Contaminated dreams

The complicated life of an endurance sports fan

"If you're upset about Santa, wait till you hear about the Easter Bunny." An older friend chuckled, further breaking my young heart.

I don’t remember how old I was, but I can still picture the scene, sitting on the floor, having my eyes forced open to a world that’s far more complex than I understood.

Like most kids, I loved to believe.

Athletics furthered this passion. Not raised with religion, and having outgrown mythical holiday figures, I obsessed the tales of sports heroes and hard work.

And then Lance broke my heart.

I’d been all in on the man. Followed every detail of his ascent, success, and downfall. But I’ll always remember the moment he shattered my magical bubble of admiration.

“I have never tested positive for a banned substance!” He snarled to a room of reporters. It was the way he emphasized “banned” in that sentence that hit me. Like a child mischievously attempting to get away with a lie on a technicality.

“If not a banned substance, then what substance could he be speaking of?” I wondered. Friends told me stories of goat hormones, blood byproducts, and saddle sore creams. Things I didn’t know anything about. Things I didn’t want to know anything about.

By the time it was all done I also blamed myself. Because I had wanted to believe the lie. I’d welcomed it and overlooked so much in pursuit of the feeling that his Livestrong community provided.

It would have been simple to become jaded. It would have been much easier.

“That athlete ruined Track & Field for me!” I’ve heard many times from many fans about many athletes. And I don’t blame them, but I don’t agree.

I have dedicated myself as a running fan to the messy middle. To steering clear of righteousness and being willing to be tricked again, in pursuit of remaining open to the beauty of the sport.

It’s easier to live in the extremes. It’s simpler. And we’ve all heard how this plays out in either direction. One camp proclaims indignantly, “A positive test should be a ban for life!” While the other wanders so far down the slippery slope of sport that they wonder, “What if we just let athletes take whatever they wanted and saw how fast they could be?!”

Totally open or entirely closed. How nice it would be if the world was so simple and clean.

But of course, it isn’t

So we each get to choose which athletes we root for and why. As I’ve aged I’ve realized there are gradations to my fandom. There are those I support with my whole heart and others that I admire but celebrate at a muted distance. The beauty of sports and entertainment is that we each get to choose this for ourselves.

But as fans, we can’t help but scream for our favorite athletes. And so we dig in and defend, even if we’ll never have all the facts.

“Do you know what Human Growth Hormone does to your teeth?!” A friend quizzed me with sadistic laughter one day in high school.

“Uhh, no, what’s it do?” I answered, dumbfounded.

“It makes them push out of your head!” He said wide-eyed. “Why do you think all those athletes suddenly have braces!?!”

Images of the world’s top runners tore through my mind.

Many of them did have braces these days. What did that mean?!

If new forms of cheating weren’t yet detectable, how was I to judge athletes that appeared to be taking their dental health seriously? Presumed guilt for something so basic felt extreme but ignoring this new possibility felt ignorant. Sweat-stained and victorious, the world’s fastest runners would answer questions from reporters and smile for the cameras with mouthfuls of hardware that glared back suspiciously.

I felt sick.
I felt jaded.
And I felt sad.

But I continued loving the sport.

In Athletics, we hold ourselves to a higher standard than in other sports. Baseball, basketball, and football will send you to the sidelines briefly for infractions that Track & Field deems career-ending.

For good reason.

We care more about performance enhancement because individual ability is core to our field of play. Without a ball or basket to focus on we take the fundamentals more seriously.

And yet it will never be perfect.

Such a standard does not exist. I’ve found that if you’re venturing to care, over years and across events, you will be tricked, you will be duped.

You may have to look past an incorrect use of ADHD medications.

Then you’ll be forced to Google and wonder about the boundaries of thyroid therapy.

And you’ll stay up late understanding the relative marginal benefits of blood boosters and steroid creams, all because you once witness someone running majestically and you’re trying to make sense of what it really was.

But you’ll know that despite all the BS, the gray area, and the technicalities, certain people are clean. Some people just don’t dope.

And then even that won’t be enough.

Because the modern world is messy, our tissue is laced with substances from across the globe. Our water isn’t pure, our chemicals are toxic and our food…or food is a global industrial mess.

Which of these examples of contamination should we admonish? Which of them should we excuse?

Not all of this messiness is doping. But that doesn’t mean it’s entirely clean.

I choose to believe. To admire. And to still cheer. Even as the complexities of our sport justify bitterness, reward righteousness, and foster constant suspicion.

I get that I’m not “right.” I know that I’m not morally true. I understand that some of the most remarkable runs that I’ve witnessed may be tainted, and yet I still applaud.

The only truth I can land on in this maddeningly simple sport is that we each get to choose who we root for, who we stand with, and who we admire. And we don’t owe a justification for these decisions to anyone but ourselves.

I have made questionable calls in my fandom before, and may well again, but when I look at those whom I lend my support today, I am still inspired.

I’m inclined to believe the explanations of some athletes over others based on the track records of their past, the company they keep and the details of their alibis. We might not agree, and that’s fine.

Athletics in this era isn’t as simple as Santa Clause or the Easter Bunny, it’s testing protocols, Therapeutic Use Exemptions, allowable trace element limits, and plausible contaminants, but I still choose to believe, even if I’ll never be as glowy eyed as I was once was.

I hope you will as well.

Because our sport too beautiful, and our world too complex, to adhere to mythically simple standards of Good vs Evil.