A random aside into sports
If given the time and opportunity, I tend to have on ESPN or Fox Sports turned on the TV when working. Over the last several days, which I would think has become common knowledge, A-Rod admitted to steroid usage. This has caused that for the better part of the week, sports reporters and commentators to be obsessed with steroids and baseball again. It was recently I heard [don't remember who or when] a suggestion that the drug testing needs to be in a different form, which is what I think is needed.
The commentator used it the form of RIP. Random. Independent. Public. I think all three of those things need to exist in order to assure the best case of avoid the "scandal" that now is brewing in baseball. I don't follow baseball, unless it is in the form of box scores printed in a paper, but I do think that the visible side of the sport is tainted with accusations of steroids and other banned performance enhancing substances.
I think it needs to be RANDOM. My current understanding is that the current system is far from the random, more deterministic than anything else. Random wouldn't allow for people to cheat the system. In the fact that you would never know if you were or were not going to be tested at any given point, would allow the test to better reflect the average daily usage versus the current system.
I think it needs to be INDEPENDENT. I think there is too much in the current system that is tied to Unions and agreements, that for the results to be trustworthy, that an outside entity is payed to come in and perform the tests and test them, independent of any conflicting arrangement that could otherwise exist.
I think the results need to be PUBLIC. This is a good way of showing a good faith move on part of the fans and the general public. It is the only way to have the testing mean something. A test that is never made public is as if it never existed.
Now for the current situation, I think that there is a need to black box the past, because there is not a lot that can be done about it now, but I think at the same time that there is a level of the past needs to be undone. There are too many awards and achievements that have been tainted by the use of this substances, that make it hard to believe that it was the person alone doing it. I think of them for those implicated currently should be vacated and the previous record holder should be reinstated as the only accurate record we have. If not that, a huge asterisk place by the record to fully account for the uncertainty of the record.
Now I just wish that we could end all of the commentary on it and focus on something else.
~u