yet another unfortunate stretch of big headlines and storylines for professional athletes and performance enhancing drugs in sport.

Here we go again!  Another headline-grabbing storyline about a professional athlete taking drugs!  Each time one of these headlines appears, I die a thousand deaths, again.  I am fed up that some athletes choose the dishonest and easy way out – just like there will always be a segment of society that cheats.  I also am fed up that “bad athletes” get the big headlines, while the ones “doing good” are ignored – case in point the packed press conference for CJ Hunter during the 2000 Sydney Olympic Games, instead of a packed press conference for Stacy Dragila, the American who won the first Olympic gold medal in women’s pole vault the night before.

As a sports lawyer who has worked in the trenches of representing the “doing good” athlete, I’m disgusted and bitter that the “athlete taking drugs” gets all the attention.  I have always been a strong and vocal proponent of superb talent, exciting competition, and honesty and integrity in and for all athletic participants.  I have worked with other idealist lovers of sport to design and implement the first serious out-of-competition drug testing program in sport for track and field in 1990. And I worked with others within the sport of women’s professional golf to design professional golf’s first drug testing program that proved that female golfers were competing “clean.”  I’m frustrated that, the law that I love and must defend to protect the innocent at the expense of the wrongdoers, requires me to defend the rights of those who I suspected are doing wrong – and are later proven or admit to have done wrong – because I truly believe in the purity of, and transformative nature of sport.

There is no more equalitarian, non-discriminatory, excitement inducing reality show than a sporting competition occurring on an “equal playing field” of honesty and integrity!

Jill Pilgrim is a principal at Precise Advisory Group.  She was part of the committee that created the track and field/athletics’ out-of-competition drug testing program in 1990-91, and she was an arbitrator for the early doping cases against American track athletes.  Pilgrim also administered track and field’s drug prosecutions and the drug testing program from 1998 to 2007.  She later was hired by the Ladies Professional Golf Association to create and administer professional golf’s first athlete drug testing program.