That unrecognisable thing called sports
By
Alaa Abdel-Ghani
One of the biggest sports stories of this year had little to do with sports. Instead, it had everything to do with unsportsmanlike people. A new steroid that was designed to evade testing -- Tetrahydrogestrinone -- now famously known as THG, hit the market, and a possible conspiracy among chemists, coaches and athletes could now be a chilling reality.
Six US track and field stars -- a significant number of athletes from a single country in one sport -- might have used THG. That might not sound too unusual; track and field and drugs have been wedded for decades. But the accused could be 40 or more athletes in other sports as disparate as skiing, rugby and horse racing. The most recent big-name scalp is European 100m champion Dwain Chambers who tested positive for THG twice and is almost certain to receive a minimum two-year ban that will keep him out of the Athens Olympics.
What's most frightening about THG is how it was discovered; it had nothing to do with cutting- edge science. A ticked-off coach anonymously sent in a syringe dripping with a performance- enhancing drug. Call it a very fortuitous delivery, if you will, from a coach perhaps upset because a high-profile athlete had either ditched him or perhaps he himself had been denied access to the performance-enhancing drug for his athletes.
Whatever the case, the cat is now out the bag, but the fear is that THG is just the tip of the iceberg. How many other drugs are out there, flowing through athletes' bodies and helping them towards gold medals and world records? We may never know. And maybe we don't care to know. Does the public really care that some athletes cheat?
When Mark McGwire was chasing Roger Maris' home run record in 1998, and was found to be using androstenedione, few fans seemed to care that he was taking a substance that would get him tossed out of the Olympic Games. The reaction was a collective shrug.
It is now routine for Lance Armstrong and other athletes in endurance sports to spend their nights sleeping in altitude tents or chambers that allow them to increase their red blood cell counts without having to book a room in the Alps, Rockies or Himalayas. It is routine for athletes in sports such as tennis to travel with portable electrical stimulation machines that allow them to contract leg or shoulder muscles without having to lift a weight or a racket.
Athletes, who should be the paragon of healthy youth, often seek an edge right up to the legal limit. They ride stationary bikes wearing oxygen masks, undergo magnetic laser therapy, hop onto neuro-mechanical stimulators that use small vibrations to activate normally dormant muscle fibres.
All of this is within the rules, but is this what we want sports to become?
It is such shortcuts that bother me. Innate talent aside, success in sports should be linked with effort, not some plug-in gizmo. Though you cannot consider an altitude chamber or a stimulation machine as doping in the classic sense, what they share with needle and vial is that they are quick, unnatural fixes.
That's not what sport is all about, and if sport has become that, then the athletes in question should instead go paint or write books but not get involved in an activity that will make a complete travesty of sport.
While some push the ethical envelope, some are downright cheats. There will always be an incentive to cheat in sport. The professional era has seen to that. And in this win-at-all-cost age, where money and fame is the end all, athletes are more willing than ever to seek out an edge -- whether legally or illegally. But we would much prefer it to be legitimate.
I don't believe for a minute that the discovery of THG will curb the use of banned performance- enhancers. More new substances capable of boosting athletic performances without detection are bound to follow. By now, in fact, chemists have probably moved on to the next designer steroid.
The problem seems so pervasive and so resistant to efforts to curtail it that the tendency is to just resign ourselves to the fact that steroids are here to stay. It seems increasingly unlikely that the system that creates and markets performance-enhancing drugs will ever fall apart, so all we can do is watch while the athletes do.
Meanwhile, no one will be able to watch one game in any sport without wondering whether the winners won because of hard work, dedication and skill, or because of a good neighbourhood chemist shop.
