After having a huge puff piece written about him in Canada’s National Post, Dick Pound seems to be missing in action right at the time when he should be speaking out about demon marijuana.
Over at Endless Cycle, Pelonton Jim unearthed a story about Robbie Green, an English darts player who tested positive for (gasp! cough!) marijuana at the UK Open Darts tournament in June. Green is currently serving an 8 week and two day suspension from competition.
Now, I’m not an expert on this, but I’ve never really thought of dope as a performance enhancing drug. Sure, if it was laced with something else you might get an unusual high, but all I ever heard was that smoking weed leaves you feeling relaxed … and hungry.
But don’t take my word for it, here’s a list of side effects in an article that’s part of a doping in sports series at ESPN.com (props to my wife for unearthing this link). Marijuana, the article says:
- Impairs skills requiring eye-hand coordination and a fast reaction time
- Reduces motor coordination, tracking ability and perceptual accuracy
- Impairs concentration, and time appears to move more slowly
- Skill impairment may last up to 24 to 36 hours after usage
- Reduces maximal exercise capacity resulting in increased fatiguability
- Marijuana has no performance-enhancing potential
If I’m following the article correctly, this information comes from either Dr. Gary Wadler (a member of the board of WADA and a professor at the New York University School of Medicine), or the National Institute on Drug Abuse. I think that last bullet point says it all. No performance-enhancing potential. So why even bother with testing for it in the first place?
OK, I’ll give you that those first four bullet points might be of concern in sports where there’s an element of danger, like careening down an alpine road on a skinny-tire bike at speeds around 50 to 60 miles per hour or driving an F1 car at high speeds around a twisting circuit. But darts? Let’s be serious here.
Do you know where darts games are normally played? In bars. Around smoke (tobacco and otherwise) and lots of booze. And during the times I’ve played, drinking seemed to be part of the game. The only danger is if a drunken fool steps into the line of fire right when a player takes his/her shot.
Oh, one other thing, THC, the active ingredient in marijuana, is fat soluble and can be detected in a person’s system for quite a while after being exposed. So even if a tournament isn’t played in a smokey bar, if Green played in a bar within several days of the tournament’s start, he could still show traces of THC in his system.
Now, I can imagine that one of Green’s competitors might have slipped him a magic brownie or something. Especially if the impaired eye-hand coordination would throw the contest to someone else. Heck, maybe Green even smoked a little dope the night before. If so, his competition should be glad. It might have helped them.
Who knows? Maybe they were all sitting around at the local pub shooting a few practice games to limber up before the big tournament. One guy pulls out a spliff and says, “Ay, Robbie, you’ll be shootin’ a much finer game if ye smoke a little o’ this.” And maybe Green did. Or maybe he was around people who were smoking, but never inhaled (yeah, that’s a likely story).
Anyway, Dick Pound is missing a golden opportunity to speak out against the evils of reefer madness. After all, if Robbie Green got caught, the whole lot of darts players must be potheads … or worse. A few scandals in cycling has Pound thinking everyone in cycling dopes (or maybe it’s just every American winner of the Tour de France, with the exception of Leg GreMond). Maybe everyone in the darts world dopes, too. Pound could even garner a few more sales of his book with the extra publicity and notoriety.
And where do the profits from his book go? Straight into Pound’s pockets, of course. So where’s WADA’s mouthpiece when we need him most? Cue Ben Stein: Pound? Pound? Pound?
I’ll say this much for Robbie Green. He should be thankful that his suspension is only for 58 days. Some people would prefer to give him a lifetime ban for doping, er, smoking dope.
