Simmons: Full, immediate biological passports for every pro athlete

http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/8904906/daring-ask-ped-question

The first half of the column is a kind of rationale for the position, the second half is the position itself.

Judge the quality of the writing and the quality of the position for yourself, but it'll be interesting to see if Simmons pursues this position beyond a single column. His position is, IMO, contrary to the relativist, "maybe it should be all be OK" position of other journalists.

Perhaps a keystone graf:

"Let's see what's in everyone's body, once and for all. I think you'd be surprised. You'd wonder if some were glorified junkies. You'd be confused about why we placed such a belated priority on concussion awareness while continuing to ignore HGH and steroids and painkillers. Why wasn't the recent story about the NFL's Toradol waiver a bigger deal? What's the difference between taking HGH and Toradol, anyway? What does the word "performance enhancer" really mean? It's OK to borrow a dead person's ligament to regain your 95-mph fastball, but it's not OK to boost your testosterone for those same results? It's OK to travel to Germany to inject stem cells into your damaged knee to stimulate recovery and regeneration, but it's not OK to replace your blood with better blood to increase your stamina?"

The point about painkillers is salient. They absolutely enhance performance -- they make performance possible, in some cases -- and the long-term effects can be more devastating, I'm confident, than deer antler spray.

 

Where it all starts to get mucked up is in international competition. There is an argument that the UOC is a government organization and that, at a certain point, testing becomes a 4th Amendment violation. I think that when genetic testing begins, for example, someone is going to make that argument. I would think that Simmons's extreme measure would also trigger that kind of challenge.

 

Bill Simmons in 1999 would hate this.

 

Ha. Why?

 

"If everyone is secretly suspicious of so many athletic achievements in the 21st century, why aren't we talking about it?"

Yeah, Bill. You are the first sportswriter to dare bring up the subject of PEDs.

The good thing is that he's finally realizing just how out-of-touch he's become as a sports columnist.

 

Drawn-out and boring column.

How 'bout just get to the point and wax for 15 inches and be done. Stopped reading halfway thru.

 

Simmons started out as the voice of the people, the voice of the common fan. At least, that was his stated goal. Do more drug testing, more controversies over drug testing and more ham-fisted media coverage of drug testing sound like things the common fan wants more of?

 

Agreed.

read like someone desperately trying to get into Best American Sports Writing.

 

With some respect, would you apply that same argument to our drug laws in general? Do you think Americans are generally in favor of legalizing drugs because they're tired of stories about trials for kingpins and drug dealers?

 

No. Maybe weed. But most Americans don't even see those stories about trials for kingpins and drug dealers. Sports fans hear about these things all the time. It's inescapable.

 

I think the reason most of us avoid printed speculation on PED use is because you're trending towards libel depending on how far you go.

The only reason to be stringently anti-drug is to protect the clean players. But if the majority of the players want to shoot up with steroids, at what point do you just say fine and let it roll? Simmons' desire to know all and control all is foolish. Look at how long Armstrong got away with his game when for, what, a decade, so many people were dedicated to catching him cheating.

Simmons' most salient point was about the NBA and its lackadaisical approach. But he's such an NBA apologist/fan-boy, I don't think his paradigms could ever withstand an actual examination of who in his capital-p Pyramid was a juicer. I respect his knowledge of the NBA, but I've seen no evidence that he can gain the dispassionate, critical separation necessary to tackle that kind of issue.