The worst person in sports, and perhaps in a whole realm of endeavors, is Dick Pound, the autocrat charged with running the World Anti-Doping Agency. Case in point: yesterday's one-year suspension of American medal hopeful in the skeleton, Zach Lund. Mr. Lund was booted out of the Olympics following detection of the anti-baldness medication, Propecia, after a blood test last November. Propecia has an ingredient that can be used to mask steroid use, although it would take an intake of massive proportions for it to have that intended effect.

And Lund, 26, is clearly an individual who has reason to take the drug, a conclusion reflected in the Court for the Arbitration of Sports, which upheld the penalty in spite of issuing a finding Lund to "be an honest athlete, who was open and frank about his failures", and ruling that "it was entirely satisfied that Mr Lund was not a cheat". In fact, Lund had disclosed his use of the drug for some five years before the hammed came down this time, and it took more than a year for the drug screeners to even find the trace amounts of the masking ingredient in his system.

Enter Mr. Pound, whose previous notoriety on this site came last summer, in his role in backing a fraudulent attempt to "test" Lance Armstrong, as well as his frequent attacks on the sports of baseball, soccer, and ice hockey for not dishing out lifetime bans to first-offenders. Pound, exulting over his ability to crush the dreams of an athlete over a technicality, stated that whether or not Lund was a cheat was beside the point:

There have to be other treatments for hair loss, for hair replacement, than stuff that is a masking agent — that are on the prohibited list. I think he was lucky to get one year, frankly. (emphasis mine)

Damned lucky, I'd say; now he won't miss any big competitions in 2007.

In addition to being a clueless asshole, Pound may have done more than anyone to completely discredit his movement for the public to take performance-enhancing drugs in sports seriously. If Lund is not a cheat, if he's taking Propecia to stop male-pattern baldness, without the high blood pressure side effects that other drugs (like Rogaine) have, and not to mask the use of anabolic steroids, which is what the regulation is designed to stop, he shouldn't receive any suspension, much less one that will take him out of a competition he's spent his lifetime gearing for. And he shouldn't have some smug little hitler suggesting that he should have gotten a hair transplant instead.