Don't do drugs, kids!

Doping in sport is black and white, isn’t it? The people that use drugs that aren’t allowed are bad, and the people that don’t are good. Right? I used to be of this opinion but now I’m starting to see why there’s such a huge grey area.

I should say that I am completely against doping in sport, and it frustrates me that the majority of sports (snooker?) have a problem with doping. In some it’s common knowledge, in others heads are well and truly buried in the sand. I’m not going to even try to speculate on how sport can clean itself up.

Take athletics – a sport with a huge problem. I saw a statistic recently that only nine of the top thirty 100m times have been run by clean athletes – all were run by Usain Bolt. I have absolutely nothing to go on other than intuition (pls don’t sue me) but that’s suspicious, isn’t it? Consider the can of worms well and truly opened.

At the beginning of this decade I got quite into weightlifting, regularly going to the gym, lifting heavy weights and enjoying it thoroughly. After a while of lifting “seriously” in a non-serious gym, one which enforced the ridiculous No Deadlift Dropping policy, I joined a cheap gym where only serious lifters went.

Just a reminder that this is a politically-neutral blog.

I literally went from strength to strength as I practiced and practiced, repeating the same movements over and over until I became more efficient, my muscles grew, and I got better. Nothing out of the ordinary – in fact exactly what one would expect from that scenario.

There was a leaderboard at that gym with a top 10 for the Bench, Squat, and Deadlift. Now, my bench and deadlift numbers were fairly average; I didn’t have the upper body power for the bench, and my lighter-than-most frame meant I couldn’t keep up with the big guys, even if I was lifting close to 2.5 times my bodyweight. My squat, however, was solid: I’ve had massive thighs since I can remember – playing football, and running hill sprints helps, too. 

One day I got onto the board with a lift of 150 kilograms, just over twice my bodyweight. I was sixth and immensely proud of my achievement. I knew I had no chance of topping the leaderboard (235kg was the record!) partly because of ability/talent, but also due to the pharmaceutical advantage the others’ had. It’s not fair to claim that everybody had used something, but the use of testosterone, clenbuterol, and trenbolone, to name a few, was so widespread, and talked about in a similar manner to how protein powder is discussed, that I couldn’t help but wonder. Yet the thought of taking any of those drugs, or anything else that isn’t allowed, never crossed my mind precisely because I’d be cheating myself.

Some people are born with a better set of genes for powerlifting, that’s an irrefutable. They are naturally predisposed to put on muscle when they overeat, and lose fat when they undereat (it’s known as ‘P-ratio’ if you’re a geek like me and want to read about it). So for a lifter handed down a poor-to-average set of genes, it could be seen as “levelling the playing field”, but I can’t even begin to fathom how one determines exactly how the playing field has been levelled. The doper is hardly going to use just enough in order for their bloods to match a rivals’ are they?

I picked up David Millar’s autobiography in a charity shop recently. It is a fascinating, and seemingly truthful, insight into the world of cycling that I hadn’t read about before. I read Lance Armstrong’s It’s Not About The Bike (lol) last year, obviously with the knowledge most of it was crap.

Millar’s book interests me, and probably inspired this post, because of how open he has been about his decisions, and shown a genuine desire to make amends for his actions, as well as trying to encourage others to learn from his mistakes. To my mind that is exactly what a doper should do. Although I can see why he chose to use the drug Erythropoietin (commonly known as EPO), it was absolutely the wrong decision and he could have survived without it. Thrived? Most probably not. But is winning everything in sport? I’d sooner lose while being honest, than win by cheating. Doubtless millions would disagree.

Mention the name ‘Thierry Henry’ to a football fan and most would tell you he was a genius, unstoppable on his day. Ask the same people about ‘Diego Maradona’ and I bet most would mention his infamous handball in the 1986 World Cup. How many remember Henry’s just as blatant handball against Ireland? Of course Maradona’s was in a quarterfinal whereas Henry’s was in a knockout qualifier, though, in my opinion, it shouldn’t matter. Cheating is cheating.

#NeverForget

Staying with football, there is a new form of cheating that is spreading, and has been for as long as I’ve been alive, probably longer. It is called simulation, but everybody calls it diving. Diving, or falling over, to trick the referee into thinking the opposing player has fouled you, in most cases, to win a penalty is pretty much commonplace in “the beautiful game” nowadays. Like doping I am completely anti-diving, it is cheating and there should be no place for it at any level of sport.

Consider the following scenario: a player is in the penalty area, his (I considered which pronoun to use, I promise) team are 1-0 down in the final minute of a crucial match. He is heading away from goal, with not a lot of space to do anything other than win his team a corner. The player shows the ball to his opponent, who sticks a foot out to try to knick the ball away, but at the last possible moment our man taps the ball, feels contact and goes down. It’s a penalty.

Under those circumstances that’s not cheating, it’s simply intelligent play. The player has “won” or “earned” his team a penalty. Yet there’s a grey area between diving and playing for the penalty.

Football is played at a breakneck speed these days – you only need to watch footage of the last time England won the World Cup to see how slow the game used to be played (yet referees and officials are expected to do the same job – a blog post for another day!). Even at the amateur level I occasionally play, the game is played at a rapid speed. If you’re a fast player that is often “taken out” you begin to anticipate the challenge, partly because it hurts quite a bit, but also because it’s a natural instinct. There have been occasions when players have “gone down” in anticipation of a challenge that never materialised. Is that cheating?

One final thought: cheating in sport is an option open to every athlete every single day. It could be through performance-enhancing drugs, faking contact in sport, or scratching a cricket ball (ahem) but it really isn’t that hard; if you’re unwilling to tell others what you’ve done then don’t do it!