Michael Ventre

Sometimes I try to imagine what sports would be like if steroids and other banned performance-enhancing substances were allowed.

Take baseball, for instance. I can envision a park that has been widened and expanded, where the dugout benches have been reinforced with tungsten steel so players can’t rip them out, where the clubhouse contains cages rather than lockers so the players don’t tear each other limb from limb during post-game ‘roid rages, where heckling fans are kept behind barbed-wire fences for their own protection, and where umpires are always flanked by bodyguards.

And the players themselves? Huge, Neanderthal-like creatures with eyebrow ridges, skulls the size of medicine balls and arms like anvils whose roars would scare off a Tyrannosaurus rex.

I figure we’re about a year away from that. Two at the most.

I don’t mean the part about steroids and other substances being allowed. That won’t happen. The sporting bodies involved would never relent on that. Maintaining the perception that they’re attacking and winning the war on chemical cheating enables them to perpetuate an image of integrity when in reality their sports are decaying from the inside because usage is brazen and rampant.

No, I’m referring to the fact that, despite their best intentions, the lords of these sports are standing by helplessly as athletes, fueled by lust for glory and money, juice themselves to their little hearts’ content.

Because it’s impossible to tell the cheaters from the honest ones, it’s also impossible to look upon any extraordinary athletic achievement these days without suspicion.

Just assume everyone is cheating.

Christian Hartmann / AP Floyd Landis delivered one of the most amazing Tour de France performances in history, but he could be stripped of his victory because of doping.

These are sad times. It used to be when a baseball player hit a lot of home runs, or a football player displayed incredible feats of strength and quickness, or a track star broke a world record, we cheered. Now, we offer guarded praise, cautious adulation, until the tests come back.

The Floyd Landis situation — even after the results of his “B” test showed that the urine sample he provided was abnormal — still isn't resolved because weeks of hearings will follow.

Still, this means that despite all the dirty looks that Lance Armstrong received during his seven-year reign in the Tour de France, Landis figured the rewards in cheating were worth the risks of getting caught.

Sprinter Justin Gatlin, the world record holder in the 100 meters who tested positive for amphetamines in 2001, failed another drug test recently and now faces a lifetime ban.

If he’s guilty, it means that despite being nabbed once before and threatened with exile from his sport, he decided the rewards in cheating were worth the risks of getting caught.