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01/02/09
In most professional sports organizations, athlete contracts contain a clause which dictates a player can be fined, punished, suspended, or released if he breaks any league drug rules, or is involved in any public legal cases involving drugs. After all, much of the present and future fan base of sports is the youth, and it’s certainly bad for business when your star athletes are being arrested for drugs.
Professional baseball, football, and hockey are remarkably consistent on this issue. Every year, inevitably, there are both in-league suspensions for players using illegal substances, and player suspensions for discipline of public arrests somehow related to drugs. Players might be upset about their punishments for both types of offenses, but they have to adhere to it. After all, the players’ union negotiates these points with team ownership, well cognizant of the need to portray a sports league as a wholesome body, devoid of illicit and cheating drug use.
In professional bodybuilding, these standards used to apply. Diuretics had been responsible for the deaths of several top bodybuilders just a few years earlier, so professional bodybuilding federations decided to crack down on their usage. In the 1990s, several high-profile professional bodybuilders were suspended following competitions for failing either AAS or diuretic drug tests. They begrudgingly accepted their fates, and worked to return the following year and amend their losses. Then, around 2001, players began fighting it. Thanks to the internet and the new influx of information on the message boards, many bodybuilders knew more about the sport and its owners than ever before. They also knew that everyone onstage was using the same drugs, for the most part. Plus, thanks to the overnight explosions of internet sales of supplements, prize money and endorsement contracts started to grow at a tremendous rate.
In 2001, players sought out lawyers to fight their punishments for using drugs that, both in their view and in reality, everyone was using. The bodybuilding federations didn’t want the public relations nightmare, authorities sniffing around, or the money trap that is a long, drawn-out court battle. So, they caved. And since 2001, diuretic and AAS testing in professional bodybuilding has been non-existent.
Perhaps more than coincidentally, bodybuilding’s popularity has decreased greatly since then. The physiques have blown up, clearly because there is no testing to stop them form doing so. Fans have become alienated from the classic physiques they desire to emulate by this new crop of drug-addled beasts. Only time will tell if things will ever return to the time of successful testing to discourage rampant drug use.
