M E N T O R

Dope article, bro
I
have felt the anger and bafflement
experienced by many fans
of sport upon discovering that
a successful athlete has cheated
their way to the top. The ‘top’, as
if they have actually ascended the
ranks of their profession. Rather,
they have just switched sports, the
same way boxers switch weight categories,
and are now competing only
with other like-minded dopers. Why
go to such lengths to win when the
victory is hollow? They must know,
deep down, that what they have
done is not just wrong, but a waste of
time. A gold Olympic medal is worth
much more in pride than it is in metal,
so you’re depreciating its worth
by defrauding the system.
This is a hard line to take and you
can’t walk down it for long before
you reach an unpalatable conclusion:
we need to ban coffee. It is often
an unwelcome voice that pipes
up to remind ‘true’ sports fans that
the line we have drawn to delineate
doping and competing is a completely
arbitrary one. We needn’t look
far back in sporting’s history to find
unacceptable practices that are all
but necessities today, but only those
completely blinded by tradition
would argue that sport is in worse
shape now than it was 50 years ago.
It seems, to me at least, that doping
is only a problem so long as we keep
saying it is.
Developments in training have made
a much greater contribution to improvements
in sporting outcomes
than anything that can be implemented
at the race, on the main stage, on
the night. I’m not talking about performance
enhancing drugs, either.
In Chariots of Fire, one of the main
Michael Houssemayne du Boulay
characters is lambasted for hiring a
coach. Indeed, historically, athletes
were discouraged from training at
all, relying instead on ‘natural’ ability.
Fast forward and we have personalised
nutrition programmes, where
nothing passes the lips of a top athlete
without it being logged. The
very idea of natural ability is such
a weak concept that it struggles to
stand up under its own weight. The
near interminable variables are too
many to even list, let alone control
in a desperate and futile attempt to
create a perfectly balanced competition
of raw talent. All we can hope
to do is provide equal access to performance
enhancement across the
board, but tell that to athletes from
underprivileged backgrounds (have
you ever enquired into the cost of
tennis coaching?).
To cheat is to garner an unfair advantage
over your competition. Unfair
implies that others do not have
access to it, but that cannot be the
only distinction drawn. Nutrition
has surely had the greatest impact
on physical prowess in history, but
even that is unequal amongst today’s
athletes. We would not turn
around and deny a sportsperson
their dietitian because the team from
Equatorial Guinea haven’t heard of
MyProtein yet, and rightly so. We
complain about our performance
in the Winter Olympics and blame
it on our lack of snow, but no one
is suggesting for a second that we
should be given a handicap because
the climate in Great Britain is not
conducive to developing a first rate
ski team. So, too, if you come from a
poor country you should be afforded
no privileges.
After all, the purists argue, hard work
is always available in abundance, no
matter where you originate. Certainly,
but how efficacious is hard work
when you have to devote most of
your day to going to your job and
feeding your family? What time is
left to train? Contrasted with the
sponsored athlete who is paid to go
to the gym our penniless underdog
can barely be consider a contender.
Doping this may not be, but it is certainly
more of an unfair advantage
than taking steroids which athletes
the world over have access to. What
do you think is more expensive: a
high altitude tent to sleep in every
night and a personal physician to direct
its use, or some make-me-hench
‘roids that you got from Gary down
the gym?
While we’re talking about drugs,
we ought to just touch on the medications
mentioned in this article.
Meldonium is an old Eastern European
treatment for ischaemic heart
disease. It is not licensed for use in
the UK and it was brought into the
spotlight following the scandal surrounding
Sharapova, one of the
highest grossing tennis players of all
time, who was banned for using it
by the World Anti-Doping Agency.
EPO stands for erythropoietin, the
hormone responsible for stimulating
red blood cell production. It is most
famous in sport for its widespread
abuse in cycling, in particular the
Tour de France where a number of
previous winners have been stripped
of their titles for its abuse (as well
as other substances). Most notable
of the disgraced Tour cohort is
Lance Armstrong who deceived the
competition organisers, fans and
sponsors for many years. Anabolic
steroid is the generic name given to
androgens that mimic the effects of
testosterone in the body, well known
for rapidly increasing muscle mass
and giving body-builders the Arnie
makeover.
What, then, does it mean to cheat?
The only answer I can reason is
that it means to do what your sport
says you can’t, and what your sport
says you can’t do is arbitrary and
open to change. Largely, the line
seems to be drawn on a feeling of
wrongness alone; we’re noticeably
uncomfortable with players taking
a perceived shortcut to success. To
take two football examples to illustrate,
Peter Shilton and Lionel Messi
were both too short as children to be
seriously considered for professional
careers. The would-be England
goalkeeper reportedly dangled from
the bannister in his home, with increasingly
heavy weights attached
to his feet (house bricks, apparently)
in order to stretch him out. Whereas
the world’s greatest player, diagnosed
with a growth hormone deficiency
in childhood, was prescribed
human growth hormone and he
has now reached average height in
adulthood. Suppose Peter Shilton
had decided to skip the undoubtedly
arduous process of drawing
his own legs, opting instead to have
his bones surgically fractured and
then positioned to promote growth,
or pressured his doctor to prescribe
him human growth hormone, like
Messi. It certainly doesn’t feel as if
we should allow the latter options to
go ahead, but they achieve the same
outcome, and put the player’s body
and mind through different, but still
difficult, ‘training’.
You’re all shaking your fists at the
thought, but what about the malnourished
child whose growth improves
in leaps and bounds when
they’re given a proper diet? Now,
what about the well-nourished child
who, when given a personalised
diet programme, reaches their full
potential instead of falling short
by an inch? Now, what about the
well-nourished child, with a personalised
diet programme, but without
the same testosterone producing capacity
of their peers? By no means a
disease, but they would undeniably
gain benefit from the use of anabolic
steroids. You might argue that it’s
just genetic variability – some people
are naturally predisposed to be taller,
stronger, faster – these aren’t diseases
to be corrected, so it’s wrong
to try and fix them with a medical
intervention. The only difference
between child two and child three,
dangers of their treatment aside, is
that we consider anabolic steroids
to be an unfair sporting advantage,
whereas dietary advice is well within
the boundaries of acceptability.
The dangers don’t really factor into
that ruling, either. In the grand
scheme of the perils of sport, blood
doping is relatively safe, especially
if it is above board and well controlled.
No one threatens to bring
an end to sport over the injuries,
sudden cardiac deaths and the psychological
trauma that goes into
training. (Youth rugby aside – although
look at the public outcry
when it was suggested!) Why has the
line been drawn, then? I believe it
boils down to the same feeling and
fear of the unnatural. Herbalism is
natural, meditation is natural, injecting
steroids into your eyeballs
with a big syringe isn’t natural. But
in the same way that you shout at
a patient for not taking aspirin because
they don’t like tablets, we’re
shouting at athletes for embracing
technological advances that move us
away from the roots of sport. People
swim in pools, not lakes, we have
carbon fibre everything and multiple
spares rather than one wooden
racquet, bikes weigh less than the
food a cyclist consumes in a day and
with each progression we step away
from naked Greco-Roman wrestlers
and towards e-sports, bionic super
humans and athletic competition
which requires a team and a holistic
strategy not just a go hard or go
home mentality.
Yet we have die-hard fans talk about
how doping is ruining sport. The
only thing ruining sport is a desperate
attempt to cling to the days
of yore in the face of unstoppable
change. Look no further than Sepp
Blatter’s repeated refusal to introduce
goal line technology for the
sake of nostalgia versus tennis and
cricket’s willing adoption of hawk
eye as the perfect example. When
will cycling realise that EPO is only
a problem because the organisers
say it is a problem? Crop dust EPO
over fields of cyclists and put testosterone
in their porridge and any unfair
advantage is gone.
We have all been getting outrageously
upset with the Russian state-sponsored
doping programme. The gall
of it! It is so obviously cheating and
so perfectly Putin. However, if we
look instead at a state-sponsored
training programme, pumping millions
of pounds into the development
of athletes, perfecting their
nutrition, designing the best bikes,
hunting down the perfect players
from all four corners of the globe,
no one bats an eyelid at its morality.
These were all new practices once,
and they all attracted disapproval. I
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