Letters to the Editor
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Retro-shock
There's nothing depressing about these mid-week revelations, or there shouldn't be. Good athletes are 1 in 100,000, and great athletes are 1 in a million. Character and honesty have little or no bearing on these odds.
When I was a kid I loved baseball, and was a huge Giants fan. Through a co-worker of my father, I got to hang out with some guys who were farm hands in the Giants' organization.
These guys were profane, beer guzzling, chain smoking pieces of shit...and I knew it even then, as a naive child barely old enough for Little League. I realized right then and there that what made them good ball players had nothing to do with intelligence or character...or even a love of the game. They were just gifted athletically, and it was as much a curse for them as it was a blessing.
So how can people in the sports media, who are adults and who've spent time around athletes, suddenly be shocked when it surfaces that this hero or that hero aren't what they seemed to be in their glory years?
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Waxman
Henry Waxman is my congressman, in a good safe seat. I think he's a good guy. But since I've been living in LA he seems mostly to care about smoking and now PEDs. I really wish he were less worried about what people put into their bodies (and, oh yeah, THE CHILDREN!), and a little more concerned about, you know, the war and the Constitution, and stuff like that.
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Marion Jones
Look, Marion Jones isn't Lewis Libby. She didn't lie about a national security issue. President Bush is on record as saying that our perjury laws are too harsh. If he can commute the sentence of someone convicted of lying about the disclosure of our nation's secrets, someone who never admitted guild, someone who never cooperated with the prosecution, someone who never so much as went on Oprah to acknowledge making a mistake, surely he can commute the sentence of Marion Jones.
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I Didn't Love Marion Jones
True, Marion Jones was a very telegenic athlete. And I do like to see those USA medal counts go up and up and up. But I had already had my fling with a telegenic female track star with Florence Griffith-Joyner, mourned her loss, and moved on. Plus, it was pretty plain that Jones was living a double life when her former husband got caught doping, way back in the day.
Look at this, about her marriage to shot putter C.J. Hunter (from Wikipedia) "Jones would later write in her autobiography, Marion Jones: Life in the Fast Lane, that Hunter's positive drug tests hurt their marriage and her image as a drug-free athlete. The couple divorced in 2002." Now, that's some serious denial there. And try to imagine the duplicitousness of someone who (apparently) divorced their husband over getting caught taking steroids and then writes about it years later, as though it were all on him. She should run for public office!
But it is one thing for someone to deny their crimes, up to the day they have to serve a prison sentence for one small facet of the total behavior pattern. It is quite another thing for someone of Oprah Winfrey's stature to give that individual a platform from which to try to sell their lie. Oprah fans should complain directly to the source.
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I love the hypocrisy here...
or perhaps irony might be a better word. While I am reading your 1500 words or so berating Marion Jones for lying to fans and public for the past decade there's an ad sitting in rotation on the page claiming I can add 40 pounds of muscle mass in thirty days using the new, safe, alternative to steroids.
OK, in your court you just write the articles (I assume) and have little control over the editorial, ad selection and ad placement in regards to advertising on salon.com and I'll even give your editorial staff some slack as the ads are from Yahoo and Google and therefore they might just be rotating in...
...on the other hand I work both in publishing and in IT so I know you can filter what is displayed on the site, even if it is coming through a third party ad generating machine. That being said, shame on you guys.
The ad is for Kosterone-Roids, I'm not going to link to the site as I don't want to help promote it any further but once on there it is pretty obvious it's a snakeoil product. The site is filled with wonderful insights into growing muscle mass such as:
"Think of your muscles like the tyres on a car. When you fill a tyre with air, it gets bigger. The same thing happens to your muscles. When they fill with protein, they grow in size."
"This is not hype. This is proven, irrefutable, scientific fact. Kosterone Roids is the most exciting development in the science of muscle growth ever recorded! These developments are the result of 4 years and over two million dollars in research by the infamous Dr B.Ya Smetanin"
"This was proven in clinical trials by V. Smetanin, researcher of the Smolenk State Medical Institute" Note: They got his initials mixed up, unless there's a brother team doing research here.
There's also a smattering of first initial, last name testimonials such as B.Smith of Chicago says it is the best thing he has ever used. He can now lift two Volvos over his head. (I made that up).
I Googled the Smolenk State Medical Institute and V. Smetanin and Dr. B.Ya Smetanin. There's no such place as Smolenk State Medical Institute (there's a Smolensk State Medical Institute) and though everyone can make typos and mistakes, like forgetting to send out a newsletter, ahem, we all know what they were trying to do there. And though I found references to a V. Smetanin and a B.Ya Smetanin they seemed to be one in the same, a physics researcher, not someone developing body building supplements. The only reference to B.Ya Smetanin I found was on another supplement site for Ecdy-Bolin.
So, if we're keeping score. Using steroids is bad, lying about using steroids is also bad. Running ads for questionable products that will boost muscle mass (as far as effectiveness and safety) on your web site however is ok.
Like I said, I don't place all the blame with you or even the editorial staff but it does kind of diminish the soap box you stand on when they run right alongside an article admonishing steroid use.
I'm just saying...