Scaring the Drug Cheats

NASCAR came appallingly late to the drug-testing game. Still, you've got to be impressed by the blunt fashion with which it handled its first major doping scandal. When driver-owner Jeremy Mayfield suggested that his positive drug test must have resulted from an unfortunate mixture of prescription and over-the-counter medicines, the man who runs NASCAR's testing program immediately debunked that excuse as nonsense. Though David Black, head of Aegis Labs, refrained from naming the drug involved, he told USA Todaythat it was "a clear violation" of policy and that in his experience no such result had ever stemmed from a mixture of meds as Mayfield was suggesting.

That's so much better than baseball's method of dealing with the kind of half-truths offered last week on behalf of Manny Ramirez in the wake of his failed drug test. The league relied on leaks to inform the public that Ramirez had tested positive for human chorionic gonadotropin, or HCG, which can be used to restart the testosterone cycle after a steroids regimen.

The tennis establishment saw no need to orchestrate either a public pronouncement or a private leak after Frenchman Richard Gasquet was suspended—he'll miss the French Open—for testing positive for cocaine. Gasquet proclaimed his innocence and his intention to prove it. But he'll need to come up with a slightly better defense than the one ginned up for him by Russia's Marat Safin, who said, "When you're at a huge table full of people having fun, it's absurd to have to watch what glass you're drinking from."

This spate of drug news and excuse came on the heels of a new book by Sports Illustratedwriter Selena Roberts that makes a mockery of Alex Rodriguez's earnest defense—I was young and immature and my cousin made me do it—after the revelation of his positive test for steroids in 2003. And another new book—American Icon: The Fall of Roger Clemens and the Rise of Steroids in America's Pastime—by a quartet of New York Daily News reporters has forced Roger Clemens to reemerge from his public hiatus and once again trot out what is an increasingly ineffectual defense: deny, deny, deny.

All this—and the Tour de France is little more than a month away.

Before any of us get too giddy, understand that these are but small victories—albeit involving some big names—in what has been a long, losing battle against epidemic use of performance-enhancing drugs by athletes. Still, while the anti-drug forces may not have gained the upper hand, they have at least thrown a scare into the cheaters. And it could amount to far more than that if only the obstructionists would mimic the increasingly aggressive Olympic approach.