we should legalise performance-enhancing drugs in sport

adrianneblue — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 11:47:08 +0000

In a television interview shortly after my first book appeared, I became the first person in Britain to call for the legalisation of performance-enhancing drugs in sport. Why? On the grounds that drugs were –and still are–widely used at the top, that they have always been used (even at the ancient Olympics) and that if legal, drug dosage could be monitored to protect athletes. I predict drugs will be legalised one day and that bionic athletes in every sport may well be the widely admired champions of the future.

As a young Sunday Times sports correspondent traveling internationally to world championships in many sports, I soon realised there was a great denial–or perhaps it was great lie–at the very heart of top level sport. My colleagues pretended it was only female competitors who were taking performance-enhancing drugs, but I knew that male competitors were taking the drugs in much greater numbers.

Height of Danger

adrianneblue — Wed, 15 Jun 2011 18:48:16 +0000

Originally published in the New Statesman

Mountain walking in Cape Town is not for the faint-hearted.

On Table Mountain, walking has become a blood sport. An American fell to his death earlier this month on the vast, wild, flat-topped mountain that overlooks Cape Town. A week later, a Briton rode the ten-minute cable car to the 1,000-metre summit but decided to walk down. He had to be rescued in an intricate all-night operation which put his and other people’s lives at risk. Add to that the increasingly frequent, sometimes violent, muggings at knifepoint on the mountain and, well, people here are worried.

Visitors to the city are definitely on the front line – although most Capetonians know where not to go, sometimes a safe route stops being safe, so really everyone is at risk. A friend who walks Table Mountain regularly (there are 350 signposted footpaths) says he now goes only with his walking group. There is safety in numbers if there is an accident, and a group is less likely to be set upon by robbers, though even that is not unknown.

It’s winter here, with cold, wet, and nastier nights than usual. The British tourist who got caught on the mountain had anticipated a 40-minute walk down and didn’t even have a mobile phone with him. He’d gone too far to turn back by the time he saw the sign warning that he was on a difficult path. Then he fell into a ravine, splintering his wrist, and spent 12 or so hours awaiting rescuers who were alerted by his family. They had taken the cable car down.

The injured man was located when one of the searchers saw his digital camera flash. A climber was then lowered on a 200-metre rope, and the two men were harnessed together and pulled up a scary 175 metres.

The American tourist who died was a 31-year-old, experienced climber who slipped. Unfortunately, the weather suddenly turned foul and it took searchers more than a day to find him. About a dozen people die on Table Mountain every year in rambling and climbing accidents. One reason is that people underestimate its dangers. Why? Because it is a big tourist attraction within a city and not all that high. They forget that mountain weather changes quickly.

Worryingly, the dangers of the mountain have been exacerbated of late because funds for repairing eroded paths and improving signposting have been diverted to pay for policing the area. Officials admit that less than a third of the paths which have deteriorated because of weather or overuse have been upgraded.

To protect walkers and climbers from muggers, the mountain is now patrolled by 52 visitor safety rangers, but there are 100 entry points to the mountain, leading to 800 kilometres of footpath.

Why should you care about Table Mountain? For one thing, it is a Unesco World Heritage Site. For another, it is beautiful.

In the Swiss Alps at another World Heritage Site, the melting Aletsch Glacier, Greenpeace recently found 600 people to strip naked and pose for a photograph to make a point about global warming. In Cape Town, which is very eco-conscious, on a fine day you could easily find a similar number to pose to make a point about soil erosion, or just about roaming free.

Finally, a word to outraged rugby fans. Even though England’s World Cup opener against the US on 8 September should be a doddle, it looks like I will not have to eat my hat. Sadly, England’s defeat in the final two warm-up matches indicates that retaining the rugby World Cup is an unattainable dream.

It’s the real dope

adrianneblue — Sat, 04 Jun 2011 09:49:59 +0000

Originally published in the New Statesman

The dirty little secret in sport used to be money. Champions were turned into criminals, forced to queue up for illegal cash payments handed out in brown envelopes. Why? Because top-level sport was a full-time profession – you could not hope to achieve world class by training after hours – but sports champions were supposed to be amateurs. Today, sport’s dirty little secret is drugs, and it is high time we made them legal. Performance-enhancing drugs may not be desirable, but they are here to stay. What we can do away with is the hypocrisy.

Insiders know that many – perhaps most – top players in all sports take drugs to train harder and feel no pain during play. The trainers, sports doctors, nutritionists, physiotherapists and managers of the big names make sure banned substances are taken at the safest and most efficient levels, and when they can, the governing bodies look the other way.

The fastest man on the planet and the world’s top endurance athlete have just failed drugs tests. The runner Justin Gatlin, the current Olympic 100 metres champion and co-holder of the world record, and the cyclist Floyd Landis, winner of this year’s Tour de France, are getting some bad publicity, but they are in very good company. Cricket, football, tennis and speed skating have all had scandals involving anabolic steroids, growth hormones, blood doping, diuretics, amphetamines, or, like Gatlin and Landis, testosterone boosts. You name it, someone takes it if it will help.

What many of us don’t realise is that sports doping rarely gives you a free ride. If you or I were to take anabolic steroids and sit down in front of the telly, we would not build muscle or speed or endurance. Drugs allow you to train harder. They help you recover more quickly from a hard session so you can work hard again the next day. Some drugs boost the body’s propensity for building muscle or its ability to use oxygen, but you still have to do the work. A judo medallist once told me: “I took drugs so I could train twice a day. I don’t feel any guilt because I know I earned my medal.”

This season, the British 100 metres runner Dwain Chambers, who was stripped of his 2002 European Championship title, is back on the team after a two-year ban for taking a designer steroid. The man who welcomed him back, the performance director of UK Athletics, Dave Collins, said: “We are not making ethical statements. We are picking a team to do as well as we can.”

Tales of sport doping go back to ancient Egypt, where the hoof of an Abyssinian ass ground up and boiled in oil was prescribed to improve performance. In the 19th century, boxers took heroin before going into the ring. The legendary 1960s Manchester United goalkeeper Harry Gregg has confessed that he took amphetamines before matches.

No one much cared until 1960, when a Danish cyclist on speed died during an Olympic competition. None the less, it was seven years before the Olympic authorities issued a banned-drug list. Anabolic steroids were not prohibited until 1976. Champions and the testers have been playing cat and mouse ever since.

The main effect of banning such substances has been to turn performers and their coaches into liars and cheats. We should legalise performance-enhancing drugs so that they can be regulated and athletes on the way up – whose entourages do not yet include savvy physiotherapists and doctors – don’t overdose and do themselves damage.