An olympic athlete banned for taking propecia as well... read...
http://www.oregonlive.com/sports/oregon ... xml&coll=7
Better bald than banned, you numskull
Sunday, February 12, 2006
R ecently, an angry reader wrote to ask, "Hey baldie, how often are you the target of a hair joke?"
Hold up.
I'm bald?
Well, I suppose that means I should weigh in on Zach Lund, the top U.S. skeleton racer who was banned Friday from the Olympics in Turin, Italy. Lund was booted for taking a common hair-restoration pill with an ingredient that can be used to mask steroids.
And while there will be a lot of hand wringing, and hair splitting, when it comes to the case of bald men and Olympic bans, the World Anti-Doping Agency got it right.
Now, Lund didn't get everything he deserved last week. Because if life were fair, in addition to his suspension, Lund would have awakened with a thick, silky mane.
"I would like to keep my hair," Lund said in a conference call with reporters. "I'm 26 years old, and I'm already going bald."
High-performance athletes receive specialized training. They get world-class facilities, the top advisers and the best nutrition. They're also tested for performance-enhancing drugs and masking agents. And so the lesson in Lund's case is that woeful ignorance trumps all the help you can find.
The Court of Arbitration for Sport said it thinks Lund did not cheat, but ruled he should serve a one-year suspension. And in a statement, Jim Scherr, head of the U.S. Olympic Committee, said, "We do not believe that Zach Lund is a doper."
But he's very much a dope.
he list of banned substances was updated at the beginning of 2005, but Lund didn't bother to check it. Nor did he call the toll-free, 24-hour telephone number that the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency set up to answer questions about drugs. At a time when Olympians are being asked to scrutinize everything they put in their bodies, Lund sabotaged himself by ingesting the drug finasteride (sold under the brand names Propecia and Proscar).
Canadian goalie Jose Theodore and bobsledder Sebastien Gattuso from Monaco also were ruled to have ingested finasteride. And Argentine tennis player Mariano Hood and German soccer player Nemanja Vucicevic were banned for taking the same drug last year. So Propecia is the new poppyseed muffin.
Without strict drug-testing guidelines, the Olympics would be an International Steroid Convention. There can be no exceptions. And while Lund ends up as a causality, his plight also comes attached to a straight-forward message if you're not distracted by all the hair talk.
The Olympics are serious about drugs.
I f Lund badly wants hair, that's his business. But also, when he gets tangled in his pursuit of it, it becomes his problem. Lund needed to be clean for Turin, and he wasn't.
I was in Sydney at the 2000 Olympics when 16-year old Romanian gymnast Andreea Raducan was stripped of her gold medal for taking over-the-counter cold medicine. During that ordeal, I kept seeing Raducan, a few years removed, panhandling on the streets of Romania, lamenting the loss of her Olympic gold medal while saying, "It was just cold medicine."
So what happened to little Raducan?
First, a jeweler presented her a replica of the gold medal, then a foreign production company made a movie about her life, and she also received a $30,000 bonus for her Olympic performance. Then, she continued competing, finishing third at the 2001 world championships before retiring in 2004 to coach.
As devastating as being stripped of that medal might have appeared, Raducan pulled through. And Lund will survive, go on to compete in 2010 in Vancouver, B.C., and maybe even coach young U.S. skeleton competitors someday.
In fact, he's teaching already.
