Rose Cantine

Today I read about the tragic, but completely predictable fate of Marion Jones, Olympic superstar, who has admitted to using performance-enhancing drugs over the course of her brilliant career. She pleaded guilty to perjury charges in connection with a case that the government is bringing against her former coach, Trevor Graham, who has been supplying atheletes for years with drugs. Jones is the only woman to have won five medals (three of them gold) in one Olympics. Pretty, mediagenic and very obviously talented, Jones became a media superstar overnight, appearing on the covers of magazines and in the fashion pages.

Gwen Knapp writes in the San Francisco Chronicle about the latest doping scandal:

Credibility has long been a problem for American athletes, because they pointed fingers at the East Germans and Chinese and acted as if no U.S. competitor ever downed anything more potent than Flintstones vitamins and Mom’s apple pie. Yet positive tests were shredded at the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles. Carl Lewis got off on a technicality when stimulants appeared in his system at the 1988 Olympic trials, and the results remained hidden for years. Jerome Young tested positive for nandrolone, and nobody heard about it until after he helped win a relay gold in 2000. When Lance Armstrong underwent a transformation as dramatic as any in sports history, all suspicions were derided as French jealousy. When androstenedione turned up in Mark McGwire’s locker, everyone made excuses, pretending that the substance wasn’t what it really was - a steroid precursor.

The BALCO investigation and the congressional steroid hearings eroded some of the perceived hypocrisy. The American authorities even managed to ban some athletes who had sampled BALCO’s wares without testing positive.

But then came Jones and Tour de France winner Floyd Landis. When Jones came under scrutiny and Landis tested positive, they resorted to tactics that made Yankee showboating seem quaint. They threw aggressive, outlandish pity parties. Landis hasn’t quit, saying that the testing and arbitration process that convicted him two weeks ago was rigged. He sounds a lot like Jones from three years ago, when she called the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency “a kangaroo court.”

Never mind that she slithered through USADA’s hands and went to the Athens Olympics in 2004. Forget that the benefit of the doubt weighed in her favor when a B sample couldn’t confirm an A sample positive for EPO a year ago. And ignore the time she illicitly missed (or skipped) a drug test 15 years ago, as a high schooler, but avoided sanctions because Johnnie Cochran stepped in as her lawyer. She was still a victim.

Because the stakes are so high - millions of dollars in sponsorship money, seven-figure salaries for those playing in professional teams, and fame - the temptation to take drugs to enhance one’s performance is not irrational. Indeed, because so few get caught, it is rational to try to game the system. Now, however, people are wondering about the authenticity of a victory. Sponsors are terrified of backing a team or an athlete who will be caught doping. It’s just bad publicity and they don’t want to be associated with it.

Sponsor unease has already hit professional cycling. A number of companies, such as Discovery Channel and Gerolsteiner, are ending their sponsorship of cycling teams. And don’t tell me the doping scandals involving Michael Rasmussen, Alexander Vinokourov, Floyd Landis, Erik Zabel and Jan Ullrich had nothing to do with that. A large number of riders will be without a team in the coming year.

But doping is only a symptom of what’s really killing professional sports. Money, obscene amounts of it, is turning sport into an activity divorced from people’s daily lives. In the old days, you knew the members of your city’s football team. You even attended their matches. The owners lived in your city. And the team stayed there. In the US, many professional teams just leave their cities and go to another one that promises more money (this has not yet happened in Europe). The players in US and European teams are from every corner of the earth, the owners live in multi-million dollar penthouses in New York. People don’t identify anymore as much with their local teams except perhaps in the lower leagues where they can still afford to attend the matches.

I’m not saying that there aren’t fanatical Manchester United fans who still live in Manchester or long-suffering Ajax fans who live in Amsterdam. But why on earth should there be Man U fans in Tokyo or Manila? What do they have to do with the tradition of Manchester? Or perhaps they are simply responding to Man U’s marvelous marketing machine?