TowerView's Michael Mueller recently caught up with 1992 Olympic Gold Medalist Mike Conley. Conley, who claimed the triple jump championship in Barcelona, has maintained strong ties to the U.S. track community. He shared with towerview his thoughts on the rampant accusations of athlete steroid use during the last several months and what this means for America's track superstars.
TV: Have you been surprised by the steroids accusations for America's current track stars?
CONLEY: I am surprised, but the main comment I want to have on that is no comment. I think it gets [more] press than it should get, and we have a lot of athletes in our sport that are doing good things that are going unnoticed because of the steroid accusations. If someone's doing something bad, why give them ink when a thousand other athletes are doing something good and getting unnoticed for it?
TV: How commonplace was doping when you competed?
CONLEY: To be honest with you, if you compare the sport of track and field with other sports, and you get the statistics, you will see that there's not a drug problem in the sport of track and field. What you will see is that every time there is a drug problem, it's on the front page. That's the difference.
TV: So what needs to be done to solve that problem?
CONLEY: Let me put this in historical perspective for you: The first sport to do out-of-competition testing was track and field. That was brought on by the athletes of track and field; I was a part of that. We're the only sport at the time doing out-of-competition testing. Our sport catches people. Other sports and other countries don't test. When we catch people, guess what it's called: a drug problem. So if we didn't test, and we didn't test people, would it be a problem? How many people knew that baseball had a problem? Was it a problem four years ago?
TV: Probably, but they didn't test.
CONLEY: Exactly.
TV: But would you say doping regulations are stringent enough right now?
CONLEY: U.S. track athletes were tested over 2,400 times and will be tested over 3,000 times this year, and that's just a pool of our top 400 athletes [who have been tested by] different agencies across the world. People don't understand that if there's one positive, [it's] just one test.
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