Jodi you raise a very valid point. But I’m still appalled by the fact that the IOC took her medal away. C. J. Hunter is an adult and should know better than to take supplements without knowing what’s in them. Andreea Raducan (she has a name everybody) was given this supplement by the doctor with the understanding that it was legal. If you can’t trust your team doctor then who can you trust on this matter? She gained no advantage from it and she had no bad intentions in innocently accepting the pill. This should have been enough for the IOC to place the blame fully on the team doctor rather than take away this poor girl’s medal.
To answer the New York Times article, I would be just as outraged if this happened to another athlete under the same circumstances, meaning they were given a pill by their doctor with the understanding that there was nothing illegal about it. I shed no tears for the CJ Hunter’s of the world however because he has only himself to blame for the gaffe.
We make rules so that we have an objective standard to make consistent decisions. Perhaps the rule is incorrect, but that’s a different debate (and probably the debate that’s really going on here). However, whats-her-name broke the existing rules. She suffers the specified penalties. If the rules don’t contain exceptions or standards for mitigation, then they don’t. Even in civil disobedience, the purpose is to explicitly and publicly break a rule and suffer the consequences to dramatize the immorality or unreasonableness of the rule itself. It is still considered immoral and unethical to attempt to evade the consequences.
Perhaps the whole concept of rules is flawed. But the practice of making objectively determinable rules has a pretty long track record with good success. Without them, how do we determine on a consistent basis which rules need to be followed and which don’t? How do we judge the quality of excuses? If we have an objective standard for evaluating the excuses, then those become part of the rules, and we’re back where we started.
Again, you’re opening the door to excuses. I don’t know how you can get away from this. If your answer to the Raducan situation is “she didn’t know, so we should let her keep her medal” then that’s what every athlete will say when they get caught. They’ll just make sure they have a prescription for everything the get and whammo, no responsibilty.
As to Raducan being a kid, tough bananas. She’s an Olympic athlete and the rules are the same for everyone. You can’t have one set of rules for the 16-year-olds and another for the 18-year-olds.
But you’d shed tears if he claimed his doctor prescibed it for him? Ben Johnson was given steroids by his doctor - in fact, that’s where all his steroids came from. They were prescribed to him. Should we give Ben back his gold medal?