In a sport that most people don’t care about unless a local player is doing well internationally (competitive cycling, for example), a scandal over performance enhancing drugs is a good opportunity to make noises about the “purity of the sport” and demand major sanctions against those who cheat. However, as Jim Souhan points out at the Star Tribune, we’re rather good at turning a blind eye to the same thing in sports we care more about:
The advent of the NFL season will provide a respite from sports riddled with performance-enhancing drugs, such as baseball and cycling.
If you can read that sentence without laughing, you are one naive fan.
We know many baseball players cheated in the ’90s and early 2000s, and we know some cheat today. For every Melky Cabrera who gets caught there must be dozens, if not hundreds, who are smart enough to avoid testing positive in a system that is easy to beat.
We know cyclists cheat. The evidence is overwhelming. When Lance Armstrong pretended to take a principled stand by abandoning his legal fight to defend himself, he was avoiding facing public testimony by a squadron of former teammates. Now another former teammate, Tyler Hamilton, has written a book in which he details his own, and Armstrong’s, cheating, and other former Armstrong associates are speaking openly about his PED use.
[. . .]
If Armstrong could avoid testing positive for PEDs while winning the Tour de France seven times, what does that tell us about the National Football League, a sport filled with the biggest, strongest, fastest and most explosive athletes in our society?
That’s right: The NFL must be stuffed with performance enhancers.
The difference is that we don’t care.
