Today’s drugs panic relates to Dwain Chambers, who has once again showed he can run 60m faster than anyone else in Britain, after a two-year ban for use of a banned substance.
The big names in British athletics (yes, that is a very llocalised meaning of the words “big names”) are engaged in an unseemly scramble to distance themselves from him. Plus today’s BBC website says that a promotion group won’t have him at events.
How fair is this? His real crime seems to have been to have said that it was impossible to win the Olympics without some chemical assistance.
He was banned for two years. This time is over. It’s not as if athletes have twenty year careers, so that they can just be out of their sport for a few years and lose no ground.
In my limited understanding of the term, he was never “cheating” anyway. He outran everyone who he raced against. “Cheating” would involve tripping up his rivals or bribing the timekeeper.
It’s tough to distinguish between a fair and an unfair advantage. I can guarantee that no amount of chemical enhancement would put me in the Olympic class for swimming. (For a start, I can’t really swim.) Why are some things that give an athlete sporting advantages “cheating” while other things aren’t? Good genetics for running – unfair, but we don’t all have them. Aerodynamically enhanced sportswear? Expert coaching? Good diet? These all provide sporting advantages that aren’t equally available to everyone.
For most sports, access to the opportunity to do them at all rests on having an unfair advantage: your own eventing horse, a tennis racket, snow, an athletics club that you can afford to go to, an Olympic-size pool, time to train, a national commitment to providing facilities and so on.
So, clearly, the whole issue rests on where you draw the line. The athletics associations drew their line to exclude whatever pharmaceutical letter combination Dwain Chambers was caught taking. Fair enough. He was competing under their rules. They applied a penalty. Also fair enough. He accepted the penalty and kept to the testing rules while he was banned from competing.
So why is the man now being blamed for everything from being a bad influence on future sportspeople to keeping a good non-cheat out of the England squad by selfishly winning enough races to get into it? (Arguments on BBC Breakfast.)
One commentator claimed that he had modified his physique by taking the banned substance 3 years ago, so would have inherent unfair advantages for the rest of his career. I don’t know what magical substance Dwain is supposed to have taken, but, if such a product exists, surely doctors all over the world would be clamouring to get it it to treat the physically weak.
I think one of the justifications for an anti-drugs regime is that if permitted they could pose a danger to health. How many athletes would take something that could give a short-term advantage, even if it carried a risk of a stroke in middle-age? The question that raises is what happens to the girls (definitely girls not women) who do gymnastics? No drugs, but is this child abuse as a spectator sport?
http://healthresources.caremark.com/topic/brgymnastics
Dwain Chambers has also committed the crime of wanting to win. The British (or possibly the English) don’t want to athletes to win. They want them to come a plucky second. The national psyche has gone from cheering the underdog to wanting to be the underdog. Someone can’t be the underdog if they keep winning races.
Alun
I agree with all your points. I was just ranting at the hypocrisy of the response to Dwain Chambers and the assumption that his actions had been, in some way, distinct from everything else athletes do to win.
Many sports can be very damaging in the long term, and some, like motor-racing and boxing even have risks of instant death or permanent brain damage.
I think it’s more than justified to limit how far athletes will harm themselves in pursuit of prizes. The issues are starkest, of course, when the participants are just children. “Women’s” gymnastics is scandalous, as you say. Similar stresses are applied to young males too. Potential Premier League footballers have to undergo training regimes that can be little short of those of female gymnasts.
It’s us, the watching public, who are really responsible for most of this. Athletes have got to break records and perform ever more extreme feats or noone is interested in paying them the huge sums they can earn now.
Ironically the same issues of the tabloids which were condemning Chambers last week were saying how great Amy Winehouse is….