Juiced?

So apparently some parents involved in summer swim league have sold energy drinks in the parking lot during meets. I received an email about this yesterday. Sometimes I'm a little slow to grasp an essential point, so I was first thinking that the concern was that these parking lot sales were taking business from the concession stand.

Oh, how naive I can be.

Finally it dawned on me that the email was talking about Energy Drinks and the key word was Energy, not Drinks. Think: Red Bull, Full Throttle, Monster. Perhaps those involved weren't thinking about those tired, tired swimmers, but thinking more like Toddlers and Tiaras' parents who juice their three-year-olds up on Pixie Sticks and Diet Coke before sending them off on stage.

In other words, these were performance-enhancing drugs. Legal ones, put performance enhancing drugs.

Hmmm.

The sarcastic side of me wonders two things:

First, why weren't these energy drinks offered to those tired, tired parents enduring marathon meets without benefit of sprint or relay to pry their eyelids open as the nights grew long?

Second, why didn't some bright soul dispense with the energy drinks entirely and instead offer some adult beverages, preferably of the dry, red variety?

Really, people, let's use the old noggins.

I remember a little league game years ago. We were losing something like 19-2 when our assistant coach approached the umpire because the opposing team was consistently sidelining the one mediocre player on the team and subbing in their star batter in his place.

They were killing us and still felt a need to cheat.

In little league!

(And then I catch faultiness of my logic which seems to ask Why Cheat? if it's just little league or if you're already winning.  Of course, I don't believe this at all.)

I'm sure all sports fans sense the damage done by the Barry Bonds and Lance Armstrongs of the athletic world. We cheer watching the Olympics, but cheaters and dopers have cast a pall that may never go away. And drug testing has unintended casualties. I remember watching Andrea Raducan of Romania win a gold medal in gymnastics only to have it stripped away because her team physician had instructed her to take something like Sudafed for a cold. The drug she innocently took is no longer banned, but her gold medal was never reinstated.

Summer swim league is a long way from the Olympics, and energy drinks are certainly not banned. I scratch my head at all this, but then I'm the mom who took her kids to McDonald's before the last meet.

But do you know what else I did? I arranged a private swim lesson for one of the kids who was struggling with his strokes. Performance enhancing? Yep. And I plan to do that for a different child this week.