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Not all sports stories are happy upsets — some in 2007 were just upsetting
I don’t care if you’re fit and having fun on the ski lifts or aging and getting around with a stair lift, if you’re an NFL Football fan, you can’t help but enjoy the surprises this year’s playoffs have shown us so far. Unfortunately, much of the sports news over the last year hasn’t been so enjoyable.
In fact, the better known sports stories over the last year have involved fallen heroes — those who admitted or who were accused of using banned substances.
Nothing typifies the unpleasant sports surprises, those fallen heroes, any more than the sad, sad story of Olympic track star Marian Jones. After years of adamant denial concerning performance enhancing drugs, Ms. Jones confessed in October that she had lied to federal prosecutors about using banned drugs (and some charges related to a check-fraud case).
To make the long story short — she’s lost all of her Olympic medals; her teammates in the team events also lost their medals; she has been fined heavily; she was sentenced to prison time; she will do hundreds of hours of community service; and, she will be on probation for two years.
Her family and supporters insist that Jones was treated unfairly and that others should have been smacked around for their greater involvement with drugs. That may be true. The judge reasoned that she was so well known he wanted to make an example of her and do something that would propel her to educate young people about the whole problem as she does community service.
It’s all such a sad loss, to her, to her family, and most of all to the sports and the young people who look up to the Marion Joneses and other celebrity athletes of the world.
Let’s hope 2008 will have more of the pleasant underdogs-come-from-behind-for-surprise-wins stories like the football playoffs and far less of the drug use/abuse stories.
[tags]sports upsets, sports surprises, sports corruption, drugs in sports, just a guy who reads the papers[/tags]
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