Written by: Patrick Galvin Tiger Woods hit his much-anticipated first tee shot yesterday at the 2010 Masters, amidst surprisingly warm fan-fare, some controversy, and a couple planes flying through the air with banners that read insults.
Written by: Mike While everyone in the country is concentrated on the growing number of alleged mistresses coming forward claiming they had a romp with the worlds #1 golfer, a new plot is developing, one in which Woods may be in the thick of. The transgressions Tiger admits to, while disturbing from a family and personal perspective, are nothing new to society. All women in think men cheat on them and every few months when there is no news, the gossip magazines just make up a story about Angelina Jolie breaking up with Brad Pitt.
But today a Canadian doctor, who is linked to supposedly working with Tiger, is under investigation by the FBI and Canadian Mounties for a stop at the border where Human growth hormone and Actovegin, a drug extracted from calf’s blood, were found in Galea’s bag in the car (according to the NY Times)
As you dive deeper into the story, and how it’s related to El Tigre, Dr. Galea, visited Woods four times in February and March to provide platelet-rich plasma therapy as he recovered from knee surgery. This therapy involves taking a blood sample, removing red blood cells that leave the platelet rich plasma, and re-injecting into the patient to expedite the healing process.
Of course, Tiger was not the first athlete to undergo the therapy. Early in 2009 Hines Ward, a Super Bowl MVP sprained his MCL in the AFC Championship game. By all estimates of traditional medicines, it was unlikely that Ward would play 2 weeks later in the Super Bowl. He did the therapy (after reviewing it’s history), and rigorous rehab. He played at least 2 weeks before playing if he had done a traditional recovery, yet the story went largely unreported. Perhaps it will take a mega-star like Tiger to bring this into our collective conscious.
With that said, the debate of the 2010’s may be just exactly what is a steroid or performance enhancing drug? In the 2000’s the media and congress went after baseball. Society was painted a picture of artificially created pharmaceuticals that players were hiding in their lockers and going to seedy ‘clinics’ to get the drug administered. The reality is we may now see legitimate procedures being done on athletes by credited doctors who are pushing the boundaries of scientific medicine.
The line between what is and isn’t a performance enhancement is blurred more than ever. On one hand, what they are putting in your body with this particular treatment was created by your body, nothing artificial about it. On the other, your body never produced the platelet rich blood; it had to be modified in a lab to get the desired result.
As we learn more about this, and other therapies, opinions will form and lines will be drawn. Professional leagues will have a new, but all to familiar issue to deal with; defining what is acceptable for its athletes to do in terms of personal fitness. The talking heads on TV will likely be varied in their opinions, and everyone with a twitter account will chime in with their 140 character take. But at the end of the day, it will ultimately be the athletes themselves who push and influence the policy. It just remains to be seen to what medical extremes they are willing to go in order to achieve athletic success.
