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By Bill Benzon

All’s not well in the world of cycling. The century-old Championship of Zurich was canceled in April for lack of sponsors. The Tour of Flanders saw a 77 percent drop in live attendance. The reason is obvious; doping scandals have all but ruined the credibility of the sport. Will baseball suffer the same fate? It’s anyone’s guess. It’s clear that there’s been a whole lot of juicin’ going on. Congress has held hearings, and drug testing was started two years ago, but no current big names have been caught. So it is still easy for fans to hide their heads in the same sand that’s been covering all those WMD’s in Iraq.

And then we have track and field and pro football, where testing programs have battered “plausible deniability” pretty badly.

But that’s not my game, bewailing the parlous moral state of athletic play. Not quite.

Why do so many of us find it so easy to think of juicing as cheating? It’s not as though chemical performance enhancement is confined to a small club that forbids it to others, thereby creating an unfair advantage for themselves. Any athlete can do it, and the pros have reasonable expectations that they’ll get good drugs and competent advice on how to use them. As far as I can tell, such judgments tend to be based on an intuitive sense of what is right and proper, what is natural. And juicing isn’t natural.

Consider a rather different example of unnatural sports preparation, vision enhancement through LASIK, laser surgery on the corneas. Back in 1999 Tiger Woods underwent LASIK surgery so that he had 20/15 vision, which is better than the 20/20 that is considered normal. Once Woods’ success validated the procedure many other golfers had it done as well. Athletes in other sports, such as baseball, have also had LASIK-enhanced vision. But no one has complained about this.

Why not?
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Warning, this post is acronym filled, and may contain nefarious allusions, probably inappropriate but nevertheless, they exist.

UNITED NATIONS Copyright - A new treaty designed to promote and protect the rights of the world’s 650 million persons with disabilities opens for signature at the United Nations on Friday.

At its core, the Convention of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities ensures that persons with disabilities enjoy the same human rights as everyone else, and are able to lead their lives as fully-fledged citizens who can make valuable contributions to society.

Forty years ago, as an upper-division undergraduate student, I was offered one of those scholarship jobs that go to jocks and related others. These were legacy-based inheritances, passed along to the next class of student athletes by graduating seniors, eagerly anticipated by the younger, who have heard-it-through-the-grapevine that this or that is the coolest chance at getting paid to do nothing, or close to it. My offer was not for one of those cushy roles (lifeguarding the women’s gym pool {only male allowed}, or driving the little tractor that picked up golf balls), but rather a heritage role for those of us in a special and unique club (the fish lane). Ours was the strand that provided support staff for the Education and Psychology departments’ on-campus education environments.
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