Sanctimonious MPS are not fit to judge our sporting greats
The death of Sir Roger Bannister at the age of 88 brought forth some facts to make you smile in spite of the sad news. For example, the performance-enhancing substance favoured by the first man to run a sub-four-minute mile was pilchards. Might the post-war generation of which Sir Roger was such a sterling member owe its remarkable backbone to tinned fish? It has to be a possibility.
Bannister also didn’t believe in talking to one’s coach on the day of a race: he thought it was unsporting. Bless! Such can-do innocence feels like ancient history now, particularly in a week when a parliamentary inquiry into doping in sport lambasted another British great, Sir Bradley Wiggins, for crossing “an ethical line”.
The digital, culture, media and sport committee (DCMS) said that the five-time Olympic champion and first Briton to win the Tour de France used
‘Long-distance cycling has been a route out of poverty for kids like Wiggins’
drugs allowed under anti-doping rules to enhance his performance instead of purely for medical purposes. Team Sky and Wiggins refute the claims.
I must admit, my first reaction was to laugh out loud at the idea of politicians trashing the reputation of someone who “did not break the rules” but “crossed a line”. Rather like, ahem, MPS and their expenses, then?
For fat-bottomed MPS to criticise a man who sought and won glory for his country in the summer of 2012, cycling 2,200 miles in the kind of physical shape they could never aspire to, is the utmost hypocrisy. Long-distance cycling has always been a route out of poverty for kids like Wiggins. It’s a brutal sport and there is evidence of doping in cycling as early as the 1800s.
And does any normal person look at Sir Mo Farah – while knowing that the injection of the supplement given to him is legal – still think: “Let’s get a single injection Mo had back in 2014 investigated by the General Medical Council”? Yet that is precisely what the DCMS has called for.
We may well be nostalgic for the days when the fishiest thing in sport was Roger Bannister’s pilchards, but times have changed. I have no idea whether Sirs Mo and Bradley ever, for just a second, inadvertently “crossed a line”, and I don’t much care. What I do know is that politicians are unfit – in every sense – to be the judge and jury.