Wednesday, November 29, 2006

Tip of the iceberg

Put this in the I'm so relieved column.

Last month, the first sanctioned tournament that had random-testing for enhancing performance drugs (which I've mused about in my steroids posts) has yielded no cheaters.

A total of 218 players playing in World Amateur Team Championship, an R & A sanctioned event in S. Africa, were under the proverbial microscope in what has initiated a full-out war on drug-use in the golf world. 12 of these golfers were picked at random to test for steroids or recreational drugs.

How they defined random is a sham.

Princeton University (hey, who's gonna argue with them, right?) defines random as: lacking any definite plan or order or purpose.
The R&A apparently has their own version of this definition in which they tell you the plan and the purpose...just not the order.

I'm not kidding! The players were well aware that there would be testing before the tournament and what they were testing for. The only randomness was who were the unlucky schleps that got subjected to peeing in a cup: okay ma'am, now we need a B sample.

I'm sure those 12 had some random words for the officials.

Seriously though, I'm glad that to see there was testing. It got the ball rolling to the LPGA whom will begin testing in '08, and to the PGA whom later this year will draw-up a list of illegal....wait...let me clean that up...I mean we are talking about a gentleman's game...what I meant was a list of inappropriate drugs if the commissioner has reason to believe it's in use.

At first, we all poo-pooed drugs in golf as crazy because "steroids won't make you a better golfer." Then we saw Landis "win" the Tour de France under the influence of HGH. Suddenly there was the potential of abuse.

....now there is a list?

As the venerable Kieth Jackson would say: "whoa nelly"


Thanks for reading. Keep it in the short-grass,

JFB

No comments: