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What's wrong with drugs at the Olympics?
8/8/08|Times Online| by Simon Barnes in Beijing


---------------------------Photo courtesy of Ron Kuntz/AFP/Getty Images
Prime example: Johnson is the highest-profile athlete to be caught
using drugs but what was so bad?


The worst decision sport ever made was to start testing for drugs. Once they began to catch the cheats, all hell broke out and we began to lose the faith. In particular, we began to lose faith in the core Olympic sports of athletics and swimming. Now the world is full of people declaring that they don't care who wins what at the Olympic Games, because “they're all on something”.

When the Games come, many of these doubters will watch anyway, because the Olympic Games are a bit un-look-away-able. But for how much longer? The credibility gap is growing, and it grows, not when a cheat gets away with it, but every time a cheat gets nabbed. Every time the anti-doping forces do their job, the sport moves a little nearer death. Every time a cheat is missed, it's a small reprieve.

But it's only a few cynics arguing a line for the sake of it who say that testing should be scrapped and may the best pharmacist win. People who actually like watching sport - the people who actually matter in any professional sport - are mostly agreed that doping is a bad thing and that people who dope should be banned.

No one is quite sure why. Is it because doping is immoral? Or is it because doping is dangerous to the user? Normally, someone who knowingly does something dangerous in order to achieve great things is regarded as a bit of a hero, even if the task in question is comparatively pointless, like climbing Everest or sailing single-handed round the world. So isn't someone who knowingly takes a dangerous drug to win a gold medal for his country also a hero?

Well, the consensus replies with a big no, perhaps in the flawed belief that the clean athlete is doing it for his country while the cheat is doing it for himself. But the irrational response is very strong: perhaps distaste - even physical squeamishness - is as much the reason for the war on drugs as any lofty notions of morality. The squeamishness comes first, the morality second.

There is a sense in which drugging - altering your body - for the sake of mere sport makes sport too important. Sport, for those who watch, is just a pastime, an entertainment, we don't want it to be a life-and-death matter. There is also the argument that the troubled sports must stop doping because people will stop their children doing them.

The only certainty about doping is that people don't want it. The World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada), is committed to eliminating EPO (erythropoietin) - and there are more than 50 types to eliminate - even though it is not dangerous. And then there is all the stuff that lies ahead at genetic level. Is it immoral to select genes scientifically, rather than by the natural lottery? Is it immoral to work on embryos in vitro to produce a master race? Wada is looking hard for the moment when such talk becomes sporting reality.

As I listened to the high-ups of Wada explaining their standpoint yesterday, and their belief that they are “getting smarter”, that the arms race between testers and the tested is going the way they want, there was still an air of moral confusion. We don't know why it's wrong, but wrong it most certainly is. It's something to do with the purity of sport.

And I was reminded of the last great moral debate at the Olympic Games, another great problem, full of cheats and dodgers and scandals and people getting caught and people getting punished and banned and vilified for ever more. It was about professionalism. We laugh at the debate now: ha ha ha! Fancy banning a man for making a few quid from sport!

But it was an issue that raised the passions and broke the hearts, one that had its victims and its defiant, knowing cheats and liars. An Olympics without amateurism was unthinkable: now an Olympics without professionalism is equally unthinkable.

An Olympics with drugs is unacceptable, but will that too change in a changing society? And as the issue of genetic manipulation becomes increasingly relevant, who, apart from a religious fundamentalist, knows what we should think?

It is required behaviour at such a point for the journalist to give all the answers to the world's problems in a couple of pithy phrases and then go to the pub.

Alas, I can only complete 50 per cent of these tasks. At a certain level, the testers are ahead of the game and we may indeed get a clean (or at least undetected) 100 metres. But there are still greater questions of morality and danger, not to mention squeamishness, that lie ahead in the field of genetics. And it's not just the purity of sport that we have to worry about.

Advantage nobody as Federer and Co breeze into town

What do the following have in common: the Olympic Games, the blue whale, Mount Everest, the pyramid of Cheops and the planet Jupiter? Answer: they are the biggest. They are things that not only exemplify but also define the matter of bigness. They are about ultimates.

An Olympic gold medal is the ultimate achievement in anything that is accepted as an Olympic sport. That's what Olympic means. An Olympic gold medal is the prize in comparison with which all other prizes are dross. Nothing can compare with a prize that is only offered every four years, for which most people get but one try.

There is no prize in rowing to compare to the things Redgrave and Pinsent hang around their necks; there is no prize in athletics to compare to the gold medals of Kelly and Lord C; there is no prize in gymnastics to compare to ones won by Nadia Comaneci at the supreme moment of her life and of her sport.

Or to put it another way, what the hell is tennis doing at the Olympic Games? The big event of tennis is not the quadrennial chance to win an Olympic gold medal, it is the four-times-a-year chance to win a grand-slam tournament, or, if you prefer, the once-a-year chance to win Wimbledon.

Roger Federer is here and was doing his press conference yesterday. Good on him for wanting to compete, but there's a bigger event in line for him and it starts on August 25, the day after the Games end: the US Open. There are only 64 players in the singles draw here, half as many as Wimbledon, and they play only three sets, not five. This is a run-of-the-mill ATP event with the unearned bonus of an Olympic gold medal for the winner. Tennis is not an Olympic sport: it's just a sport that they play at the Olympic Games.

 

Buzzby

The reason we don't allow performance-enhancing drugs in sports is simple: we want to see a contest between athletes, not between drugs. We want to see what a un-enhanced human can do with the best of training and the highest effort. If drugs were allowed, it would be impossible for there to be a level playing field. Without a level playing field, competitions are meaningless.

If these drugs were legal, athletes would be pushed to use them at ever higher and ever more dangerous levels in order to remain competitive. Athletes with too much desire to win would kill themselves. With enough drugs, I could run a mile in under four minutes. I'd drop dead at the finish line, but that's a small price to pay for winning.

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JohnBoySmoker

Performance enhancing drugs take a good part of the whole idea about fair competition out of the picture and then it comes down to who has the best chemists on staff.
As far as other drugs, well the Chinese will throw you under the jail for pleasure seeking types of drugs.

Delta

Yeah, no joke. This is a no brainer. Drugs are not and should not be allowed in sports because it bypasses the entire point of sports in the first place.

king cola

Yeah when a record gets broken and the person is using performance drugs it really does make it unfair. With the Olympics records are broken all the time and it's not fair if they are using enhancing drugs when those records get broken.

 

ShivaSpaceTechnology

there was a comedian one time who suggested we have a stoned olympics because that would make it harder and they must be tested to make sure they have enough


i think all the athletes should take steroids it would make it more interesting and fun to watch