JULY 30 — British sport has been in a reflective mood over the last few days.
The Wimbledon tennis championships and the British Lions rugby union tour of Australia are done and dusted, the new Premier League football season is still nearly three weeks away and the third Ashes cricket test match between England and Australia doesn’t begin until Thursday.
With the country’s biggest sports taking a rare break from our television screens, the scheduling gap has allowed lower-profile events to claim some rare headlines.
In particular, athletics resurfaced into national prominence with this weekend’s staging of the Anniversary Games to commemorate last year’s hugely successful hosting of the Olympic Games in London.
With memories of last year’s gold and glory still strong, the Olympic Stadium attracted sell-out crowds to enjoy the sight of Mo Farah — who became a national hero this time last year with his double gold medal haul — cruising to victory in the 3,000 metres, while Usain Bolt confirmed his status as the fastest man on earth with a comprehensive win in the 100 metres.
Despite the celebratory atmosphere, however, it’s fair to say the event was overshadowed by the re-emergence of the sport’s darkest menace, a topic that everyone would much prefer to ignore — doping.
The recent news that Jamaica’s Asafa Powell and the Tyson Gay of the US, two finalists in last year’s 100 metres Olympics final, have both failed drugs test was a horrible blow for sports fans to contemplate.
Whenever drugs scandals of that nature occur, there is always an inevitable accompanying question: who else? If Powell and Gay — two of their sport’s biggest stars — have been doping, was everybody else also getting up to the same misdeeds?
In the wake of the news, Bolt reacted swiftly to once again insist he is “clean”, and it would be horrendous if that ever proved not to be the case. The charismatic Jamaican has become a genuine global superstar thanks to his astonishing sequence of sprint victories, and the possibility that he has only done so by cheating is sickening to imagine.
And there is a possibility. By his own admission, Bolt takes vitamin tablets to supplement his diet as a matter of course and isn’t always familiar with the precise details of the pills he’s popping — those checks are within the domain of his trusted entourage. But if Bolt isn’t exactly sure of what he’s taking, even he can’t be 100 per cent certain that he has never doped.
Indeed, Gay has made just that defence, arguing he was the innocent victim of a third party’s wrongdoings. Whether Gay’s particular claim is true or not, it can hardly be a unique situation. Athletes themselves are not the only people competing for glory in major sporting events: a phalanx of backroom staff, including fitness coaches, physicians, dieticians and sports scientists, also make or break their reputations on the achievements of their charges.
With honour, glory and significant riches available for those associated with champion sportsmen and women, it’s perfectly conceivable that some of them will be tempted to improve performance by slipping “a little something” into the dietary intake of their trusting and unknowing athletes.
More frequently, however, offenders know exactly what they are doing, having made a conscious decision to pursue victory at all costs by living the life of a drugs cheat.
And, of course, athletics is by no means the only sport to be affected. Lance Armstrong perhaps did cycling a favour in the long run when he revealed his seven Tour de France victories had been achieved with the assistance of performance-enhancing drugs, and it would be naive in the extreme to believe that any sport is completely free from doping.
Although we should, of course, strongly condemn guilty parties for playing outside the rules, we can hardly be surprised when it happens. The human species is, by nature, strongly competitive. Indeed, our desire to win is the driving force behind evolution. We progress as a species by finding ways to become better than our peers.
If some of those methods are underhand, so be it — there will always be individuals whose competitive instinct is sufficiently strong to take a gamble that they won’t get caught. As the American comedian WC Fields quipped: “A thing worth having is a thing worth cheating for.”
In any field of human endeavour, there will always be cheats. Whether it’s in business (fraudulent bankers), educational achievements (students copying the work of classmates), politics (government officials lying to cover up unpalatable scandals), sport (doping athletes) or even romance (men lying about their extra-marital activities), it is absolutely impossible to prevent some people from stepping outside the lines of acceptable behaviour in the pursuit of success.
If we want to be serious about stopping cheating, all we can do is to ensure that rigorous regulations are strictly enforced. We can’t stop cheaters from cheating, but we can make it a lot more likely they’ll get caught.
The chief difficulty in this quest is ensuring that drug-detecting technology is better than the technology being used by the cheaters and their “advisers”. That task requires serious investment, which is unlikely to be readily forthcoming for a topic that most people would prefer not to talk about in the first place.
At the moment, drug-testing procedures across all sports are woefully inadequate and open to abuse. WADA — the World Anti-Doping Agency — knows this and is currently drawing up a new code of conduct which is likely to be announced later this year.
It should be as stringent as possible and receive unequivocal support from FIFA, the PGA, the ICC, the ITF and every other global sporting governing body.
If not, we will continue to receive unpleasant surprises like Tyson Gay and Asafa Powell.
* This is the personal opinion of the columnist.
