Pee In Here, Please

Filed in archive Golf News on September 21, 2007

The New Drug Czar, Tim Finchem
Courtesy: AP

It was a touch of irony. On the day that a U.S. sports arbitration board found 2006 Tour de France winner Floyd Landis of the United States guilty of doping, the major golf bodies finally agreed to get on board with a drug policy and signed off on one yesterday, under the auspices of the World Golf Foundation.

Landis has been battling his innocence since his first negative test shortly after winning just over a year ago. But the arbitration board ruled 2 to 1 that he had cheated and the world body of cycling, UCI, announced he would be stripped of his title and the laurels handed to Spanish rider Oscar Pereiro who had finished second behind Landis in 2006.

Landis has one more appeal process left: the Court of Arbitration for Sport in Switzerland.

Cycling is a mess, world track and field is fraught with cheating and the Olympic Games have seen many, many scandals - all facts that are surely not lost on the world's major golf bodies - the PGA Tour, USGA, R&A, European Tour, LPGA and PGA of America.

These august golf entities have agreed on a list of banned substances that closely mirrors the one used by WADA, the World Anti Doping Agency and implemented by the International Olympic Committee, FIFA and other sports bodies.

It's about time. Never mind those who say golfers are gentlemen and gentlewomen whose integrity is too great to ever stoop so low as to cheat with drugs. Professional golfers don't have honor cornered merely because they play golf.

Temptation is a human foible.