GAA PLAYERS WARNED: DRUG TESTING IS FOR AMATEURS TOO
‘AN ABSOLUTE JOKE. I DON’T THINK AMATEURS SHOULD HAVE TO DO IT’
DOCTOR UNA MAY confirms what one already knew. ‘Anti-doping isn’t exactly the fun side of what Sport Ireland does but it’s something we do because it means we can protect the integrity of sport,’ she says. People suppose they have their opinion on doping in sport settled. It is wrong. It is the preserve of a dysfunctional state like Russia, or a wilful cheat like Lance Armstrong. Drugs are bad. Black and white.
Then a doping violation is revealed close to home and equivocation sweeps the land. Suddenly, there are grey areas. Doping does not necessarily equal a determined effort at cheating, after all.
In the aftermath of the Brendan O’Sullivan affair, opinion has diverged to a surprising degree. It was wearying, for instance, to hear phalanxes of former Kerry players launch the ‘good lad’ defence, as if O’Sullivan’s character rather than a sample had failed a test.
One newspaper reported the claim he was the victim of nothing more than bad luck. In the past week, eight-time All-Ireland winner and former hurler of the year Eoin Larkin (right) described drug testing as an ‘absolute joke’. ‘I don’t think amateur players should have to do it,’ he was reported as saying.
That is an astonishing opinion for a man who spent over a decade immersed in high-performance sport to express. It brings up a point frequently addressed but one stubbornly maintained by some constituencies in the GAA: amateur players should not be subjected to testing.
‘We’ll be arguing that one forever, as far as I can see,’ responds Dr May. ‘The fact that somebody took a supplement doesn’t make them any more or less of an amateur, that’s the thing.
‘It’s not going to change it from that perspective. It is very frustrating. Honestly, in a country where the GAA is so, so omnipresent, it’s impossible to say just because they don’t get paid to play, [it] makes them different.’
She raises the obvious example of athletes. ‘Our athletes don’t get paid. Some of them get grants but they don’t get jobs for life and holidays at the end of the season and stuff like that. There are different definitions. It’s not just whether you get paid to play.
‘But I don’t think we’re ever going to get over that. It’s a cultural thing.’
This constitutes an increasing tension in the GAA, between footballers and hurlers who train in precise, scientifically measured environments, and the culture that takes such pride in its stars being ordinary amateurs.
‘The reality is they are high performance athletes competing at the highest level with way more temptations and more risks,’ she says. ‘We have risk categorisation for all of our sports and one would be the status. That would be a risk because there is a status attached to being a very high-level inter-county player that makes them high-risk.
‘Just because they’re not getting money doesn’t change that. We would take a lot of different factors into consideration and whether someone gets paid is very low on the list for us.’
The O’Sullivan case also illustrated an aspect of some doping stories: a violation does not have to involve a premeditated attempt to cheat. ‘The system is designed to accommodate the fact that sometimes it’s not an intentional thing,’ she explains. ‘Someone didn’t go out to cheat, someone went out and took, yes, a shortcut by taking a supplement but then let’s face it, threequarters of the population are probably taking supplements somewhere along the way.
‘But athletes have to be more careful about what they take and they have to really consider long and hard before they take something. But at the end of the day it’s obvious, depending on the substance they took, it’s generally fairly obvious that they weren’t setting out to cheat as such.
‘The substance they took is doping: it gives a performance advantage, and therefore it’s doping.
‘Doping is based on three different criteria: whether something is bad for health; whether it’s performance-enhancing; and if it’s against the spirit of sport.
‘You have to hit two of those criteria for something to be banned. If something is banned and just because someone took it in accidentally, they took something banned, so there has to be some sanction, because they got an advantage.’
Dr May reiterates a view she has shared before, that the GAA is not considered a high-risk sport by the antidoping system. It is not, though, invulnerable to the growing problem of steroid abuse, no more than any other sport is.
Awareness campaigns are running in gyms, but in March this year €2 million worth of steroids were seized in Donegal. Last year, 26,000 tablets were taken in a raid in Dublin. Sport Ireland has worked with bodies including Merchants Quay Ireland, which runs the largest needle-exchange system in Dublin, about the incidences of gym goers using the facility as a result of their steroid use. In the prevailing environment, where steroids and other illegal supplements are so easily sourced online, no sport is safe. Long before the O’Sullivan case emerged, Dr May had spoken of her concerns about supplements. There is, she says, a continuum, from multi-vitamins to products purchased online making big claims for their effectiveness. ‘When you start to take things that make claims about ‘super’ this and ‘booster’ that and all the rest, then you’re starting to move into the more dodgy area. We would suggest to people that if you’re buying it off the internet, straightaway that’s high risk. But it’s not just the internet; it’s clearly not just the internet, but there is a bit more control in the shops. ‘Then it’s what else does a company make? Do they make substances that contain prohibited substances, and therefore is there any risk of contamination in the manufacturing process? Because if they’re making a steroid project on a Monday and an ‘innocent’ project on the Tuesday, what is the guarantee they have cleared out the machinery in between?’
This is one way in which supplements become contaminated. She also cautions against products that claim to be fat burners. Again, though, she says the enthusiasm for supplements reflects a wider social eagerness for simple, quick solutions.
‘On the whole what we’d be saying to people is that the claims they (supplements) make, if they were true, they’d be banned. It’s kind of simple in many ways but everyone wants the quick fix and it’s across the board in everything we do in life.’
She acknowledges the co-operation Sport Ireland receive from athletes, including GAA players, in testing. However, it is still possible to hear the occasional voice asking why there is testing in any sport at all? This grim view of the world is passionately rebutted by Una May.
‘It’s a comment you do hear from people. Do you want your child to aspire to being a champion, to let them walk out that door knowing they are going to possibly kill themselves in the process? That’s not what sport is about.’
If sport is supposed to be fun, for the sake of health, morality and legitimacy it also needs to be policed.
‘Taxpayers’ money is invested in sport and our role is to protect that investment,’ she says. ‘We’re like the insurance policy against that investment, to ensure what money is spent on these athletes is spent on what we consider traditional core values and ethics in sport.’