MALE PATTERN FITNESS: Comment on A Dick for All Seasons

A Dick for All Seasons

January 07, 2007

I was enjoying the New York Times Magazine profile of Dick Pound, the anti-drug crusader for the the International Olympic Committee, when I came across this passage:

Pound’s biggest role in sport, before joining WADA, is one that can be seen as having helped create the very thing he is now fighting. Pound was the I.O.C. money man. He recognized that Olympic organizers were undervaluing their product and, as chairman of the I.O.C.’s television and marketing committee from 1983 to 2001, he dragged the games into the big-money era by negotiating richer deals with multinationals like Visa, McDonald’s, Kodak and Coca-Cola. In 1980, the I.O.C. got about $100 million for its TV rights; for the Beijing Games in 2008, the total will be nearly $2 billion. ...

Andrew Jennings, a British investigative journalist who has written three books on the International Olympic Committee, told me he believes Pound so valued his place within the I.O.C.’s inner circle that he abided the group’s questionable ways of doing business until Samaranch cast him in the role of reformer. ...

Jennings says Pound “did very well at giving sports away to commercial interests” and, by making the games vastly bigger and the money available to athletes more plentiful, thereby increased temptation and cheating. “The sponsor money brought the doping,” he claims, adding that it also financed the lavish travels and perks of I.O.C. members. Craig Masback, C.E.O. of USA Track and Field and a frequent target of Pound’s, says that “it seems logical that with more money, there is more temptation to make the tragic decision to cheat.” But he adds that it may be too pat to equate the money and drugs. “There was plenty of doping before there was a big financial incentive,” Masback says.

There was no money in Olympic weightlifting in the early 1960s, when the Americans started doping to keep up with the Soviets, who were so open about their use of synthetic testosterone that they left their hypodermic needles on the locker-room floor after meets. How much money is there in powerlifting or Strongman competitions today, and how many of the top competitors would pass a drug test?

To put it in even better perspective, friends who've played Division III football have told me about teammates who used steroids to get an edge.

That quibble aside, it's a terrific story, written by Michael Sokolove, an outrageously talented journalist. I love this paragraph near the beginning of the story, in which Pound is talking about Floyd Landis:

Pound took something like a schoolboy’s delight in talking about Landis’s lab result, which supposedly showed his testosterone level to be grotesquely above what is typical for most men. Landis has denied taking a prohibited substance and is fighting what could be a two-year ban from cycling. “I mean, it was 11 to 1!” Pound said, referring to Landis’s reported testosterone-to-epitestosterone ratio, a measure used to identify doping. “You’d think he’d be violating every virgin within 100 miles. How does he even get on his bicycle?”

The Megaphysical Club

Speaking of doping, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch has a feature this morning on baseball's 500-home-run club, a group that's growing and diminishing at the same time:

This coming season, Frank Thomas, Jim Thome, Manny Ramirez and Alex Rodriguez are within 40 home runs of reaching 500, with Thomas needing 13. As two is the highest number of players to hit their 500th in the same season, it could be an unprecedented membership drive for the club. From Babe Ruth in 1929 to Ernie Banks in 1970, nine players hit 500. Six players joined in a seven-year span from 1965-71.

If Gary Sheffield, who is 45 short, reaches 500 by 2008, nine more players will have joined the club since Barry Bonds did it in 2001.

"I think it does have the same (importance)," said David Vincent, a home run specialist for the Society of American Baseball Research who has a book on the history of the homer coming out this spring. "When you consider there have been 16,000-plus players all time and you're still talking about just 20 people, that's significant."

Others have a different view.

Wrote Bill James, author of The Bill James Handbook and a pioneer in baseball statistics, in an e-mail: "If (500) hasn't lost some of its luster already, that would be a miracle. I wouldn't want to speak ill of Mark McGwire, who was a fantastic player for a few years, or (Rafael) Palmeiro, who was an unusually good player for a long time, but ... they're not Mickey Mantle or Jimmie Foxx, either. It seems a matter of time until somebody who nobody would describe as a great player reaches that level."

Note the faint praise from Bill James. You can add a couple words to each quote and perhaps figure out what he thinks about each player: McGwire "was a fantastic player for a few years while he was taking steroids." Palmeiro was "an unusually good player for a long time, once he started doping."

But here's the most interesting passage in the story, which mainly focuses on whether Jose Canseco, who appeared on the Hall of Fame ballot for the first (and probably last) time this winter, would've been a sure-fire HOFer had he reached 500 home runs instead of topping out at 462. The guy quoted is Doug Ames, his agent:

Canseco is at work on a second book, Vindicated, which could hit shelves as early as the All-Star break, Ames said. It was his first book, Juiced, that didn't spark but spurred discussion on steroids -- spurred it all the way to Congress. Ames said Canseco wrote himself out of the Hall with that book. That prompts this question: If he had reached 500, would he have put out his tell-all book? Would all that followed its publication have happened? ...

"He said he would still have written the book," Ames relayed, "but only after he was in the Hall of Fame."

Posted by LouSchuler at January 7, 2007 07:47 AM

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I still believe Floyd, because I don't think he's guilty. But the biggest reason that I'd like to see him vindicated is because I think Pound is such a fucking tool.

I'm not a big conspiracy buff, but I wouldn't rule out collusion between Pound and the French lab that conducted the tests. I think he would like nothing more than to have a doper win the TdF, and would do whatever it took to get that result.

Posted by: Mark at January 7, 2007 01:02 PM

Step away from the abyss, Mark!

Man, you've got some dark thoughts.

I don't know beans about cycling, other than the fact a lot of my friends who ride end up in the emergency room. But from my position of ignorance, it's hard to imagine that the most likely explanation isn't the one that's most obvious -- Floyd was losing the race, and did something desperate to get back into it.

I feel the same way about spiked drug tests as I do about hacked voting machines: I don't rule out the possibility, I just want to hear one credible person admit to doing it. It takes a criminal to commit a crime, and criminals generally get caught.

Posted by: Lou Schuler at January 7, 2007 02:01 PM

A Dick for All Seasons

January 07, 2007

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