Is Usain Bolt Clean Or Has He Just Not Been Caught Yet?

Same question for Michael Phelps.

Remember back when Lance Armstrong was a great guy and a wonderful role model?

I was a big Barry bonds fan. Well, I still am. I haven't turned from loving him to hating him. It's just that I finally stopped kidding myself about the overwhelming evidence that he was breaking the rules -- and, for example, paying a friend to spend years in prison to help him break the rules. My denial about Bonds lasted a long time, but not as long as some San Francisco Giants fans. I do believe some of them still think Barry's innocent, God bless their innocent, trusting hearts. I still believe that Barry is a whole lot of amazing things (Lance, too, for that matter), but innocent is no longer one of those things.

Reggie Jackson is Barry's uncle. Back when I was still standing up for Barry in arguments over whether he was juicing, I kept saying that some men just get much more muscular when they're in their 30's, which is true, and I pointed to Reggie as an example. Reggie bulked up big-time late in his career (1967 to 1987 in the bigs.) When I stopped fighting the accusations against Barry, my entire view of sports and athleticism just collapsed, and I figured anybody could be doping, including Reggie back when he had played. If Reggie did it, would that even have meant he was ahead of his time? Accusations of doping in Major League Baseball weren't yet flying in the late 70's when Reggie was the remarkably-buff Mr October,

but steroids and human growth hormone had already been used in bodybuilding for some time, and had taken that sport from this

to this:

and even before 1980 a few baseball stars had sudden eye-popping muscle growth. They said it was Nautilus and free weights. And no doubt it was. Just ingesting roids won't grow muscle on you. The roids just allow you to work out more often by making your muscles recover faster.

Not only do I now suspect pretty much every successful athlete of using banned substances, I'm sort of in favor of sports just not banning substances any more. Why? Because the bans are not being successfully enforced. The steroid era is not over. Let everybody juice as much as they want. Yes, using that stuff is dangerous. But so is chronic denial of the obvious.