Chemically Enhanced

I have mentioned in the past my love of the ESPN original film series, "30 For 30." It's a set of original sports documentaries, but done in a way that looks a the larger fabric of life surrounding sports. That is certainly true of "9.79*," the latest installment that aired last Tuesday.

The film chronicles the scandal surrounding Ben Johnson following his positive test after winning the 100 Meter at the 1988 Olympics in Seoul, Korea. But the film is really about all the runners in the race, and the competitors in track for most of that decade, most of which involves the use of, or suspected use of, a banned substance.

It is a fascinating film, and one that raises a lot of questions. Many of the athletes interviewed were bluntly honest about their cheating and why they did it. Others were coy or fought off allegations. Others remained proud to have run clean, though they knew it would cost them trips to the podium.

I can't say it changed my feeling on the race, because I was only seven during that Olympics. The fact is that I don't really remember the race. But I was fascinated by the discussion, and by the way that we like to romanticize sports of the past.

You can hardly follow any sports now without a discussion of Performance Enhancing Drugs coming into play in some way. That is the era we're living in. And, of course, it was the era we were living in then, too. We just didn't know it.

What's fascinating is the way we like to romanticize sports of the past. Athletes hardly played "clean" in the past any more than they do now. There have long been stories of football players who took the field high on cocaine, players who were in the lineup drunk, and athletes who used steroids and other PEDs to get ahead.

The difference, it seems to me, is that our expectations have changed. Before, we watched sports and didn't really consider the idea that the athletes were cheating. Now that the rampant cheating in all sports has come to light, it's hard to think of anything else.

It's when you watch documentaries, like "9.79*," that you get a sense of how false your impressions of the past really were and how much our eyes have been opened as sports fans.