Forcing every young boxer to transform himself into a synthetic superman would be one way to level the playing field?
Heavyweight Tony Thompson, who tested dirty for performance-enhancing drugs after beating David Price in July 2013, told the London Daily Mail on Friday that boxing should just go ahead and legalize doping because … well, everybody?s doing it.
That is, everybody except Thompson, who considers himself innocent of all charges because (1) he says the dirt snuck into his body via medication he was taking for high blood pressure, and (2) gee, he didn?t know it was banned. (Or, maybe Thompson just forgot it was banned: Turns out he was given a separate 12-month ban in August 2013 after the Austrian Boxing Federation found the same substance in his blood after his fight against Kubrat Pulev.)
But, hey, why quibble about how the drug got there, and whether or not it?s illegal. Apparently that?s all beside the point to Thompson, who believes he has a much better idea.
?Especially in boxing, you have the people with money: the haves, the people with money, are using all the drugs they want,? Thompson told Daily Mail reporter Declan Warrington. ?They?re able to cheat and get away with it, so as a way to combat that, everybody can take whatever it is they want and declare it.?
Maybe he?s on to something. Forcing every young boxer to transform himself into a hulking, phony, synthetic superman would certainly be one way to level the playing field. What harm could that possibly do … except on those occasions when a clean fighter faces a juiced-up Marvel comic book character and gets his head caved in? But, then, graveyards are already full of losers, right?
The other option ? probably a silly one, let?s admit ? would be to implement better testing procedures that would catch (or discourage) a much-higher percentage of those guys who believe that cheating is OK, long as there?s a pot of gold waiting at the end of the rainbow.
If the sport became more diligent about testing, Thompson?s children (and everybody else?s) might not feel like they need to inject concoctions some bathroom chemist mixed up in his sink, just to avoid getting killed in the ring by a mutant.
Meanwhile, we can all be thankful for wrongly-accused fighters like Tony Thompson, who clearly are doing it the right way. Glad to hear his filthy drug test was all just another silly mistake.
