Drive for medals comes at a cost
The Mail on Sunday has no issue with the pursuit of sporting excellence nor with the nurture of Olympic and Paralympic heroes. And those old enough to remember the 1996 Atlanta Olympics and Britain’s shambolic approach — which garnered one gold medal — may feel it is churlish to gripe when Britain sat proudly second in the 2016 Olympic medals table with 27 gold medals.
Except that last week we heard allegations of physical abuse and bullying at British Gymnastics. Which comes after bullying inquiries in recent years into British Cycling, British Swimming and British Canoeing, all of which resulted in those governing bodies either ‘admitting failings’ or apologising for a ‘culture’ or ‘climate of fear’. There have also been two separate inquiries into decisionmaking at UK Athletics.
In recent years it has also been explained to us just why Bradley Wiggins had a therapeutic use exemption for triamcinolone in the run-up to the 2012 Tour de France and Olympics, which a Parliamentary committee concluded was ‘not to treat medical need … but to improve his power to weight ratio.’ Wiggins and Team Sky denied this.
We have listened patiently as to why a British Cycling doctor inadvertently received 30 sachets of banned drug testosterone at the National Cycling Centre. They were to treat the erectile dysfunction of a colleague. We have tried to understand why UK Athletics doctors prescribe thyroid drugs to some elite athletes. It’s for their medical needs and not as a performance enhancer.
Furthermore, we have been asked to excuse the fact that their former doctor neglected to record the level of L Carnitine administered to Mo Farah. It was an innocent mistake, though the process itself, legal at certain levels, was queried by UKA’s endurance coach who wondered whether ‘this is within the spirit of the sport’. They went ahead anyway at the behest of Farah’s ex coach and the former UKA consultant, Alberto Salazar, who is now banned for anti-doping offences, one of which was administering illegal levels of L Carnitine.
Wading through the extensive medical ailments afflicting our Olympic and Paralympic athletes and the various ‘cultures of fear’ that seemed to have prevailed in their federations, there is a temptation to wonder whether those 27 gold medals won at the 2016 Olympics and 64 golds won at the Paralympics were worth the cost?
When UK Sport, essentially the overseers of these sports, in that they fund them with National Lottery money, spent hundreds of thousands of pounds on a new substance, developed for US Special Forces, which was still in research and which they could not guarantee complied with antidoping rules, you sense the pursuit of medals had entered into surreal territory. As a nation it might be as well to ask ourselves what we expect of our Olympic and Paralympic teams in Toyko next year? A glorious procession to podia followed by endless inquiries into bullying and lengthy explanations as to why this therapeutic use exemption or novel nutritional supplement was absolutely fine and ultimately fell within the anti-doping rules?
Or perhaps we ought to reconsider whether sport in the UK should be something more than a vanity exercise in flag waving?
Given the proliferation on inquiries of late, it is time that UK Sport instituted one into whether their governmentdirected obsession with medals targets is the root cause of these patterns of behaviour in British sport.