Alex Rodriguez and Justin Gatlin Are Having Unbelievable Summers

Alex Rodriguez is defying age. Yeah, that's it. That's all it is. He's 40 years old and suddenly cranking out home runs again. He is on pace to hit more of them in this season than he did during much of his 30s. That's redemption for a guy who's been suspended twice for performance-enhancing drugs. He can put Cousin Yuri behind him and prove that he can do this clean.

Justin Gatlin is defying age, too. He's 33 years old—ancient for a sprinter—and about to run down Usain Bolt at the world championships this week. He's been suspended twice for PED use, most recently from 2006 to 2010, and is posting faster times now than he did a decade ago.

We have two athletes, both proven steroid users in the past, doing unbelievable things this summer. Unbelievable, as in you might not be able to believe in them. We haven't really had this problem before, of suspended athletes coming back so strong when they're so old. It might be that Rodriguez and Gatlin are doing this cleanly, shifting conventions about what aging athletes can accomplish in the manner of George Foreman or Peyton Manning. But it might be something else.

"When you see this upswing all of a sudden from someone who's been going down, down, down, yes, that raises suspicion," said Charles Yesalis, a professor emeritus at Penn State and an expert on PED use in sports.

Yet there is a third possible explanation for a resurgent Rodriguez and Gatlin: that they are no longer putting banned substances into their bodies, but still benefiting from PED use. How so? Well, in 2013, a group of researchers at the University of Oslo published a study in the Journal of Physiology that suggested steroid users might still get a boost even after they stop juicing. The researchers, led by professor of physiology Kristian Gundersen, gave small doses of steroids to mice. Then they took the mice off the steroids until their bodies returned to their usual size. Three months later, the mice were exercised and their muscles grew by 30 percent in six days, whereas the muscles of the mice in a control group, which hadn't been given steroids, grew only six percent. Gundersen wrote that while there are similar physiological mechanisms in humans, more research is needed.

"I have no reason to doubt that study," said Don Catlin, the anti-doping pioneer who founded the first sports drug-testing lab in the United States. He's developed a number of testing techniques, and even ran the test that caught Gatlin in 2006. "Any time you have an important finding like that in medicine, though, you want somebody to repeat it. And I don't think anybody has done that. It takes a long time for anabolic steroids to have their positive effects and improve performance, and likewise it takes a long time for them to return to normal, I believe. I don't think there's enough data yet."

In the study, Gundersen suggested that the World Anti-Doping Agency revisit its suspension policies to ensure that athletes don't still have an unfair advantage when they are allowed back.

Michael Joyner, a human performance expert at the Mayo Clinic, agrees: "I think they need to consider longer bans."

Joyner said that steroid use leads to "adaptations" in your cells, and if a former steroid user starts working out again years after doping, those workouts could "re-awaken" those adaptations. He equated it to weightlifters who know that they can reach a certain strength level, take ample time off for, say, an injury, and then come back and reach the same level again far more quickly than they did before.

Your muscles remember. Your cells remember. It's easier to get it back than it is to get there in the first place. Suppose that Rodriguez and Gatlin—and countless other PED users who did the crime, did the time, and are now back on the field—are still benefiting unfairly from banned substances they took years ago. Should they be allowed to continue competing at all? If additional research confirms the results of the Norway experiment, Catlin said, he would also favor longer doping bans, maybe even permanent ones.

Of course, it's possible that Rodriguez and Gatlin are clean and that they're also not benefitting from PED aftereffects. Catlin, Yesalis, and Joyner all agreed that it's rare, but not unheard of, for older athletes to enjoy late-career success. Today, older athletes enjoy better nutrition, more advanced training regimens, and vastly improved medical care—torn knee ligaments decimated Gale Sayers, but a ripped ACL hardly slowed down Adrian Peterson.

Gatlin has told reporters that not competing for four years during his PED suspension has left his body feeling "like a 27-year-old instead of a 33-year-old who's run those four years and feels tired." Maybe that's enough. Maybe Rodriguez feels mentally fresh, free from a bitter, lengthy legal battle with MLB and better able to focus on his sport. Maybe offseason hip surgeries have given him a new lease on athletic life.

What's clear is that both men are producing extraordinary numbers. Rodriguez has 24 home runs, and is on pace to hit 35 or 36 this year. He has only hit more than that once since 2005, when he had 54 homers in 2007.

According to ESPN's Home Run Tracker—which figures out where the ball would bounce if it hit the ground and also makes adjustments for wind and temperature to come up with an accurate distance numbers—Rodriguez's home runs, on average, are going 404 feet this year. Since 2007, when Rodriguez was 31 on Opening Day, he has had just two seasons in which his average home run distance was longer than this season.

Gatlin's numbers are even more preposterous. He won the Olympic gold medal in the 100-meter dash in 2004 in 9.77 seconds. Eleven years later, he has run the same race in 9.74 and 9.75.

According to an analysis of sprint performance and aging by Roger Pielke at the website Sporting Intelligence, in the 100- and 200-meter dashes, "the fastest runners ever, as a collective, do not improve after age 30." In fact, Pielke found that top 10 fastest male sprinters in the world stopped improving as a group by about age 25.

"Gatlin's times and improvement are, it is safe to say, unprecedented among these groups of runners," Pielke wrote.

British 400-meter hurdles champion Dai Greene has been outspoken about Gatlin's resurgence, and seemed to grasp intuitively what those Norwegian researchers believe they've discovered in their lab.

"He should never be running these times for the 100 meters and 200 meters,'' Greene told the BBC last year. "But he's still doing it and you have to look at his past and ask how it is still affecting him now, because the average person wouldn't be able to do that.

"It shows one of two things: either he's still taking performance-enhancing drugs to get the best out of him at his advanced age, or the ones he did take are still doing a fantastic job. Because there is no way he can still be running that well at this late point in his career."

An old football coach axiom holds that three things can happen when you pass the ball, and two of them are bad. Similarly, there are three ways to explain Rodriguez and Gatlin. Two aren't good. The third is all but unbelievable. And that's the problem.