Flumesday.com - China On the Juice

China On The Juice
What was first an Olympic problem and then an American problem has now become a Chinese problem. Four athletes who won gold medals in central China's Henan provincial games last month have tested positive for performance enhancing drugs. These athletes earned their medals in wrestling and weightlifting (no surprise) but their names and the specifics of the drugs used have not been released. Of the 274 athletes competing in the provincial games, 78 were subject to random drug testing, said national news source Xinhua. This bust comes on the heels of a massive August raid in which Chinese authorities seized 450 doses of EPO, testosterone and steroids from an athletic training school in north China's Liaoning province where the staff of the school were caught injecting students with the drugs. The students at the school, the type of school Yao Ming attended for basketball, ranged from ages 15-18 and all have Olympic potential. China, in preparation for the Beijing Olympic games, has been aggressively fighting the war against performance-enhancing drugs to assure that it does not face embarrassment as the world's host. So, as this news from China surfaces, it becomes clear that doping is officially a global problem and not an American one. Other than the NBA, there seems to be a steroid abuse problem in every sport in the world from pitchers in Arizona to wrestlers in China. American cyclists rely on testosterone boosts to win. Baseball, it's safe to assume that half those guys are on something. Football players all look juiced. And even soccer players, playing "the world game" (I hate that), have faced steroid allegations in the past few years. And with Olympic athletes, it's gotten to the point that you have to start assuming they are all taking drugs. Every U.S. track star I've ever heard of except Maurice Greene-- Carl Lewis, Flo-Jo, Marion Jones, Tim Montgomery, Justin Gatlin--all used steroids during their Olympic careers. Clearly, these athletes are not isolated cases of steroid use, but rather they are small parts of a systematic cheat ring in sports. Nowadays, it would be naive to assume an athlete won an event without 'roids. Drug use, as we can see from the raid in China, has become the norm in athlete development all around the world. And therefore, I think the 2008 Olympics should serve as a test of which country has the best athletes, but rather, the first test of which nation makes the best drugs.