Mommy I don’t want to be an athlete
IT IS HELL being an athlete these days. Whom do you trust? How easy it must be to spike a drink or sprinkle hate dust in your food to wreck the competition. What happened to Indian wrestler Narsingh Yadav and his total psychological destruction could just as easily have been done by design.
This whole testing thing stinks. While there are cheats in sport who deliberately enhance their performance parameters there are so many who rely on coaches and managers and support teams to feed them and what they hell do they know what they are being given.
Also everyone’s metabolism reacts differently. I know a man who has a missing enzyme so all the sugar he eats turns to alcohol. Give him three ice cream servings and he has had three drinks and cannot drive home.
While in no way advocating performance enhancing steroids someone has to wake up to reality across the sports board and define the line between protein supplements, tonics, herbal uplifts and teas as against specific anabolic steroids.
The World Anti Doping Association (WADA) has a list a mile long. Maybe even monosodium glutamate could ruin you.
Shane Warne was sent back from the world cup in 2003 because he tested positive for a diuretic. Really. Maria Sharapova had no clue what she had done wrong. Andre Agassi spilled the beans and his records still stand. Lance Armstrong took the wheel of cycling. Ben Johnson ruined the sprint forever and even Usain cannot rub out that stain from the track.
So often we hear this plaintive defense that the athlete was a victim of a substance without his or her knowledge. Athletes are not pharmacologists. They cannot be on alert 24/7 on what they eat or drink. If it is easy to put some crystal meth or cocaine into someone’s glass to seduce them why would it be difficult to put a banned substance into an athlete’s system?
In the 2012 London Olympics drug seller Victor Conte blew things apart when he said that 60% of the athletes taking part were into substances designed to improve their physical strength. He confessed he sold sprinter Dwayne Chambers a seven substance cocktail.
With the Russians already banned from a car wreck of a Rio Olympics another slammer has come from Rory McIlroy who has mocked the tests done for golfers and called them pretty much pointless. What is worrying is not just the uppers but the idea that golfers could be using downers to calm their nerves for more steadiness for their long putts... or the three footers. Calmpose, Librax, any sort of soporific. How about that? Leaves you with nothing sacred. Pointless listing all the famous names who have come a cropper but staying ‘clean’ is now more of a lottery than a screening for professional cheats.
Half the fun has gone out of viewing performances because you have to decide whether these are humans trained to perfection or zombie-robots programmed by science to do the impossible.
Take the case of Yadav. Four years of hard training. Put his sweat into the daily regimen. Totally shattered. Will never get over it. The pain is tangible. And he may be totally innocent. Probably is. He won’t even know who knifed him.
Either every athlete should add a pharmacist to his entourage or this gentle euphemism ‘performance enhancing’ that is used should be upgraded to ‘drug abuse.’
Everything is aimed at performance enhancing including the training schedule. So when a coach or a trainer gives his ward a tablet or a drink of something it could just be for rehydration or so he thinks.
With so much cheating now blatantly occurring and smart guys finding way to ‘get away with it’ because the stakes are so high maybe athletes could become dispensable entertainment one day (like those Roman gladiators) and level the playing field by being allowed to swallow whatever they want. And if they die prematurely that’s the price for glory. Enough of them are already doing it so what other solution is there. Doping won’t stop. It will become more sophisticated and there will always be someone working out a way to beat the test tube.
Like those airline pilots who swallow beta blockers on the day of their medicals to lower blood pressure readings.