Excuses, Excuses
What’s the problem with snowboarding and marijuana and rules?
Oh, I don’t mean the ethics involved. Frankly, I don’t much care about the IOC’s rules about substances conflicting with the FIS’s rules, which necessitates a ruling from the CAS. Or the whole should-marijuana-be-legalized debate that never really goes away.
No, I mean the excuse that was trotted out by snowboarders throughout this whole exercise; that of, "it’s part of the lifestyle, dude."
Well, that’s as may be. I’m not a snowboarder, but given what I’ve seen of the sport and its participants, it might well be part of the lifestyle.
And there’s nothing wrong with that. I mean, if your idea of a great winter activity is to basically surf down a mountain and then relive the adventure later with friends, maybe some munchies, and perhaps something smokeable, then more power to you.
But the excuse that, “it’s part of the lifestyle, dude,” doesn’t work at the Olympics. Or indeed at the world level of any sport.
Look. Other sports have lifestyles that conflict with the Olympics’ ideal. Figure skaters are notorious for various indiscretions: the Tonya Harding-Nancy Kerrigan feud is just one event that happened to make it out into the open. True, a hitman was hired and most skaters don’t go that far, but similar feuds do erupt at lower levels of figure skating. There is out-and-out hatred between skaters, there are temper tantrums, there are all number of other things skaters do to bother other skaters.
And some figure skaters have also been known to partake of various other ethically questionable activities off the ice. Let’s face it; you can only force an adolescent into so much training and practice and coaching before something snaps. Most skaters make it through without a problem, but some don’t, and the results are usually not pretty.
But it’s part of the lifestyle, dear.
Or one of the other new Olympic sports, curling. I have yet to see a curling rink without a bar attached. And that bar is usually thick with tobacco smoke, while kegs of beer are bravely dying to fulfil the needs of the curlers’ thirst.
But it’s part of the lifestyle, bud.
Sure it is, and I don’t know any figure skaters or curlers who would deny it. But they are all in agreement that while those things might be tolerated tacitly at the lower levels of competition, they are not to be tolerated at the world-class level. It doesn’t have to be the Olympics; it can be the annual world’s championships or even the national championships--the point is, such things are not tolerated at the higher levels. And the "lifestyle" story won’t work.
And that’s why I’m wondering about the snowboarders’ attitude. They seem to be wanting to use "but it’s part of the lifestyle" as an excuse. It’s a common excuse that has been trotted out by young people of every generation (though perhaps not with those exact words), for many situations and sometimes it works.
But sometimes it doesn’t, and while it had no impact on the decision to reinstate the Canadian with the gold medal (a decision which I support), I don’t like to see the snowboarders thinking that the stodgy old geezers of the IOC are living in the age of the dinosaurs just because they don’t understand that "it’s part of the lifestyle, dude."
The sport is young, and perhaps that’s part of the problem. There seems to be little maturity, little life experience in those that govern the sport. Most of the people that govern the sport (at least, the ones I saw on television during the whole debacle) are participants themselves. And the participants are young, as the Olympians in most sports are. But unlike other Olympic sports, there seems to be few mature voices of experience in snowboarding.
Under these circumstances--the lack of life experience and the lack of experience in the larger sporting world--I have to ask: how can a young participant, in an even younger sport, hope to understand the politics and the reasoning of the bodies that govern world-class competition?
Maybe what the sport--and the participants--need is to grow up a little. Let today’s crop of snowboarders grow older, be forced to deal with the fact that they are not as fast or daring as the younger ones, and stay involved with the sport through coaching or serving on a committee or participating in the governing body. Perhaps then they will gain the experience with bureaucrats, with overlapping rules, and with others in the sporting world, and they will come to understand why "it’s part of the lifestyle" just isn’t seen as a valid excuse.
But for now, rather than complaining that the dinosaurs are not understanding their lifestyle, today’s snowboarders should try to understand the dinosaurs’ reasoning in ignoring that excuse. The figure skaters do, the curlers do, and if the snowboarders really want to be recognized as capable athletes in a world-class sport, they will also have to.
"It’s part of the lifestyle, dude"? Fine. But understand that such an excuse has no weight at the world-class level.
A Little Background
During the 1998 Winter Olympics, a routine drug test revealed that the gold medal winner had traces of marijuana in his system. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) voted to strip the winner of his medal, in spite of the fact that traces of marijuana are permitted by the FIS, the world body that governs skiing, and under whose authority the sport of snowboarding currently falls.
Added to this conflict were the close votes for disqualification by medical bodies and the abstention of eligible voters that could have cut the debate off before it escalated to the IOC. In short, it was a case without precedent, and nobody really knew what to do.
An appeal to the Committee of Adjudication of Sport (CAS) resulted in the reinstatement of the medal to the winner, but during the process of appeal (a time period of about two days), the media--always anxious for a sound bite--asked other snowboarders what they thought. Their replies began to form a pattern, which prompted this essay.
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