It's been a busy week on the cheating front, and I'm not even talking about NASCAR, where Jeff Gordon was sent to the back of the Daytona pack for his quarter panels.

Barry Bonds finally signed his new contract with the Giants, meaning it is only a matter of time before a product of modern chemistry owns baseball's career home run record.

On the bright side, the Colorado lawyer-leaker in the federal BALCO case reached a plea agreement with prosecutors that let San Francisco Chronicle reporters Mark Fainaru- Wada and Lance Williams off the hook for the work that led to Game of Shadows, the best piece of sports journalism in our time.

Had they imprisoned the guys who broke open baseball's steroids scandal, it would have sent, shall we say, a mixed message to all those kids that are ostensibly the basis for the rules against performance-enhancing drugs.

Unfortunately, Shadows demonstrated beyond any doubt that some athletes will risk their careers, not to mention their health, for the chance at immortality or riches or both.

Today, they don't even have to risk their careers. Nobody tests for human growth hormone. In fact, scientists continue to debate the validity of the tests under development.

How many football players do you suppose used growth hormone last season, knowing they could do so with impunity? How many baseball players do you suppose will use it this season? We know from Shadows it was already part of the cocktail BALCO provided many of its clients.

"Or insulin-like growth factor," Charles E. Yesalis, the national expert on performance-enhancing drugs from Penn State, told me the other day. "We also know that unless you make widespread use of the radio isotope test, you can get by with using testosterone creams and gels, which, in my judgment, enhance the effect of growth hormone.

"So you can get by drug testing. Growth hormone, IGF-1, testosterone, all real stuff, is readily available and affordable. They work, and there's a lot at stake. There's motive."

The solution?

"I don't think there is one," Yesalis said.

Which raises this question,offered in all seriousness:

Should we give up the battle against performance-enhancing drugs rather than maintain a hypocritical system in which some drug users are ruined and others achieve immortality?

Yesalis has written three books about the use and effects of performance-enhancing drugs in sports, but even he is beginning to wonder about increasingly invasive testing requirements that shred athletes' privacy without any hope of guaranteeing they are clean.

NFL players' union chief Gene Upshaw has refused to sanction drawing blood for the fledgling growth hormone test, which he regards as unproven. "From what I've heard about that test, I agreed with the players' association," Yesalis said.

"And then I have another problem. There have been stories about athletes in the Olympic sports having to literally log onto computers and tell people where they're going to be almost by the hour. I think that's so far beyond the pale. And it bothers me to take blood from people. It's bad enough you've got to pee in the bottle in front of somebody. Now they're going to start sticking you with needles? And when we get to gene doping they're going to start forcing you to take muscle biopsies?

"If this were for our national security, it would probably scare you what I'd be willing to do. But this is for kid games."

Yesalis is 60 now, and he's come to the conclusion that those of us who care about the "integrity" of athletic competition will die off soon enough.

"I think there's two groups that are reasonably exercised about drugs in sport," he said.

"One, guys over 45 who tear up during Field of Dreams. And I do, OK? I remember the last catch I had with my dad. And two, sportswriters who, I don't know if all of you, but a fair amount of you are into it because you like sports.

"I still am a college professor. I'm emeritus, but I'm teaching a course this semester and I talk to a lot of young people. Most young people absolutely don't care. In fact, a couple of them say, 'Why do you and my dad tear up during Field of Dreams?

"And the reason is they view what you may consider sacred as the same thing as going to a Black Eyed Peas concert. It's just entertainment; absolutely nothing more. March Madness, Super Bowl, college bowl games, big league baseball, it is all big entertainment."

Maybe we're the ones behind the curve.The six best single-season home run totals in baseball history were very likely achieved with chemical enhancement.

The career mark will be soon enough. Does anybody honestly believe we're putting the genie back in the bottle now?

When we fogeys are gone, maybe the asterisks will go to the people from the pre-steroid era. Roger Maris will get one - again - as the single-season home run champion back in the day, when baseball players were still the size nature made them.

kriegerd@RockyMountainNews.com

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