Juiced

Letters

Vol. 28 No. 17 · 7 September 2006

From Arthur Havisham

Quite a few syringefuls of steroids or whatever have been injected into the bloodstreams of star sportspersons and, vicariously, the unusually excitable journalists employed to write about them, since David Runciman described the bad behaviour, both on and off the baseball diamond, of the home-run supremo Barry Bonds (LRB, 3 August). One of the American sprinters whom Runciman brought into his account, Marion Jones, seems finally to have bitten the dust, after many years of being suspected but never caught taking steroids. So has her male compatriot, Justin Gatlin, the joint holder of the world 100-metre record; and Floyd Landis, the short-lived American winner of the Tour de France in July, whose extraordinary recovery from a serious time deficit in one of the last mountain stages of the race was almost immediately put down to an even more serious surplus of testosterone found in his body on the day in question.

Not much of a summer for cheats, you could say, and just in case cricket-lovers were reflecting how fortunate we are that our game at least is free from scandals of this kind, along comes the ball-tampering episode on the parched turf of the Oval, where the Pakistani side was accused of doing something not as yet specified to the ball in order to encourage it to deviate on its passage from the bowler’s hand to the batsman’s bat. It’s assumed we will be scandalised by this, if it’s proved it actually happened, for sullying the fair name etc. Few followers of cricket will, I suspect, be able to muster the full degree of shock expected of them, coming as it mostly does from commentators who know perfectly well that ball-tampering goes back several decades, ever since the physics of the game began to be vaguely understood and the factors that might make a cricket ball swing more, or move off the pitch, were better appreciated. I fear cheating in cricket is small beer compared to the real thing elsewhere.

Arthur Havisham
Brighton

From Richard Koss

David Runciman misses an important point regarding Barry Bonds. Because major league baseball had no official policy on steroids until 2002 (a year after Bonds achieved a record number of home runs in a season), and instituted a half-hearted testing programme only in 2004 (a year after Victor Conte spilled the beans), it’s really not in any position to punish him. Throughout the ‘steroid era’ baseball was happy to allow juiced statistics to help revive a sport which had been devastated by the players’ strike of 1994. If Bonds is punished for anything, it will probably be – anticlimactically – for tax evasion.

Richard Koss
New York

Vol. 28 No. 18 · 21 September 2006

From Raymond Clayton

The irony of unintended consequences is on full display in David Runciman’s discussion of the baseball steroids scandal (LRB, 3 August). In 1949 I was a graduate student in organic chemistry at the University of Manchester. I was one of a research team, directed by the late E.R.H. Jones, trying to synthesise the steroid hormone cortisone. Our effort was prompted by the recent discovery that cortisone brought miraculous relief to rheumatoid arthritis sufferers. At the time it was available only by extraction from massive quantities of the adrenal glands of slaughtered animals. The race was on for a commercially viable method of synthesis.

We were in competition with other groups in Britain, the US, Mexico and Switzerland. There were many late nights and weekends in the lab. The result of all this effort was an explosive advance in steroid chemistry (until then a fairly sedate branch of ‘natural products’ chemistry). Thus cortisone and cortisol and their more potent synthetic analogues became available, along with many other physiologically active steroids, the ‘Pill’ and various anabolic steroids among them. The versatility with which chemists have modified steroid hormone molecules to produce subtle changes in their properties has been remarkable. But until recently attention had focused on their clinical use. No one in those hectic early days of research could have imagined a stadium full of baseball fans chanting: ‘Steroids! Steroids!’

Raymond Clayton
Stanford, California