Posted on Wednesday 9 August 2006
Inspired by the latest in the Maurice Clarett saga and an ESPN list, I decided to put together this list. Feel free to leave comments with any I may have missed.
- Ken Griffey, Jr.: Not really a fall so much as a gradual decline ever since leaving Seattle. When he was traded in 2000, Griffey was pretty much on track to be the best player ever. Don’t get me wrong…he’s still a shoo-in for the Hall of Fame, but how many people outside have Cincinnati have paid much attention to The Kid in the past six years other than to shake their head whenever they hear about his almost annual season-ending injury.
- Bode Miller: After two silvers in the 2002 Winter Olympics, he had a legitimate shot at five skiing golds in the 2006 Olympics. Unfortunately, Miller acted more like a frat boy than an Olympic athlete and ended up with zero metals — finishing fifth, sixth, and not even placing in the other three events. However, any personal disappointment was quickly drowned away as Miller was reported to have spent ample time at the bars of Turin.
- Maurice Clarett: If ever anyone needed to follow the advice of George Costanza, it’s Clarett: “If every instinct you have is wrong, then the opposite would have to be right”. Some of Clarett’s instincts include taking massive handouts from car dealers while in college, deciding to leave school after his freshman year to challenge the NFL’s age limit with little precedent, armed robbery, firing his defense lawyers two weeks before trial, and now fleeing from cops with a car full of guns and vodka. If only he had paid attention to Seinfeld he might have been getting ready to follow-up his Rookie of the Year season in the NFL.
- Athletes on Motorcycles: Take your pick: Jay Williams ending his NBA career, Kellen “I’m a Soldier” Winslow ending his season in a parking lot, Ben Roethlisberger ending up minutes from death, or a number of other incidents. There’s no doubt that the battle between man and motorcycle has seen a significant upswing in momentum for the bike in the past decade.
- Michael Jordan: Of course, this is a relative rather than absolute decline…but there’s not doubt that any Jordan highlight reel isn’t going to include too many clips of him wearing Wizard blue. It’s kind of like if the Superman II movie ended with Superman just remaining human…not necessarily bad, it just kind of taints the memories what once was. Not that he was the only athlete to play well beyond his prime (thankfully the competitive allure of Dancing with the Stars finally pulled Jerry Rice away from the NFL), but the probably best to do so.
- Diego Maradona: Some ex-soccer stars, like Pele, become ambassadors for the sport and for the United Nations. Maradona became an ambassador of drug abuse and gluttony.
- Ryan Leaf: You have to put this one in perspective. In 1998, pretty much ever sports commentator was debating whether the Colts should take Leaf or Peyton Manning. That’s how high his stock was at one time. A few craptacular seasons and embarrassing outbursts later, and Leaf is coaching quarterbacks for West Texas A&M University while Manning is poised to be the best quarterback of his generation.
- Mike Tyson: Yea, this is just too obvious, but the dude isn’t just a loose cannon…he’s a loose nuclear bomb. He’s actually had a massive fall from grace twice. Of course, there was jail term for rape in the early 90s. But the past decade saw some odd decline with his infatuation with cannibalism…be it Evander Hoyfield’s ear or Lennox Lewis’ children. He gets bonus points for pretty much taking the entire sport of boxing down with him. Back in the 80s, watching Tyson box was exciting. In the past decade, the only things I know about heavyweight boxing is: (1) Lennox Lewis was the heavyweight champion most of the time and (2) his major competition was two Russian brothers with PhDs. Not exactly the Ali-Frazier-Forman era now is it?
- Latino Sluggers: While quite a few are tainted with steroids in baseball, it seems to have taken an especially strong toll on sluggers from south of the border. The top three Latino home run hitters of all time are currently: Sammy Sosa, Rafael Palmeiro, and Jose Canseco. Canseco admitted to steroid use in his book Juiced and wouldn’t mind taking a few other down with him. Now he’s spent the past several years jumping from team to team in the minor leagues. Rafael Palmeiro told a Congressional committee that he never used steroids just months before testing positive. He went to the Orioles and had a precipitous drop off in performance around the time that the steroid stink was emerging. Then, there’s Sosa who seemed to go from hitting 60 homers a season to not even being picked up by a MLB team virtually overnight after his corked bat incident and steroid suspicions. Ironically, he too went to the Orioles just before having a major decrease in performance.
- Floyd Landis: The thing about Landis is the speed with which he fell from grace. Basically, no one in America had heard of him before the last Friday of the Tour de France. On Sunday, he was an inspirational story for the entire country. Then, on Thursday, he went from hero to zero when he tested positive for illegal drugs. Someone like Barry Bonds, sports fans have basically been preparing themselves for years…conclusive evidence would merely be a formality at this point. With Landis, there was just no time to brace yourself for what was coming. Then he just exacerbated the situation by offering so many excuses you need a dedicated 24-hour news channel just to keep track. I just have too much natural testosterone…no, it was the cortizone shots…wait, I mean it was the dehydration…I was abducted by aliens?
Tags: Lists, Sports
You really need to be fair to Landis, he is a cyclist not a doctor. Doctors can explain hormone imbalances in humans. Professional cyclists can ride bikes really really fast. After being bombarded by the media with the news of the tests and being in his 15 minutes of fame, he was merely speculating as to why his testosterone levels were elevated.
I’m not saying he is innocent or guilty, but word around the campfire is that testosterone has no beneficial short term effects. The test for the T/E ratio are out-dated. The level of epitestosterone could have been deminished. He is on cortisone shots for degenerative hip disease. His team has been plaqued with doping allegations and convictions in the past. Cyclists like Landis push the limits of endurance and take handfuls of supplements to help aid in recovery everyday.
Does anyone reading this really know what epitestosterone is? Do you know how they test for synthetic testosterone? Do you know the side effects of long term cortisone use? And last but not least, does anyone know what it feels like to beat 120+ professional cyclists over not 1 but 5 mountain passes in what was essentially an 80 mile time trial.
The verdict is still out in my book.
I’m going by Occam’s Razor for Landis. If every possible test that could clear him comes back negative and he can’t give a solid non-doping explanation, then the most likely theory is that he’s guilty. Of course there’s a probability that results will eventually show otherwise, but at this point that probability is not very high.
For the same reason, I accept that Lance Armstrong’s Tour wins were all clean. If he never failed doping tests that caught a lot of his competitors, then the simplest explanation is that he was clean. In some ways, Landis’ case strengthens Armstrong’s because, as fellow Amercans, they presumably had access to the same medical expert advice. So, if Armstrong knew ways to trick the tests for so many years, one would assume that Landis would know the same tricks.
The worst part of Clarett’s latest incident (for him) has to be every time that they show the video of the police searching his vehicle. Now everyone in the country knows that this former football star / robber / gun toting tough-guy drives a Hyundai Santa Fe. That has to be embarrassing.
It could be worse…at least he’s not driving a Pontiac Aztek.
In the mind of Maurice….
Vodka – check
Shotgun – check
Lint roller – check
Link
Here’s the picture Leigh Ann linked to in the previous comment:
Going back to the whole Landis defense and actually putting a “gut check” into it, I think he is innocent. This year the guy won the Tour of California, the Tour of Georgia, and Paris-Nice (one of cycling’s most prestigeous races). He has been tested multiple times at each of these races and mulitple times at the Tour de France, coming up clean each time. All riders in the Tour know that the stage winner will automatically be tested for doping immediately following the stage. After Stage 17, a stage which he set out to win and blow everyone away, he knew he was going to be tested. If this was your plan to dope, win the stage, win the tour, know you would get caught, don’t you think you would come up with a better story than, “Maybe it was the alcohol, maybe it was the cortisone, maybe it was natural causes….” I think if I did something wrong or illegal, knowing I would get caught, I would have a seamless story in my defense. Obviously this is not the case with Landis, he still doesn’t have reasons and it obviously caught him by surprise.
It isn’t even like his T/E ratio was slightly high showing some dabbling and pushing the limits. It was off the charts. If anyone is to blame here I don’t think it is Landis. I think he either was doped by someone else or the samples were tainted. Also the lack of “due process” by the UCI shows they were eager to release the information. http://www.velonews.com/news/fea/10679.0.html I really feel Landis is innocent. The UCI, possibly the team doctor, or the testing lab are the guilty parties.
All in all it is a huge blow to Landis, America, the Tour de France, Phonak, and Cycling. It is a lose lose situation.
OK, for the sake of argument, let’s start with the assumption that Landis is guilty. What would be an acceptable way to prove this to you? What positive tests would convince you that he doped in the Tour de France?
While these tests are never going to be 100%, I have to believe that the tests used in such a high profile event have to be among the cutting edge of medical technology. And, the more tests you do, the probability that all of them are wrong decreases exponentially.
Why does anyone cheat? Because they think they won’t get caught (no matter how well or poorly they planned). What about the 13 riders eliminated before the beginning of the Tour (Ullrich and company)? Why would they cheat if they knew there would be excessive scrutiny on them leading up to the Tour? Why didn’t they have rock solid excuses ready to address their allegations?
How would you expect someone to behave if they did have what they thought was a reasonable defense ready and when they made it public a lot of doping expert said that’s a crappy excuse? You’d probably try another and another. What’s the latest…his food was laced with testosterone?
Maybe what he did only had a 50% chance of being caught…so he figured cheat now, come up with excuses as needed. I don’t think cheat with the intention of being caught and using excuses to prove your innocence is the preferred method. More likely, you cheat thinking there’s a chance it won’t be caught.
And, why would the UCI make Landis the fall guy? If the UCI was going to use their methods to bring someone down, wouldn’t it have been Armstrong? I don’t see any motive to frame Landis if they never did it to Armstrong.
Again, I don’t think he’s 100% guilty, but he’s definitely up to at least 95% in my book. Until the majority opinion of independent medical observers favors Landis’ explanations over the testing methodology, I can’t accept his innocence.
Actually, UCI has gone after Lance Armstrong. They last year (maybe two years ago) they tested a sample from 1999 (!) and said it contained EPO. This information was leaked by UCI’s testing lab to the French Newspaper L’Equipe who then waged all out war on Armstrong. Mind you they had to do this with a 4-5 year old test sample. An independent investigator found that natural EPO can breakdown and look like the synthetic form after a few years in storage.
Landis may very well be guilty, but it’s a mistake to think that these tests are fool-proof. These tests can presumably give false positives if the equipment isn’t calibrated correctly, if some of the reagents used are bad, etc. I’ve done enough High Performance Liquid Chromatography to know analyzing biological samples can have a error component.
One thing that is for certain is that the French have shown a clear agenda against Armstrong, so it’s not surprising that the same goes for Landis.