In four days the Winter Olympics will be upon us, with the Opening Ceremonies kicking off 16 days of international competition. When compared to the Summer Olympics, what the Winter Games lack in quantity of sports, they certainly make up for in quality and excitement.
For starters, the United States has only once finished atop the medals count of the Winter Olympics, with the only occurrence coming in 1932 at Lake Placid. It would make for an interesting conclusion if the United States could end the historic wintry dominance of Germany, Norway and Russia.
Along with the medals chase there are stories of rivalry and pride. Canada took home hockey gold on U.S. soil four years ago, adding some fire to one of sport's most thrilling rivalries. For the first time in decades, two of the world's best alpine skiers, Bode Miller and Daron Rahlves, are American. And amidst all of the excitement arises the inevitable doping scandal.
So far, a few Americans have had bizarre close calls with cheating. First, U.S. Skeleton captain Zach Lund was temporarily suspended from the Olympic team this fall for testing positive for the masking agent Finasteride. The positive test conveniently came just after the suspension of the head Skeleton coach for sexual harassment.
But luckily for Lund, on Monday the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency reinstated him just in time to compete in Torino. There is no way to know the real details, but the USADA bought Lund's story that the positive test inadvertently resulted from his documented prescription for hair-loss medication.
Now that the Skeleton doping incident appears to be resolved, ESPN is breaking a story about potentially dicey medical treatment by U.S. Olympic Ski Team members Bode Miller and Eric Schlopy. The report alleges the two went to Mexico to receive some questionable treatment for ACL injuries.
According to ESPN, Miller and at least three other U.S. Ski Team members paid visits to orthopedic specialist Milne Olney in Mexico after sustaining potentially career-ending knee injuries. Olney, who operates out of a small shack a few hours' drive from San Diego, injects his patients with a mixture of dextrose, glycerin, phenol and distilled water.
The "Olney Solution," as Olney describes it, is supposed to stimulate tissue growth in the area of injection, accelerating the healing process "through the reproduction of similar cells."
In layman's terms, the "Olney Solution" is a mixture of sugar, alcohol, and water. It is one example in the growing field of "Prolotherapy," which is emerging as a popular new technique to accelerate recovery in sports medicine.
The injection of a foreign substance is supposed to induce inflammation and jump-start the body's natural healing process. The theory behind prolotherapy is millennia old; the Greek healer Hippocrates is said to have treated an athlete's injured shoulder by pricking it with a hot needle to initiate inflammation.
The report exposes the vast gray area that exists within the world of sports doping. Did Miller or Schlopy participate in an unethical treatment for their injuries? So far, they have not explicitly violated any of the World Anti-Doping Agency rules because the procedure involves neither banned substances nor blood manipulation. Instead, they have brought to our attention the fact that there may be flaws in our concept of what truly constitutes doping.
You could argue that prolotherapy gives athletes an unfair advantage in the healing process in the same ways that THG or traditional blood-doping do. The flipside of the performance enhancement issue is the harmful effects the substances often have on the body. Olney's injection treatment has not been thoroughly studied, and he has twice been sued by his patients for negligence after their injuries got worse.
So if this does not qualify as doping, is our concept too narrow, or too wide? Perhaps taking a performance-enhancing substance should be acceptable so long as the athlete in question is willing to gamble with the harmful consequences.
Or perhaps something as simple as vitamins should become illegal so that all athletes must rely on nature to heal. Inevitably, some people are going to label the treatment as cheating, but is it really unfair?
If Bode Miller had his way, the whole doping concept would be redefined from scratch. Maybe it's time we start taking him seriously.
