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Drugs in Sport – Raising the Bar
Dr Martin Brookes
February 2004
When Greg Rusedski tested positive for the banned steroid nandrolone, he pleaded innocence on the basis that it was in a perfectly harmless looking nutritional supplement. What gives Rusedski's story a ring of truth is the fact that other athletes have tested positive for nandrolone only to be cleared on the same grounds. The UK sports authorities must be finding it hard to keep up with all 1500 banned substances. Worse still, many of these occur naturally in the body and are in some dietary supplements – a fact that makes detection anything but simple. So, are the authorities making a rod for their own back, a bureaucratic mountain that can never be topped? Some believe so, 'sportspeople should be given the freedom to take what they want', they say. But the cry from the anti-drugs corner is 'slippery slope'. Who is right? Before registering your vote in our quick poll, let your mind go and imagine a time when drugs in sport are positively encouraged …
The athletes are on their marks, ready to pounce into action. The next few seconds will see the culmination of years of training. One hundred metres of pure white line is all that stands between them and a place in the history books. The gun goes and they're off.
These men really know how to snort. Painstaking practice has turned their noses into well-honed instruments that hoover up the powder like veritable vacuum cleaners. The crowd, on the edge of their seats, can only look on in awe at this spectacle of sporting excellence.
The race is over in a flash and it's no surprise when an American takes gold. But it's a shock to everyone when a post-race investigation reveals that the winning athlete has had plastic surgery to reinforce an ailing nasal septum. Brandished a cheat, the American is disqualified and the gold goes instead to a Brit. Still suffering from the after-effects of the race, he has to be restrained by straight-jacket during the playing of 'God Save the Queen'.
This is an Olympics unlike any other. It is some time in the future, in a new sporting era. The authorities have stopped chasing drug cheats after conceding that they can never catch up. In a U-turn of record-breaking proportions, the IOC (International Olympic Committee) has decided that drugs in sport are not only legal, they are compulsory. And in an effort to broaden sports' appeal, and attract a younger audience, drug consumption itself has now become an Olympic event.
Mad? Perhaps. But this sporting scenario, or some version of it, may be more than mere hallucination. Slowly, like the turning of a supertanker, we could be witnessing the birth of a new kind of sporting philosophy. Some people now acknowledge that the fight to eliminate performance enhancing chemicals from sport, like the wider war on drugs, may be impossible to win. They argue that instead of banning substances, and the athletes caught using them, the solution is not to proscribe at all.
Banned substances
The list of banned substances is already enormous. To date, the International Olympic Committee has declared more than 1500 drugs off-limits to competitive athletes. The list includes all the usual suspects: the anabolic steroids and peptide hormones that promote muscle growth; stimulants like amphetamines and cocaine that can raise heart rate and improve performance; painkillers such as morphine and other opiates; and diuretics that promote the excretion of fluids from the body and last-minute weight loss.
Although the list seems clear and unambiguous, the situation is confused by the fact that many of the banned substances either occur naturally in the body (albeit in very small doses) or can be taken accidentally in over-the-counter medicines and nutritional supplements. More than one inexperienced athlete, for instance, has tested positive after taking a cold cure that contained the banned stimulants ephedrine or pseudo-ephedrine.
Nandrolone scandals
But it is not only the naive, it seems, who can get caught out by accidentally swallowing something that they are not supposed to. Just ask British tennis player Greg Rusedski. In July 2003 Rusedski tested positive for the banned steroid nandrolone. In failing the test he joined British athletics stars Linford Christie, Mark Richardson and Dougie Walker in the nandrolone hall of infamy. Yet all three athletes were later cleared of any wrong-doing by the UK athletics authorities when it was discovered that many perfectly legal dietary supplements contain enough nandrolone to produce a positive result. Rusedski claims that he has always been scrupulous in monitoring the ingredients of his nutritional supplements. In his defence, he appears to be pointing his finger at the ATP (Association of Tennis Professionals), the governing body of men's tennis, which has admitted detecting nandrolone in some of the supplements distributed by its own trainers.
Rusedski may also take some comfort from the findings of a recent study by FIFA (Fédération Internationale de Football Association), the governing body of football. After ex-Manchester United footballer Jaap Stam tested positive for nandrolone in 2001, FIFA conducted their own research into the steroid. A survey of some 356 professional footballers found that, under stressful conditions, players produce nandrolone naturally in their bodies, and at levels that would breach the IOC's permitted threshold.
In many ways, nandrolone offers a perfect illustration of the difficulties surrounding drug use in sport. How can you ban something that occurs naturally in the body? How can athletes stay clean when they are ignorant of what's in their drinks? How can sport stay true to its principles of fairness and honesty when it is so wrapped up in sponsorship and the multi-million dollar industries of sports nutrition and drug development? Perhaps it can't.
Drugs for all
But let's turn the question around and ask why we subject our sportsmen and women to such high levels of scrutiny in the first place. Why are we so concerned with what athletes put in their bodies, and why do we not apply similar standards to other areas of human achievement? Why, for example, do we not subject the winners of Oscars, Grammys and Pulitzer Prizes to random dope tests? Many authors and artists have attributed their creativity, at least in part, to the influence of illegal drugs. So why do we not brandish them as literary or musical cheats?
Maybe we treat sport as a special case because we believe that drugs do offer a disproportionate advantage to those who run the risks of using them. The example of Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson, the most notorious drug cheat of all time, certainly seems to vindicate that point. In 1988 he was the discredited winner of a gold medal at the Seoul Olympics. A few years later, after he was banned from all international competition, he was too slow to catch a mugger who stole his wallet.
In the bad old days of the Cold War it was politics that led many athletes to pump themselves full of performance enhancing drugs. Communist athletes may have jumped higher and run faster than their capitalist competitors, but many of them, sadly, also died much earlier as well. Yet the demand for drugs will not go away so long as the rewards remain so high. Today, huge sponsorship deals await those who reach the peak of their chosen sport, helping to sustain the win-at-all-costs philosophy. And far from ridding sport of the drug scourge, punitive measures seem to have made an illicit industry grow evermore sophisticated. As long as new kinds of drug continue to be developed, the athletes, or at least the richer ones, will always be able to stay one step ahead of the testers.
Level playing field
Perhaps one answer is to accept that the war cannot be won, and to acknowledge that drugs are as much a part of modern sport as spiked shoes and streamlined shorts. Former Australian middle distance runner Ron Clarke is just one among a growing number of voices to argue that athletes should be permitted to use performance enhancing drugs provided that they do not damage health. This final caveat, however, seems to create a new threshold of prohibition, which would be just as difficult to enforce as those already in existence. If there are drugs out there that can give a competitive advantage, there will always be some athletes who are willing to take them, whatever the risks involved.
A suitable compromise might be to instigate a two-tier system of competition, one for the druggies and one for the straights. Given these circumstances, it would be interesting to compare the level of public interest in each. What is it that the punters really want from their sporting spectacles? Excitement or integrity? Many within sport argue that drugs ruin the concept of fair competition. But what exactly do we mean by fair? How does wealth, for example, factor into the equation? You only have to look at the last few Olympic Games to see that the richest countries tend to monopolise the medals tables.
Success in sport isn't just about will, effort and training. It's also about the genes you inherit from your parents and the environment in which you were raised. Drugs may offer an advantage to a competitor, but so do many other attributes that could equally be labelled unfair. Is a race that pits a man born to athletic parents and raised at altitude (ie has blood that can carry more oxygen) against a self-made athlete born and raised at sea level a fair competition? Perhaps our whole concept of a level playing field in sport is an idealistic notion that could do with some updating.
All this may seem a far cry from those halcyon days when a gripped nation gathered around the television for the latest instalment of Coe versus Ovett. Those seemed like more innocent times. But drugs were around then, and they're still around today. Maybe it's time to start thinking about new possibilities. It would certainly give a whole new meaning to the high jump.
Find out more
Channel 4 is not responsible for the content of third party sites
Websites
BBC – Drugs in Sport
http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/in_depth/
2000/drugs_in_sport/default.stm
Takes an in-depth look at the history of nandrolone, the reliability of drugs testing, and Ron Clarke's defence of drug use in sport.
BBC – Man, Beast and Machine
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sport/195432.stm
Article on the Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson, the most notorious drug cheat of all time.
Channel 4 Sport Uncovered
No longer available through the main Channel 4 site, but this archive of sports articles is well worth a look. Written by Chris Nawrat, former Sunday Times sports editor, there are several good articles on drugs in sport.
Drugs in Sport
www.drugsinsport.net
Massive resource on all the issues, with articles, a news archive and online reports such as the UK sport drug database and anti-doping reports.
Football Culture.net
www.footballculture.net/players/
feat_doping.html
Article on doping in football that looks at the results of the 2003 Doping in Sport conference. Argues that immense pressure is placed upon sportsmen and women to achieve; many footballers are expected to play over 80 games per season. This may be, at least in part, to blame for this drug culture.
Olympic Movement
www.olympic.org/uk/organisation/
ioc/index_uk.asp
Official site of the Olympic Movement, with information on the IOC (International Olympic Committee), athletes' profiles plus articles and press releases on drugs.
'I'm a Scapegoat,' says Rusedski
www.channelnewsasia.com/stories/afp_sports/
view/65650/1/.html
News article on the banning of British tennis star Greg Rusedski for taking the drug nandrolone. Links to other related articles available.
Substance Misuse Net
www.substancemisuse.net
Portal site that aims to raise awareness and understanding of substance misuse, the problems it creates and the ways to deal with these problems. Provides articles on key issues, personal stories, project profiles, recommended books, and more.
US Holds back on Doping Funds
http://sport.guardian.co.uk/athletics/
story/0,10082,966910,00.html
Guardian article from May 2003. For the second year running, the US, which screamed louder than any other country four years ago that the International Olympic Committee was not taking the problem of drugs seriously, has failed to honour its obligation to pay the Montreal-based WADA (World Anti-Doping Agency) its £2.4m on time. It has left the organisation charged with stamping out drug abuse with a serious cash shortfall, threatening its effectiveness in the fight against doping.
Books
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Sport, Health and Drugs by Ivan Waddington (Spon Press, 2000)
Examines sport, health and public policy; child abuse and sex abuse in sport; doping in sport; sports medicine; and the development of performance enhancing drugs. With interview transcripts, case studies and press cuttings.
Get this book |
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Doping in Elite Sport: The politics of drugs and the Olympic Movement by Wayne Wilson (Human Kinetics Europe, 2000)
This historical and political overview of drug use in elite sport explains the procedures and protocols of drug testing, examines ethical dimensions of doping and the political and economic factors that influence the attempts to control doping.
Get this book |
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Drugs and Doping in Sports by John O'Leary (Cavendish Publishing, 2001)
Excellent collection of essays from academics, practitioners and administrators, analyses contemporary socio-legal and political themes related to doping in sport. It provides a challenging and often controversial view of doping issues and confronts political and legal orthodoxy, supplying the reader with an insight into this area of academic study.
Get this book |
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