Reply #61: From what I understand... Bonds passed all his steroid tests too.

[Blue Belle]

And as for eye witnesses... there are plenty of them to go around for both parties. The point is, steroids are getting virtually undetectable in EVERY area of sport.

Taken from King Kaufman's Sports Daily on Salon.com:
http://www.salon.com/sports/col/kaufman/2006/03/08/wednesday/index1.html

<SNIP>It's the fact that Conte, Bonds' personal trainer Greg Anderson and the rest of the BALCO crowd were so indiscreet and yet so safe from both sports and real-world law enforcement.

<SNIP>That's the story here. Not that the most prominent jerk and steroid abuser in baseball really was a jerk and a steroid abuser. But that law enforcement is so comically behind the drug pushers.

The cops are barely even in the game. How could they be? There's no money in law enforcement. The real money's in the cheating. If there's another BALCO somewhere right now -- and why wouldn't there be? -- the drug cops are almost certainly in the dark about it.

It's a joke to worry about whether Bonds' records have damaged the integrity of the game. Bonds is a hard rain, but for all we know the game's integrity is being washed away by a tsunami of cheating.

And speaking of team chemistry, we haven't even entered the coming era of genetic testing.


Another interesting factoid in regard to steroid use at the Olympics:
http://www.salon.com/sports/col/kaufman/2006/02/27/monday/index1.html

<SNIP>Officials administered a reported 1,200 drug tests, a 71 percent increase over the last Winter Games, in 2002. And there was one positive. One. In Salt Lake, seven athletes tested positive out of 700 tests.

So, thanks to the crackdown by world anti-doping forces, we've gone from 1 percent of the tests coming up positive to 0.083 percent. Problem solved! Glad we cleared that up.

<SNIP>Positive tests are not required to punish athletes for drug use, the IOC says. It takes circumstantial evidence into account.

That's probably wise, because drug testing is obviously one of the most abject, spectacular law enforcement failures since Prohibition.

Either that or the Olympics are now suddenly a collection of the cleanest, most drug-free saints ever gathered in one place. On second thought, yeah, I'm sure that's it.