Sporting cheats fail our children
AND they wonder why so few people bothered to vote in the annual television boreathon Sports Personality Of The Year?
The viewing public are so confused and bewildered about which sports personalities are actually talented or just talented at dodging drugs tests it’s all become a huge turn-off.
This week it emerged 100 metres champion Justin Gatlin is at the centre of a doping scandal after members of his team allegedly offered to supply performance-enhancing drugs.
Last week Chris Froome was found to have double the allowed level of an asthma drug in his urine.
And a few weeks before that a 14-month inquiry finally ended into why a “mystery package” was delivered to Sir Bradley Wiggins during a competition. All three deny any wrongdoing. And I guess at least the prevalence of asthma among our top athletes gives hope to wheezy kids everywhere. No more should they be last to get picked for school teams – these must surely be our Olympic champions of the future. But it’s not just drug tests. Cheating has become an epidemic. Footballers can’t slip running for a bus without claiming someone, somewhere must have fouled them. And every referee decision has to be denounced as malicious. As for the Russians – hosts of the next World Cup – they couldn’t lie straight in a pole vaulting competition. Extreme financial rewards have of course warped behaviour as they do in every world where they exist.
Winning becomes the be all and end all.
But where does that leave the viewers who are entertained not by the result but by the performance?
And the message it sends our children who every week turn out to play football or hockey or to swim or run, is disastrous.
It undermines us parents who teach kids to do their best and tell them it’s not the winning or losing that counts but the taking part.
But it’s even more dangerous than that. For what we need our kids to learn to do is to fail.
To fail and then get up and try again. Otherwise they’re never going to get off the starting blocks of life.
But these sports people with their diving and their drugs are telling our kids a very different story.
They’re saying that failure is a terrible thing which must be avoided at any cost.
And with that message they’re destroying our children’s greatest hope of success.