The winning chemistry

For years, the Chinese government selected children as potential athletes by body type as future competitors.

East Germany went further, using anabolic steroids to build winning teams of weightlifters and track and field athletes. Individual athletes, often training away from national teams, got caught too. But the world has gone far, far beyond that.

It’s a given that top-ranked athletes now have a virtual battery of specialists and trainers to ensure that they are in peak shape to compete internationally; nutritionists, video analysis and anything else that can give an athlete even the slightest edge is used to its fullest extent.

For some countries, cheating has become fully institutionalized.

For countries like Russia, cheating has become so central to athletics that abuse worked its way right into the state-run laboratories that were supposed to catch cheaters.

Why try to avoid or “game” testing when you can simply run the laboratory and come up with results showing everyone’s clean, when clearly they are not?

This week, Russia was banned for four years from international competition, including the Tokyo Summer Olympics, by the World AntiDoping Agency after WADA said the Russian government tampered with a database to hide widespread sports doping.

WADA executive committee member Linda Helleland said, “This is the biggest sports scandal the world has ever seen. I would expect now a full admission from the Russians and for them to apologize for all the pain all the athletes and sports fans have experienced.” (Russia has 21 days to appeal the decision, and has already indicated that it will appeal.)

Good luck with the wait for any kind of apology.

There’s doping in international sport, in professional sport and just about every aspect of sport, sometimes as far down as the high school level.

It’s done because it pays; drug cheats get the accolades and glory that come from winning the Tour de France bicycling race, from winning the Super Bowl or the World Series or Major League Baseball’s batting championship.

Athletes who are supposed to be seeking the perfect combination of health, fitness and skill are instead using potentially damaging drugs to gain the outsized rewards that come from success in many sporting endeavours. Others are doing it just to keep up, or even just to stay in the game.

Maybe we shouldn’t be looking at athletes to solve this problem at all. It is, basically, a supply and demand equation. Some athletes take the risk because, on some level, the risk is worth the potential reward.

Perhaps it’s time we changed the way we looked at sport. Maybe the pedestal we put winning athletes on is just too high, when compared to the actual role they play in a functioning society.

Diminishing the reward will go a long way towards making the risk unreasonable.

Not long, not far: just 938 steps.

Out the door into the crisp cold of winter’s morning, the snow hard under foot. Not cold enough for a hat, but a solid yes to gloves. Open the shed and pick up the second-class axe. (The first-class axe is for splitting, only.) The second-class axe used to be the first-class axe until the handle splintered, and I inexpertly replaced it — now, despite repeated efforts, the axe head often threatens to depart its new handle.

So I use it for limbing and cutting paths, carrying it with my hand directly behind the axe head. Sometimes, I drive it straight head-down on a stump, as though one lucky strike will lock the axe head in place again. That never works for long.

Down into the valley where the brook curls in and through summer’s four-foot-high yellow grass. A second-hand sand-brown oilskin coat stiff with the cold, and I’m hoping I don’t look too much like a moose from a distance.

I want to build a path down to where the old house’s reservoir — little more than a widening in the brook — chuckles in tight against the hillside, where the water moves fast enough falling over the stone dam to make a short stretch of cobble and sand and where the flow is also enough to make water’s sound. I might put a bench there, make a trail to join the two paths that run down into the brook valley and then head their separate ways. I might do many things. I might do nothing. That’s all fine.

The axe head is as cold as the inside of the shed was overnight, and when I set it down, snow neither melts onto the metal nor sticks to it. It was a cold night, the sky clear and wide open, the stars hard after the snow stopped and the cloud scudded east.

It’s that peculiar snow that make you think it was the genesis for the idea of hanging icicles on Christmas trees; the snow fell wet, and then froze in place like frosting on a gingerbread house. It’s still cold, but the sun’s out, so the snow on the branches is melting and then forming into hanging clear icicles from the branch tips. So, every deciduous tree is wrapped in hard white scale, and every evergreen is decorated with sun-lit icicles.

The high grass is all knocked down now, and the few scant inches of snow are enough to tame the tangle of the blackberry and the ground-cover rose bushes with their small bright orange rosehips. It’s hard to believe that you’d even need a path, it’s so wide open. But the valley was forage, and the yellow hay that was planted here comes back every year to shoulder-height, and in late summer it seems almost trackless, right across to the other side where the trees start again.

My coat is worn, my gloves are worn and the sticker on the side of the axe handle is worn away to a long black smear of stubborn adhesive.

There’s no wind, not even a hint of wind, and the snow’s too recent and too hard for anything to have left tracks. Except me — I leave raggededged tracks along the side of the brook, to the gap in the trees where the trail ends, then back around the loop to the shed and the back of the house.

There’s a crow somewhere, calling, but no emails or texts.

935 steps — 936 — 937.

The second-class axe got out for a walk, and did no work.

The splitting axe stayed in the shed, waiting in the shed-light half-dark.

It’s not always in your favour to be the best.