The hard truth

Legislation won't stop most athletes from using supplements

Let me start with three tales from the front lines (or, in some cases, the back lines) of the battle between natural and artificial performance.

In the summer of 1998, I'm at a large university in the South reporting a college football story for Sports Illustrated. I'm sitting in the office of the strength coach, who is running the summer conditioning program, as do most strength coaches. (This is not meant to indict strength coaches; they have sweeping power, but they are largely doing what much higher-paid head coaches tell them to do.) A player sticks his head in the doorway, still dripping from an intense weightlifting workout.

The strength coach, never even pausing during our interview, tosses a can of a popular nutritional supplement across the room to the player, who snags it from the air and stuffs it into his backpack.

Three years later I'm covering the World Track and Field Championships in Edmonton and talking to a prominent U.S. runner. We're discussing the rash of recent positive drug tests for nandrolone, the prehistoric steroid that had gone out of favor several years earlier because it had become so easily detectable. I asked her if she used any supplements.

"Nothing,'' she said. "I'm afraid of what's in them. But I used to."

Last summer, July of 2002, I'm driving in the family minivan with an 11-year-old boy who happens to be my son. I'm taking him to a day camp for hockey players. The sessions starts at 8 a.m., so naturally my kid (and all the others) are half asleep when they get to the rink. My son is drinking a popular energy-boosting drink that lots of his friends drink, too. It tastes like bad orange soda and it's loaded with caffeine. I drink it, too, on long road trips and while writing stories overnight. The stuff works. Not long after that July day, I read that most of these drinks are marginally unsafe for anybody, to say nothing of 80-pound, preteen athletes, and my son drinks them no more. He makes do with the Dew. Me, too.

You get the idea. And this is just the tip of the iceberg. I've seen dozens -- maybe hundreds -- of athletes buying or using supplements in the last decade. I agree with the case stated eloquently by Alexander Wolff in this week's issue of SI, that nutritional supplements should be regulated more stringently by Congress. This comes in the wake of the tragic death on Feb. 17 of 23-year-old Orioles pitcher Steve Bechler, who the medical examiner said was taking a weight-loss drug that contains ephedra.

We entered the Supplement Age several years ago. Creatine was among the first to make headlines. Now you can go online -- or simply click on your daily spam -- to order human growth hormone. The list grows longer. Mark McGwire took baseball into the 70-home run era while gobbling pills (androstenedione) that would have gotten Maurice Greene thrown out of the Olympic Games. Clearly, some type of federal involvement is due.

However, I find myself wondering how much such action would affect athletes. Maybe it will save the life of the occasional naïve high school football player or distance runner. And there's no belittling the saving of a single life. But when it comes to athletes with big ambitions, history teaches us that warnings and laws are of little value. Olympic athletes and football players have been using illegal steroids for decades. Baseball has only recently caught up to the practice. These people are neither uninformed nor stupid (well, maybe a little stupid; that's a judgment call, and a tough one). It's been known for a very long time that steroid use can destroy internal organs. Yet people have long used them.

The rationale is frightfully simple. Athletes look for an edge. They train fiendishly hard and drugs allow them to get more out of the training and give them a leg up on the competition. Gold medals and world championships can be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. A long-term NFL contract can be worth much more than that. Many, many athletes are willing to risk the side effects of drug use to reach those goals.

Supplements are legal, so there is a difference. But the essential issue remains the same: Given the chance to roll the dice with a potentially deadly substance that could make them perform at a much higher level -- faster, stronger, bigger -- many athletes will roll the dice. Always have, always will. All the legislation and warnings on earth won't change that.

Sports Illustrated senior writer Tim Layden is a regular contributor to SI.com. Click here to send him a question or comment.

 

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