By David Walter, Special Writer
Former USA Track & Field CEO Craig Masback holds a sobering view of the current condition of athletics.
”Sports in our country, and on some level in our world, are in a state of crisis,” Mr. Masback told an audience at Princeton University’s Dodds Auditorium last week.
A varsity runner at Princeton, Mr. Masback pursued a professional track career after his graduation in 1977, eventually winning the U.S. indoor mile championships in 1980. He then worked as a lawyer and television sports commentator before joining USATF in 1997. He left that post recently to take a job at Nike.
During a decade at the helm of USATF, Mr. Masback saw track and field’s reputation battered by a succession of high-level doping scandals. In the beginning, USATF responded to the situation by using classic damage-control tactics — strategies that Mr. Masback said have failed almost every major sport confronted with a steroid problem.
”The first order of defense was to deny that there was a problem. Then, we tried to minimize it,” he said. “Third, we pointed to others: ‘We may not be perfect, but what about these guys? They’re not doing any testing.’”
USATF was finally able to move forward, Mr. Masback said, when it finally realized, “If there was only one person in our sport cheating, then we had a problem with doping.”
USATF then toughened its steroid response. But by that point, Mr. Masback said, the damage to the sport had already been done.
”The public and media have come to say, “Why should I believe anything that happens in your sport?” he said.
While cheating was always present in sports to some degree, Mr. Masback said, the sophistication of today’s cheaters combined with increased media scrutiny has created an exceptionally large problem for sports leaders.
”Sports have always reflected society, for better or worse. But what’s new is that the media, which used to give sports a free pass on (societal) issues, now studies sports to look for these issues,” he said.
Mr. Masback said, however, that the media often misses the larger picture when focusing on steroids in sports.
”Eighty-nine percent of men who use steroids are not athletes,” he said. “We are a society that celebrates the enhancement of performance … whether it’s plastic surgery, Viagra or students or professors taking ADHD medicine to study.”
Mr. Masback quickly added that sports should be cleaned up even if the larger causes of steroid use go unaddressed.
”Sports do need to be held accountable in part because athletes and sports are put up on a pedestal,” he said.
That privileged position can allow professional athletes to communicate the dangers of steroids to young people facing the pressure to cheat, Mr. Masback said.
”I would like sports to not simply play defense, not simply to be aware of its intrinsic problems, but try to take our sports to a new level,” he said. “How we inculcate values is very important.”
In addition, Mr. Masback called for increased funding for scientists trying to devise better drug tests. He said the current support for these scientists was clearly inadequate.
”The Mitchell Report (on steroids in baseball) cost more money than all the money on research this year that will be dedicated to catching drug cheats,” he said.
