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Sports
This is the NHL on drugs
Revelations of widespread steroid use in professional baseball casts the light back on professional hockey, still in denial
By Kevin Potvin
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The National Hockey League is behaving like South Africa a couple of years ago or China in the early 1990s. Despite logic and common sense, the governments of those countries steadfastly denied AIDs was an issue in their populations. Hockey league officials, union representatives and players themselves likewise steadfastly deny that performance enhancing steroids is an issue in the NHL.
Yet the release last week of a US Congressional report following an investigation into steroid use amongst major league baseball players revealed suspicions not only cast upon the leading all-time home-run king Barry Bonds, but also upon such other leading stars as Jose Consenco, Roger Clemens, and 80 other bright lights of the sport both current and retired.
The NHL and its players claim a more rigorous testing regime caps the use of enhancement drugs. But the risk of getting caught is only one of many factors that play on an athlete’s decision to artificially enhance their performance. As we’ve seen in the Tour de France, at the Olympics, and now in professional baseball, the risk of getting tested and caught, and suffering severe professional consequences, can be very high, and yet steroid use can still be rampant. Playing a bigger role in the risk assessments of tempted athletes is the prospect of an always too early fading career or a failure to ever reach the full potential as played out in dreams.
In the professional hockey development system, as in baseball, the rigours of training leave little time or energy for development of alternative career options. Yet the average hockey and baseball professional career lasts about seven years. By the age of 27, at least half of all hockey players who ever skated onto NHL ice are cashed out and sent home. The average pay packet is currently about $1.75 million in hockey and $2.6 million in baseball. The average pay a 27 year old retired athlete can earn back in the more pedestrian job market might be the average for everyone else in that job market, about $50,000. Faced with a choice of going from fame and glory playing a game for almost $2 million a year to an anonymous job paying $50,000—if such a job is even available to a retired athlete with no other skills—, or risking ingesting a proven performance enhancing drug that might squeeze out an extra two or three years in the big leagues and earn another $6 million to $8 million before the ticking clock of father time goes cuckoo, is it any surprise that a great many would choose the latter?
Conditions in hockey and baseball are the same. Professional athletes from different sports hang out with each other. The trainers who procure the drugs and in many cases help with the injections all come from the same place regardless of the sport they get involved with. There can be no doubt that the full range of performance enhancing drugs are as available for hockey players as they are for baseball players. There can also be no doubt that the risks to the body and to one’s professional reputation and prospects are also the same in the two sports, as would be the conditions that would cause a player to consider their use. There is nothing intrinsically different about a hockey player compared to a baseball player, or indeed from just about every kind of athlete on the planet where drug use is rampant. It would defy common sense to imagine that NHL hockey players are in some mysterious way immune to the seductions offered by readily available performance enhancing drugs, seductions succumbed to by athletes in just about every other sport going.
Dick Pound, the Canadian in charge of drug policies at the Olympics, came in for severe criticism when he alleged widespread drug use among NHL hockey players two years ago, an allegation he did not retract. The shrill denials that rang out from every corner of hockey were too reminiscent of denials of AIDs in South Africa and China.
It is likely that performance enhancing drug use is as widespread among hockey players as it has been found to be amongst baseball players. The longer officials, union representatives and players deny there is a problem, the more players will harm themselves and poison the sport’s relationship with its fans. When drug use is admitted, there will be a shocking investigation into how widespread and deep the problem is. But a bigger and more damning investigation should look at the official denials and calculate the much greater harm done by the ongoing cover-up. Asterisks may begin to appear beside the names of hockey players in the record books, but even bigger asterisks should appear beside any quotes proffered forever after by coaches, general managers, and league officials.
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The Republic of East Vancouver masthead
The Republic of East Vancouver supports no party, advocates
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