A recent top sports story cites pro football's Houston Texans working out world-class 100-meter sprinting champion, Justin Gatlin. Gatlin is waiting on a pending suspension from professional track due to testing positive for a synthetic steroid. The Texans appear to be slapping the upper football ranks in the face as they have been working on a new tougher anti-drug program. It is clear that banned football players from the National Football League (NFL) have found work in the Canadian Football League (CFL) such as Ricky Williams of the Miami Dolphins. The NFL must feel obligated to do in kind with other athletes.
I see this as a windfall for sports training. Young athletes trained in track and weaned on steroids hoping to test positive one day and move on to a professional football career. It does not have to stop there. Raphael Palmeiro tested positive for steroids while last playing for baseball's Baltimore Orioles and has been out of work. With all the slapshots he has received due to being outted as testing positive after his infamous Congressional declarations, he should be fielding offers to take up goaltending in the National Hockey League. Pro Boxing's James Toney and Tour-de-France cyclist Floyd Landis have their present sport's honor of the official rank of "Roid Head" for testing positive. They also are out of work. These are name athletes who are available to receive offers from other professional sports. After all, name athletes are a drawing card for sporting events.
If this does become a trend then each sporting body will have to make changes for the entry of other sport professionals. Banned hockey players going to pro football will mean that the sport will have to adopt a penalty rule for slashing the opponent with a yard marker. As innovative, as the sport has been in the past they would need to define the difference between a five-yard unintentional and fifteen-yard intentional slash. Banned Tennis players turning to pro baseball would have to have learned the changes in vocabulary. The first obstacle would be calling strikes instead of love. A big problem may surface in figuring out the difference between each game's meanings of the term "Grand Slam." Banned boxers switching to pro hockey while probably a good fit, most likely need to be schooled on the fine points of playing in the event a game breaks out. When it comes to bicyclist, their best bet would to leave the sporting arena, take up backpedaling and go into politics.
Are drug-banned athletes the wave of the future? Only time will tell. For some banned athlete's as NFL running back Onterrio Smith it does not always work out positively. Smith caught at an airport with a drug-masking unit called "The Original Whizzinator" and pure crystal pee vials did not fair so well. While trying to catch on to the CFL after an NFL ban it became clear, the man depended too much on his "Whizzinator" to make the team. The fear of such dependency might cloud the future of fellow banned sports icons trying to maintain any type of career in sports.
