Personal accountability is the only way out of the deepening PED swamp. Nonito Donaire understands that. Few do.
Donaire was proactive in addressing suspicions he knew would be there when he hired Victor Conte, the BALCO founder who spent four years in prison for his role in the scheme to distribute performance enhancers to Olympic medalists and major leaguers who rewrote baseball’s home-run records. Donaire took the test, takes the test, whenever and wherever.
It’s unfortunate that Juan Manuel Marquez didn’t follow Donaire’s lead. If Marquez had, there wouldn’t be all of those messy questions attached to his dramatic victory last Saturday over Manny Pacquiao at Las Vegas’ MGM Grand. Marquez’ home-run shot in the sixth round knocked out Pacquiao, but none of the PED garbage.
Not taking an Olympic-style test these days is the equivalent of taking the fifth. It’s just another way of saying you don’t want to incriminate yourself.
Marquez likes to call himself an intelligent fighter. But he didn’t think things through when he first hired Angel Heredia, a former Conte associate, and then added muscle to a middle-aged body that Heredia christened “The Hulk.” Heredia and Conte will be in opposite corners Saturday night at Houston’s Toyota Center. Heredia works for Jorge Arce, who fights Donaire for the super-bantamweight title.
Heredia, like Conte, is bound to stir up suspicions. Before his upset of Pacquiao, Marquez said he was willing to undergo testing considered more thorough and rigorous than the procedure administered by the Nevada State Athletic Commission.
Saying it, however, isn’t doing it.
Marquez didn’t.
Instead, he underwent Nevada tests that many believe are easy to circumvent. The Nevada tests will come up clean, Marquez said. It would be a huge upset if they didn’t. In the court of public opinion, however, the negative result won’t allay the suspicions.
During the last year, we have heard testimony and watched news reports of how Lance Armstrong beat the system in international cycling for years. Armstrong always denied doping. He still does. But few believe him. That public skepticism has spread to every fighter who won’t step up and undergo state-of-the-art testing not required by state regulators.
Heredia’s well-documented role with BALCO includes grand-jury testimony in which he says he supplied Olympic track-and-field medalist Marion Jones with performance enhancers. Jones, a woman and the only athlete sentenced to jail in the BALCO scandal, never tested positive. She always denied the allegations. In the end, she was convicted on a perjury charge.
I want to believe Marquez and so do many of my friends. I respect him, his poise and ability to think through a tough fight. Marquez’ physical transformation, Heredia says, is about “science.’’ Maybe so. But wasn’t Frankenstein science fiction?
It’s the fiction part that bothers me. Only updated testing can make it real and that’s a process that starts with the kind of accountability practiced by Donaire.
