By Bart Barry-
TLAQUEPAQUE, Mexico – Thirty kilometers northnortheast of San Agustín de Tlajomulco de Zúñiga, and the meat here is delicious. It may well be the tainting that makes it so, but such tainting can doubtful be sensed by an instrument blunt as the human tongue else the fighting pride of Jalisco, the flamehaired horseman heartbreaker recently humiliated by a positive PED test whose announcement and subsequent coverage got heavily seasoned – bien condimentado – by the word “trace”, never would’ve ingested what plenteous amounts of meat and particularly liver can lead to such damnable positivity.
After another halfweek in Canelolandia and time to reflect during flights to and fro I’m ready to give Saul Alvarez the benefit of the doubt (which I didn’t realize till about a sentence ago). Not because any elite athlete defaults to notguilty in anyone’s mind anymore and not necessarily either because I can barely care less about the matter of athletes, fundamentally entertainers, taking substances that enhance their performance (and imagine what disappointing spectacles we’d’ve suffered and been suffering were other entertainers tested by antidoping agencies – adios to Hendrix and Cobain, Stallone and Schwarzenegger, Dickens and Sartre, Freud and Monroe), but because getting caught marks such a fault of professionalism it seems too far outside Alvarez’s character.
Canelo’s myriad of detractors will admit, heck probably declare, he is more calculating than he is nearly anything else. He calculated his way to the final bell with their hero in September, after all, surviving by dint of his wiles 36 minutes of terror with the most transcendentally dangerous middleweight (and junior middleweight and super middleweight, let us not forget) of the last 25-100 years. He didn’t stand and trade with GGG, at risk to his interests and reputation, because he had a strategy that opposed doing so, and regardless of what transpired in the hot blood of combat, he didn’t revise a single prefight calculation.
If Canelo had a strategy for disarming Golovkin he most surely had a strategy for passing drug tests.
So we return to the P in PEDs and posit there’s been no dramatically nonlinear improvements in Canelo’s performances since we saw him patrolling Queer Street with Jose Miguel Cotto eight years ago. Canelo has improved about the way you’d expect a champion to improve in the prime of his career. Which is another way of imparting th’t if Canelo is using PEDs today he’s probably been using them a very long while.
I’m agnostic on this possibility, agnostic by way of ambivalence – it says here no natural athlete is talented enough to dominate a PED era in any sport or ever has been – but it further supports the probability Canelo’s positive test was innocent as his apologists immediately claimed.
One minute of googling Clenbuterol and Mexican meat (I’m assuming; I spent nearly twice that) reveals an authority no less PED-dependent than the NFL warned its athletes almost two years ago about Mexican meat. It’s the secondary-smoke of protein sources, apparently, this beef, as its cattlemen enhance their livestocks’ dinnerplate performance till Mexican carne asada hits the tastebuds like Barry Bonds pulling a 100-mph Eric Gagne fastball 50 feet foul into McCovey Cove. It would seem an athlete would have to consume copious amounts of this beef to fail a doping test, but there are a couple counterarguments to that, too: 1. If anyone would consume copious amounts of animal protein it would be a professional athlete in training, and 2. Just how sensitive have these tests become, after all?
There is a militant faction of sports journalism that can answer that very question even without internet access, yes, and I’m just fine being counted outside its ranks. It’s dreadful tedious. One of the overlooked elements of the Money May era that made it so awful were the hours all of us wasted arguing about PEDs. It looked deep brutal arbitrary – though, to be fair, anabolism does appear the one place an objective line ever got drawn – and deciphering the days’ news and testing developments brought out the Pecksniffian worst of everyone the subject touched. And that’s before one inadvertently began weighing the heavyhanded moralizing at the root of every accusation and counteraccusation – the unspoken assumption not any of us or anyone we respected would do anything so craven as take drugs to make ourselves better at our crafts or rich.
I can’t keep a straight face on that count: I wrote openly about experimenting with ephedrine and modafinil to improve my performance in this very column, without a penny on the line either way.
The enduring irony of our enduring PED anxiety is that none of the greatest beneficiaries of these drugs was caught by testing agencies – their labs got busted, their teammates wrote books, their wives ordered drugs be delivered to the home they shared, their strength and conditioning coaches appeared in infomercials and got recognized by other strength and conditioning coaches.
I don’t know if Canelo Alvarez is above cheating to win, but I do believe he is above getting caught. This area in Mexico whence Canelo hails isn’t sloppy or slapdash as other parts of the country, it isn’t about yelling ¡Fiesta! at sloshed tourists; it’s buttoned down serious with residents that are surprisingly tall and standoffish, more Catalonia than Cancun.
“See? This is just the sort of subjective criteria idiots use to defend their idiotic theories. Try science, moron!”
Yes, I suppose so. But I remain obdurately unpersuaded. Or as they might say round here: Ultimamente, pues, ¿Qué me importa?
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Author’s note: The picture that accompanies this column features a mural by the Tapatío artist Carlos Mesie Rodriguez Balp.
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Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry
