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stories that break sometime later. Then comes the tearful admission, the blaming of the culture of the sport, and
another hero is pulled down.
There are many questions that emerge from this latest revelation. But they are the same as the ones raised every
time this happens. How common is doping really? How can they get away with it? How much do the organisers
know and do they conceal it from the public? Why does this keep happening?
The first question is perhaps the easiest to explain. The culture of sport as competition has triangulated with
advanced science and our dreams of becoming something more than human. Sport has always been about getting
that extra one percent to win. The rules have always been bent to breaking. The ancient Greeks, seen as a paragon
of sporting fairness - right down to the lack of clothes – regularly took herbal potions and experimented with
mushrooms to beat back pain and promote endurance. If they had access to anabolic steroids, you can bet your
amphorae that they would have used them.
Why they do it is closely tied to how they can keep getting away with it. Science in all fields is progressing
exponentially, but that progress is dramatically accelerated when large sums of money are involved. And sport
is big business. Drugs employed by scientific wideboys are staying ahead of detection agencies. The parallel
between this illegal drug trade and the war against mainstream drugs is clear. The official agencies play a rather
reactionary foil to the drug cheats, as they can only test for something that they know about.
Elite athletes and their coaches have sensitive antennae for details: knowing how to structure their diets, how to
time their training and what minute changes in their posture will improve their performance. So knowing the right
time to administer a drug and in what amount also can fall into that very skill-set. Steroid users who suspect a
test will be administered use micro-injections and avoid them around the time of testing. Blood infusions allow an
athlete to appear clean during a test, and afterwards they would defrost previously doped blood and inject it back
into their bodies.
Lance Armstrong is well-attested as being the greatest sports cheat of all time: though there may well be greater
out there- he did get caught, after all. His story of bullying, coercion, cutting edge science, and simple chutzpah will
one day make for a great movie with a sad ending. But his decade of lies really demonstrates the science and skill
in the life of a drug cheat.
Simply put: athletes are prime competitors, and not just at running or jumping high or riding a bike. They are
masters of winning. And sometimes for some that requires something extra.
As to the role of the organisers of sport; a cynic could argue that they have more to gain by keeping quiet about
drug cheats. Every bust pulls their respective sport lower in the eyes of the audience. Sports themselves are in
competition for viewers, and by extension, sponsors. Cycling has almost been pulled under by its culture of drug
use, and every other sport must be terrified of sponsors closing their giant novelty cheque book. It would be
far simpler to turn a blind eye to most of the sordid cheating then to confront it: even better, allow one or two
athletes to get caught every so often to show you are paying attention.
Equally, there is the argument that organisers are just as frustrated as the viewers, constantly trying to sniff out
the cheats and stay ahead of the science. The empowerment of the WADA and the USADA seems to suggest that
sport power brokers do take these issues seriously and want to see doping gone. WADA, growing tired of the drugs
arms race, has developed the Athlete Biological Passport. This is designed to chart specifically tested biological
properties of the athlete against performance. They hope to cross reference the two variables to see evidence of
changes in the body that do not reflect a natural advancement on the field. This innovation removes the random
discoveries of doping, but enables them to detect that something is going on, that they can then use targeted
testing for.
The role of WADA in the elimination of doping is essential. But doping will always be part of sport unless athletes
and coaches themselves decide to speak up and stamp it out.
TOUCHLINE
ISSUE 21 | AUGUST 2015 |
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