Mike Murray essay -- Gun's Up

Opinion Paper: 18 September 2006

Gun’s Up

--by Mike Murray

For those unfamiliar with Track & Field jargon, the “gun” is the starter’s pistol. When it’s “up,” it signals the timers and finish-line judges that the contestants have been called to their blocks and that they’ve been given the first of three commands: “Runners, take your marks.”

As the starter raises his second pistol (the recall gun, should a false start necessitate its firing), the penultimate command is issued: “Set!” At that moment, the runners rise slightly in their blocks and bring themselves to a completely still state.

The final command – the piercing crack of the starter’s pistol – releases the coiled energy and the nervous tension of the runners, and sends them barreling down the track.

On playgrounds here in the States, kids simulate the event with commands of, “On your mark... Get set... Go!” Across the pond in England, they say, “Ready...Steady...Go!”

Track & Field was once such a pure, such a simple sport. Around since ancient times, it was a direct outgrowth of the playful competition that youngsters engage in easily and spontaneously. Racing around, jumping, and throwing things come as naturally to kids as swimming does to ducks.

The core component of the sport – running – was accessible to nearly all. It mattered little to what station in life one was born; a suitable pair of shoes was all that was necessary to participate. In some parts of the world, even that simple staple was not requisite. Ethiopian Abebe Bekila achieved Olympic marathon gold, after all, sans footwear.

Track was a supreme meritocracy. A fancy outfit or the favor of an official could do nothing to improve one’s odds of success. You reached the finish line first, you jumped the highest, you threw your implement the farthest, you won. Period.

But things have changed. For those of us with life-long ties to Athletics (as the sport is known throughout much of the world), these are troubling times.

As most surely know, cheaters today permeate the sport. It didn’t start with Canada’s Ben Johnson, although his very public fall from grace did shine a bright light on the problem. The issue of improper “performance enhancement” has been around for some time.

I recall the stellar Olympic achievements of Finland’s Lasse Viren. He and his handlers reportedly came up with a novel procedure: blood doping. The method involved extracting some of his blood weeks or months before the Games.

An oxygen-carrying component was separated out and frozen. Viren’s body naturally replenished the diminished blood volume in a few days, bringing him back to his normal state. Then, on the eve of his big races in the Olympics, the frozen content was thawed and injected back into his body.

The presumption is that the technique afforded Viren extra oxygen-handling capacity (“uptake,” in aerobics-speak) – a decided advantage for a runner competing over distances of 5 kilometers and 10 kilometers.

Viren’s method of gaining an advantage over his competition, even if true, was not illegal in his day. As it is with most forms of cheating, rules forbidding undesirable behavior are impossible to formulate and impose before the fact. Only after someone does something designed to gain an unfair advantage does a restriction become obviously necessary.

Even now, when chemical supplements play such a large role in boosting performance, tests to catch cheaters necessarily lag in response. Vaccines, after all, are only developed in reaction to known viruses.

So it is with drug testing. Illegal strains of natural and synthetic performance enhancers crop up all the time; officials play catch-up in first learning of their existence and then developing methods to detect their presence in athletes.

But cheating of a sort existed even before chemical or biological enhancement. Consider Soviet sprinter Valeri Borzov, winner of the 100- and 200-meter races at Munich’s Olympic Games. Borzov was a master of the “rolling start.”

The rules state that runners must wait for the sound of the starter’s pistol before beginning. They are not supposed to anticipate. In Borzov’s day, officials relied solely upon their visual acuity to spot runners who “jumped the gun.” In such cases they fired their recall pistols, halting races and bringing contestants back to their blocks.

Borzov was able to beat that system. He excelled at fathoming a starter’s rhythm, at determining the precise interval between commands – and so was remarkably adept at timing his release for the instant the gun went off. The result was a nearly imperceptible advantage of a tenth of a second or so. (Human eyes were seldom able to catch Borzov. It usually required a camera and slow-motion replay to reveal his “gamesmanship.”)

Borzov was indeed fast. But in sprint races determined by margins as small as a single hundredth of a second, the benefit of his rolling start was undeniable (except by him and his compatriots, of course). On several occasions it transformed a probable second- or third-place finish into victory.

Technology was developed to thwart the craftiness of athletes like Borzov. Pressure-sensitive starting blocks were designed that detected even the slightest premature motion. Thereafter, early movement triggered an automatic alarm and identified the runner to whom a false start should be charged. But that reactionary policy did little to mollify Borzov’s conquered contemporaries.

Even as a high-school competitor, I encountered cheaters. I recall one crisp autumn morning at Cleveland’s Edgewater Park. It was the occasion of one of my finest races. The event involved well over a hundred athletes, representing more than a dozen high schools. We were gathered for a large cross country invitational on the southern shore of Lake Erie.

I didn’t win that 2-mile contest, nor did I even place second. But I was thrilled to come in third, seeing as how I nearly reeled in Ron Addison in the process. I was closing fast as we neared the chute, but I had started my final drive a moment too late and just ran out of real estate. Still, I was pleased to have come so close to catching Addison. I was pleased to have forced him to take a nervous, backward glance at the sound of my approach.

Ron, you see, was a god in distance running. He was an Ohio state champ in track and cross country. And, before he was through, he became the second-best high school miler in America, clocking 4:06 and barely losing in the (then) national championship: California’s Golden West Meet.

Pretty heady stuff, that. And pretty fast running for the early 1970s.

That Ron didn’t win that cross country race at Edgewater was a shame. The person who did win – the person who beat both Ron and me – was a cheater. We didn’t know it then, but he later owned up to having taken an illegal chemical stimulant.

During the outdoor track season of that same academic year, I received another shock. I was by then head-and-shoulders above the other distance runners on my own team, regularly finishing far ahead of our second-best miler.

I was surprised, then, when I started having to work considerably harder to maintain my number-one status. A runner I routinely beat by huge margins was suddenly finishing within a couple seconds of me. I was harder and harder pressed to hold him off.

Stunned, I had to ask: “What gives? How have you managed to improve so much in such a short period of time?”

His answer was honest and succinct: “Drugs.”

I was incredulous. “No, really, what accounts for it?”

Again came the forthright reply: “Drugs. I can get you some. You should try ‘em; they make a big difference.”

My sense of fair play offended, I rejected the offer. And I redoubled my efforts. I buried the cheater by ever-growing margins in subsequent races.

There will always be cheaters. Fans will not blame those in authority for the actions of bad apples. But we will take to task the stewards of the sport for tardy and insufficient responses.

USA Track & Field (the governing body in America) and Track & Field News (the self-professed “Bible of the Sport”) have seemed to many of us to have acted more as enablers than watchdogs in recent years. To close followers of the sport, their recent claims of deep commitment to ferreting out cheaters ring hollow.

If they are at last sincere, fine. But it seems to us that they have too long been part of the problem, not the solution.

Under the guise of “due process,” too much has been overlooked. Too much has been rationalized away. To observers in other countries, America has seemed to be a nation altogether too tolerant of its sports scofflaws.

When weeks are permitted to elapse after failed drug tests on U.S. athletes’ “A” samples with no subsequent action being taken, foreigners’ concerns seem justified. It is unlikely that the chemical signatures of performance-enhancing substances in urine hold up well over time; effective detection requires expeditious evaluation.

In the recent case of Marion Jones, the June test on her “A” sample came back positive. But that result did not prompt the timely testing of her “B” sample – it was, instead, permitted to lie around gathering dust. The secondary sample languished (and degraded) for a full two months.

It took a tip-off to the press to prod officials to act. When word spread of the failed test, Jones wailed – as did Mary Slaney in a similar case, years ago – that her rights were violated. Jones complained that her test results were “inappropriately leaked” to the media. (In the athlete-friendly world of American testing, policy dictates that public disclosure of violations not be made unless and until the “A” and “B” samples are both examined – and each proves positive for banned substance.

Given the foot-dragging in bringing the Jones matter to resolution, however, one can reasonably question the behavior of those responsible for oversight and enforcement. Jones’ primary sample was confirmed positive in June; as of late August, follow-up action had still to be taken.

Exactly when were officials going to get around to fulfilling their duties by testing Jones’ “B” sample? Had not the sunlight of public scrutiny shone in, would the matter have been addressed yet? Ever? And, now that the backup test has finally been conducted, it must be asked: What is a belated examination of a months-old urine sample truly worth? What is it really capable of revealing?

Those are sincere, straightforward questions. And longtime supporters of the sport would like honest, straightforward answers.

From the sprints to the middle distances to the field events – on both sides of the gender aisle – cheating has run rampant. It has been responsible for far too many stellar performances in recent years.

Fans are watching. We’re waiting to see how the sport polices itself. We want to see it acquit itself well; we want to see it do the right thing. We want to know that honest participants will be given a fair chance at succeeding. And we want to know that the sport will be preserved for future generations.

But our patience is not limitless; time is a factor. The gun’s up. Will Track & Field win this race?