Drugs in Sport
The Government have recently announced plans to implement a harder line on drugs in sport in the run-up to the 2012 Olympics in London. A report by a House of Commons Select Committee accuses UK Sport, which overseas drug-testing in Britain, of “unacceptable complacency” and said more needed to be done to identify and prevent doping scandals; including a suggestion that the responsibility for testing for drugs should be removed from UK Sport, due to a conflict of interests as they are the body that fund athletes’ training and preparation. Sports Minister Richard Caborn has yet to agree, preferring instead to discuss increasing the length of bans handed out to competitors found guilty of drugs offences.
Yet drug abuse in sport has been rife for years, and though lifetime bans from the Olympics are now automatic for any athlete guilty of using performance enhancing drugs, we must surely question whether the present system in any guise can ever truly work.
At the 2001 World Athletics Championships in Edmonton, Canada, the golden girl of British athletics, Paula Radcliffe, caused a stir by holding up a sign saying “EPO Cheats out” while watching a heat for the 5,000m. Her anger was directed mainly at Olga Yegorova, who despite recently testing positive for EPO, a blood-doping agent, was taking part in that 5,000m. Since then some of the biggest names in athletics have been implicated and occasionally banned from competition. Britain’s own Dwain Chambers has served a two-year ban; the USA’s Tim Montgomery has been banned and all his successes (including a world record) have been removed from the history books. Another USA Sprinter, World Champion Justin Gatlin, has been punished similarly. Yet Athletics is still suffering; recently Kostas Kenteris and Katerina Thanou, the two disgraced Greek sprinters who tried to mock the sport and disguise avoiding a third consecutive drugs test by the invention of a spurious motorcycle accident, have said that they hope to return to competition, Kenteris even suggesting he will compete at the 2008 Olympics to regain his 200m gold medal he won in 2000.
An automatic four-year suspension for a serious doping offence is again being looked at by the World Anti-Doping Agency, but it is believed that many professional sports would find it legally unworkable because it could be challenged in the civil courts. Only now that the British Government have decided to investigate how to punish drug cheats in order to avoid potential embarrassment at the London 2012 games has this become an issue worth really debating. Yet every year, countless young athletes around the world are unable to resist the competitive pressure that drives people to taking performance enhancing drugs. A recent documentary about the misuse of steroids in bodybuilding showed, as an aside, the story of a 17-year-old, 6ft1 high school baseball pitcher whose coach had told him he needed to “bulk up” on steroids in order to make the varsity team. Within two months he was dead, having committed suicide after the uncontrollable mood-swings he had suffered from as a side-effect.
Currently Italy is the only nation in the world to have a system in place for bringing criminal charges against drugs cheats in sport. If sports authorities care about the young impressionable athletes endangering their lives by taking performance-enhancing drugs, and not just their own potential embarrassment, it is time more nations followed Italy’s lead. Cases like the baseball pitcher in the documentary must be told, and offenders must be punished as harshly as possible; it’s not simply a matter of making sport cleaner, but about making it safer for all the young men and women whose lives revolve around it.
Yet drug abuse in sport has been rife for years, and though lifetime bans from the Olympics are now automatic for any athlete guilty of using performance enhancing drugs, we must surely question whether the present system in any guise can ever truly work.
At the 2001 World Athletics Championships in Edmonton, Canada, the golden girl of British athletics, Paula Radcliffe, caused a stir by holding up a sign saying “EPO Cheats out” while watching a heat for the 5,000m. Her anger was directed mainly at Olga Yegorova, who despite recently testing positive for EPO, a blood-doping agent, was taking part in that 5,000m. Since then some of the biggest names in athletics have been implicated and occasionally banned from competition. Britain’s own Dwain Chambers has served a two-year ban; the USA’s Tim Montgomery has been banned and all his successes (including a world record) have been removed from the history books. Another USA Sprinter, World Champion Justin Gatlin, has been punished similarly. Yet Athletics is still suffering; recently Kostas Kenteris and Katerina Thanou, the two disgraced Greek sprinters who tried to mock the sport and disguise avoiding a third consecutive drugs test by the invention of a spurious motorcycle accident, have said that they hope to return to competition, Kenteris even suggesting he will compete at the 2008 Olympics to regain his 200m gold medal he won in 2000.
An automatic four-year suspension for a serious doping offence is again being looked at by the World Anti-Doping Agency, but it is believed that many professional sports would find it legally unworkable because it could be challenged in the civil courts. Only now that the British Government have decided to investigate how to punish drug cheats in order to avoid potential embarrassment at the London 2012 games has this become an issue worth really debating. Yet every year, countless young athletes around the world are unable to resist the competitive pressure that drives people to taking performance enhancing drugs. A recent documentary about the misuse of steroids in bodybuilding showed, as an aside, the story of a 17-year-old, 6ft1 high school baseball pitcher whose coach had told him he needed to “bulk up” on steroids in order to make the varsity team. Within two months he was dead, having committed suicide after the uncontrollable mood-swings he had suffered from as a side-effect.
Currently Italy is the only nation in the world to have a system in place for bringing criminal charges against drugs cheats in sport. If sports authorities care about the young impressionable athletes endangering their lives by taking performance-enhancing drugs, and not just their own potential embarrassment, it is time more nations followed Italy’s lead. Cases like the baseball pitcher in the documentary must be told, and offenders must be punished as harshly as possible; it’s not simply a matter of making sport cleaner, but about making it safer for all the young men and women whose lives revolve around it.
Labels: Sport
posted by Matt at 5:42 pm
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home