With the Olympic opening ceremony now only five days away, two issues threaten to cloud the spectacle of international sporting excellence to which the world is looking forward. The first is the continuing high level of pollution in Beijing, despite the Chinese government’s sweeping closure of factories and the severe curtailment of traffic on the capital’s roads. It would be a tragedy if, after the immense effort that the authorities have put into making the Games a success, athletes, especially in endurance contests such as the marathon, found their performance affected by poor-quality air. The more serious issue is, however, the continuing problem of the use of performance-enhancing drugs. As the hours tick away to the start of competition, a series of doping stories has hit the headlines.
Yesterday the International Olympic Committee (IOC) decided to strip the gold medals from the US 4x400m men’s relay team won at the Sydney Games in 2000, after sprinter Antonio Pettigrew admitted in June that he used banned substances between 1997 and 2003. Sadly, the IOC has yet to agree to award the medals to the Nigerian relay team who came second in the race. But already the Beijing Games have the taint of doping scandals. Seven Russian athletes have been banned from taking part by the International Association of Athletics Federations because of strong evidence that they were tipped off about drugs tests and so substituted other people’s urine for their own when they were called in to be checked. The Bulgarian weightlifting team has withdrawn 11 of its members after they tested positive for banned substances.
The women’s world champion road cyclist Italian Marta Bastianelli has also quit the Games after a positive test and two runners have been dropped from the Romanian team after showing suspiciously high levels of oxygen in their blood. It could be argued that the unmasking of these cheats is actually good news in that it demonstrates that athletics authorities everywhere are taking the doping issue seriously. The counterargument, however, could be that these guilty athletes are only the tip of the iceberg and that despite the now generally uncompromising official view of performance-enhancing drugs, more and more athletes are prepared to risk their careers and, indeed in the long-term, sometimes their health, in order to achieve sporting glory.
It says little for the personal morality of any sportsman or woman who holds a gold medal proudly aloft, knowing that they have cheated in order to gain it. The whole point of any sporting contest ought to be the absolutely fair matching of athletic prowess. A darker possibility is that too many athletes believe their rivals will be using drugs, so they must use them themselves. This seems to have happened in grueling events such as the Tour de France. As long as the chemists can formulate performance enhancers that are ever harder to detect, it seems there will still be many takers. If, however, the Beijing Games become known as the Crack Down Olympics, they will hopefully be no less memorable for genuine sporting excellence.
