Drug Cheating Then and Now

I’ve been thinking a lot about drug cheating recently.

I don’t mean that I’ve been looking for Xenon to inhale or contemplating shady Internet purchases for myself, I mean that I’ve been thinking about two recent news items, one that landed like a bombshell, and the other that left hardly a ripple.

The bombshell was, of course, the leaked results of Rita Jeptoo’s positive drug test for synthetic EPO following the Chicago Marathon. Jeptoo, winner at Boston and Chicago, was in line to win the World Marathon Majors title, but the WMM postponed the award pending resolution of the issue. New of the positive test unleashed a flood of commentary from all sides, with Jeptoo’s manager and coach denying responsibility and trying to pin the blame to corrupt agents in Kenya, and a debate within the Kenyan athletic world that continues to smolder.

The second news item — the one that went virtually unnoticed — was the press release last week that named 12 new inductees into the IAAF Hall of Fame. Here is the list of athletes from that press release (http://www.iaaf.org/news/iaaf-news/hall-of-fame-2014-inductees):

Valeriy Brumel
Glenn Davis
Heike Drechsler
Hicham El Guerrouj
Marita Koch
Robert Korzeniowski
Janis Lusis
Bob Mathias
Wilma Rudolph
Shirley Strickland de la Hunty
Lasse Viren
Cornelius Warmerdam

When I read some of the names on that list, I felt a little queasy. Specifically, when I saw that East Germans Marita Koch and Heike Dreschler were included, I was both surprised and discouraged. Both athletes competed in an era when the East German sports machine engaged in systematic doping using anabolic steroids.

While the two news items are quite different, they are also related. In the next two blog posts, I’d like to explore each one in detail, consider the individuals involved, and speculate on what it means for such an issue to ever be fully resolved.

About Jon Waldron

Running and Racing have been important parts of my life for as long as I can remember. I ran Track and Cross Country at Amherst HS, back in the day, and am proud to have been training and competing with the Cambridge Sports Union (CSU) for more than thirty years. If my bones hold out, I hope to continue for another thirty. Sixteen years ago, I began coaching, first as an Asst. Coach at Newton North HS in Newton, MA, and for the past ten years, as Head Track and Cross Country Coach at Concord Academy in Concord, Massachusetts. I've been writing about running for almost as long as I've been running, dating back to high school, when I would write meet summaries for the Amherst Record for about $0.33 per column inch. I've been blogging about running since 2005, and began blogging at "the runner eclectic" in 2014. Until recently I also had a day job, working full-time as a Technical Product Manager for Nuance Communications, based in Burlington, MA. But I am now on what might turn out to be a permanent sabbatical. Thank you for reading my blog, and please consider leaving a comment.

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