Matt Barnard

About the author: Matt Barnard is a journalist and writer for the New Statesman.

While many people find the idea of using performance-enhancing drugs disturbing, athletes, responding to internal and external pressures to win and to improve, will continue to use them. Society will eventually accept the fact that elite athletes will use any means, including drugs, in their quest for success. Drugs will eventually be as accepted in sports as they are in medicine and cosmetics.

Florence Griffith Joyner ("Flo-Jo") died, aged 38, from heart seizure this week [September 1998]. Even before her untimely death, the shadow of suspicion hung over her glorious two gold medals and one silver at the Seoul Olympics in 1988: with her muscular form and husky voice typical of steroid users, and with her retirement announced abruptly in 1989, when...