Are doctored gloves and PEDs equal offenses?
An issue that’s come up recently in light of Antonio Margarito’s attempt to use doctored gloves in a fight with Shane Mosley is whether that kind of offense is on equal footing with performance enhancing drugs. After all, in the last twenty years PEDs have become incredibly popular in most sports, including boxing.
Few fighters can brag as much about burning as many fields of controversy as Margarito, but things are still heating up with the recent announcement by Top Rank Promotions that Pacquiao will fight Margarito as surrogate for Mayweather. Many argue a cheater shouldn’t be rewarded for cheating. And yet that seems to be exactly what is happening here—a fighter could have permanently hurt someone in the ring with plastered wraps (and maybe did, in Miguel Cotto), and he’s punished by being awarding the highest grossing fight of his caree,. and surely the highest purse.
All this for a guy who doesn’t even have a boxing license right now.
But there are various forms of cheating, and whether one is worse than another is a matter of opinion. There’s the issue of quantity over quality, which exemplifies the current situation with Margarito. Plastered wraps may seem a lot worse than PEDs because they could hurt someone and a fighter gains a serious advantage over his opponent, but the frequency of that form of cheating is incredibly low compared to PEDs. Does that make the two equally punishable?
It’s no secret that PEDs have been in use in the boxing world. Mosley admitted to taking banned substances in 2003. Fernando Vargas also had traces of a synthetic anabolic steroid in his system following a fight with Oscar de la Hoya, and James Toney tested positive for a banned substance after a fight with John Ruiz. The list goes on and on.
But all of these fighters failed to gain the kind of stigma attached to them that Margarito now finds everywhere he goes.
At the same time, if the punishment isn’t the same for plaster and PEDs, the logic is the same: both allow for unfair advantage and put opponents in danger.
Executive director of the Pennsylvania Athletic Commission Greg Sirb was recently put with the question of which he is worse.
“It’s a good question. Let me put it this way: I don’t think (what Margarito did) is more serious. I don’t like to split hairs like that. You’re cheating. You’re cheating to get an advantage. It’s the same thing. To say that one’s worse than the other is splitting hairs.”
At the same time, Sirb acknowledged that the difference may reside in the fact that it’s not exactly to what extent steroids or other PEDs enhance a boxer's performance.
“There’s no question that we have a problem with steroids and growth hormones in boxing. But when a boxer has taken those, he’s obviously going to gain weight, and they have to get moved up to another weight class. So there’s like a little safety net there for boxing. If he’s taking steroids, he’s going to get bigger, he’s going to gain weight and he’s going to move out of that weight class.”
There is also the question of personal training and diet planning. Today with the right technology fighters are literally able to peak for a fight, not just in terms of performance, but also in terms of diet and planning, all sorts of factors hitherto unavailable. It’s nearly a fact that with the proper diet specialist you can improve nearly all facets of performance and health.
For now much of the debate is going to be over the validity of the suspension handed out to Margarito. If a fighter can flaunt the decision of an athletic commission to go onto the biggest fight of his career, boxing may want to take a good hard look at some of its punishment policies.
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