Explain the Rules Please
Filed Under Shower Curtain | Posted on August 20, 2008
I’ve been watching this sport longer than many who read these pages have been alive. So you would think that by now I would know the rules when watching the sport. But over the past few years the rules as I know them have been challenged somewhat, so I guess I need a bit of help.
So we learned to cheer for the athletes from the West because we were the Good Guys -the ones in the white hats. And of course we learned to boo the athletes from the East because they were the Bad Guys - the ones in the black hats. Was very simple because all you had to do was take a look at the country the athlete was from and no matter how good or bad the performance, you knew immediately if you should cheer or boo.
So we learned to not only boo at the performances of the Bad people, but also to suspect that any time they won or had great results, that it was due to those “drugs” they were using! Of course along the way there were some people that weren’t from Communist countries that got busted but they were fairly insignificant and their performances usually not overly outstanding. So as the “Bad” athletes starting rewriting the history books and the all time lists in track and field throughout the 1980’s, the cries against them grew to a crescendo.
Then within a period of a few years the perfect storm hit. First was Ben Johnson’s now infamous drug bust at the ‘88 Games in Seoul – a huge drop in the WR, while beating a beloved athlete from the “Good Guys”. A few years later there was the fall of the Iron Curtain and with it the disclosure that all those athletes that we suspected of using all those bad drugs were indeed using those bad drugs!
But defining Good Guys and Bad Guys was not as easy as it was in the good ole Cold War days. We couldn’t just look at one nationality anymore to determine if he or she were “Good” or “Bad”. Now we had to wait on drug tests to decide if we were going to cheer or boo! But we weren’t sure about that either, because we found out during the inquiries into Bad Ben that he had beaten the tests for years! So maybe there were other “Bad Guys” out there that we needed to boo that weren’t getting caught!
So now we knew who to cheer and boo for again. We cheer for the Clean athletes and boo the Dirty ones. And we know who is dirty because either they test positive for the bad drugs OR they have performances that are just loads better than everyone else simple, cut and dry and easy to identify! So it was written, so it was done.
We then entered the era of “Finger Pointing”. And we started in the Bad Ben era with pointing at FloJo – her huge improvement from 1987 to 1988. Superhuman performances meant she must be “one of them”! And the world quietly pointed a silent finger, ‘quietly’ because no one wanted to be accused of accusing. It didn’t help matters either that when Carl Lewis was accused by another athlete (Darrell Robinson) he immediately countered by bringing a law suit. No one wants to go to court without proof, since THAT could be costly.
So through most of the 90’s there was a lot of silent finger pointing. Athletes were suspected and there were whispers in the shadows, but few were testing positive (of course we’ve known since the 80’s that Urinalysis is easily beaten) so support for the allegations was non existent.
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