ESRI reveals a very worrying trend

NOBODY would want to go through what Brendan O’Sullivan went through a couple of years ago. Nobody would want to have their name in headlines linked with doping violations. Nobody would want to have their sporting career interrupted by suspension. Nobody would want to go through all the legal proceedings and back and forth with the anti-doping authorities in Sport Ireland.

O’Sullivan’s case we would have thought would have acted as a cautionary tale for county boards, inter-county management teams and players the length and breath of the country, but to a worrying degree that seems not to be the case.

In their latest study on the lives of inter-county footballers and hurlers, the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) has found that nine out of ten players consume supplements and are recommended to do so by their management teams.

So far so good. There’s nothing wrong with taking supplements necessarily, they’re part and parcel of high performance sport these days. The trouble only arises when “many players source their supplements from outside of the inter-county set-up (e.g, internet) and only half of players indicated that supplement use is monitored within their team”.

There are so many alarm bells ringing there if you recall the case of O’Sullivan. He didn’t realise the supplement he took – which he procured himself and didn’t check with the Kerry nutritionist – was contaminated with the banned substance methylhexaneamine, which is what put him over the limit when he was tested.

It’s important to remember that Sport Ireland found that O’Sullivan bore “no significant fault or negligence” in the affair and that for us underscores the problem here. When – and it’s bound to happen if what the ESRI reports is accurate – this happens again, it will more than likely be because of a lack of diligence not because of any intention to cheat.

For the good of their players, inter-county management teams and county boards need to be a little more on top of this issue. It’s not like they haven’t been warned.