Does a ‘clean’ sporting contest really exist anymore?
Last week has once again laid weak claims that humans are capable of superhuman things in the sporting arena without the pills, the syringes and the tonics.
Pakistan pacer Mohammed Asif failed a dope test during the IPL and was suspended by the Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB) on Tuesday; the ongoing Tour de France is still awash with drug abusers, with assertions that along the 3500km route, one will find more syringes and empty drug bottles than cyclists on two wheels.
And with the Beijing Olympics just round the corner, doping is one of the biggest concerns for the authorities and organisers alike.
The use of performance-enhancing drugs is so prevalent now that chess might be the only clean sport. Or have there been claims that Viswanathan Anand drinks ‘brain tonics’ every night? It has reached such a crisis-point that wiping out doping from sport no longer looks the solution.
The administrators’ problem with doping is that it gives the athlete an unfair advantage over the others. But athletes argue that if they don’t dope, they are at a disadvantage because everybody else is doping. If you can’t beat them, join them. ‘Dope cheats’ around the world vouch by this adage.
Tainted Canadian athlete Ben Johnson said in a recent interview: “They’re all at it. How shall we put it to avoid being sued by everybody? OK, virtually all the big names, the winners, the stars all the fans come out to see...they’re on drugs. Nothing has changed as a result of all the controversies because without steroids it’s not humanly possible to keep producing the performances.”
More and more offenders have been caught due to technology that’s evolving each day. But, athletes have also found a way to get around it.
So, because there has been no solution to curb the practice, suggestions that doping should be made legal have cropped up. In the 1990s, after various Olympic doping scandals, International Olympic Committee president Juan Antonio Samaranch was quoted in a newspaper as saying: “Doping now is everything that, firstly, is harmful to an athlete’s health and, secondly, artificially augments his performance. If it’s just the second case, for me that’s not doping.” It was believed that IOC chief was hinting at ‘legalising’ the practice.
Johnson, who still claims that naturally he was the fastest man ever, believes that without drugs, sporting feats that have been glorified over the years would never be a reality. “You would break down after six or seven weeks. Everybody is right in believing that steroids enable the body to recover quickly so you can train more. Everybody is wrong thinking that steroids in themselves are bad,” he was quoted as saying recently.
Mankind has always tested the limits. In its argument, legalising drug use could be another one of the endeavours — to break the 9-second barrier, to jump more than 10 metres, to cycle more than 5000 kilometres, to become supermen. Let the athletes be allowed to pump into their body whatever they think gives them the advantage but with it be told of the consequences, of the hazards to their health. And then, let’s have some competition.
