KENAN MALIK From Manchester United's Rio Ferdinand
missing a drugs test to leading sprinter Dwain Chambers failing one: sports
and drugs seem forever in the headlines these days. And it's not just their
reputations that sportsmen and women appear to be putting on the line.
VIVIENNE NATHANSON There are some very frightening
bits of research which show that if you talk to people aspiring to be elite
athletes and you say to them 'If we could give you a drug which would guarantee
that you'd win a gold medal at the Olympics but you'd be dead within five
years, would you do it?', the majority would say yes.
KENAN MALIK Dr. Vivienne Nathanson, Head of
Ethics at the British Medical Association. There are, of course, no drugs
that can turn ordinary athletes into world-beaters. But the willingness of
so many to contemplate such a Faustian pact seems shocking. How do former
Olympic medallists Mark Richardson and Tessa Sanderson feel about this?
MARK RICHARDSON What kind of moral standard,
what kind of example are we setting you know when these sportsmen and sportswomen
are meant to be, and are perceived as role models, but they're going out there
and they're contravening the laws set by our sport in order to get a better
performance? We want them out of the sport. It's the worst form of cynical
cheating. It cannot be condoned in any shape or form.
TESSA SANDERSON Many advice I give my athletes
because if the question comes up about drugs - and it does because I have
athletes from the age of you know seventeen right through to now thirty -
and I say to them, look, don't even think about it. They've seen me compete
for twenty-six years and I've never once been done for drugs. You know I have
a clean image about me.
KENAN MALIK So, what are the drugs that so worry
Richardson and Sanderson, and how do they work? Dr Richard Nicholson is editor
of the Bulletin of Medical Ethics, a former international rifle shooter, and
the author of an official review of drug use in sport.
RICHARD NICHOLSON It appears that the commonly
used groups are anabolic steroids, which boost the proportion of muscle mass
in the body and which certainly do enhance the power of muscles. There is
a lot of suggestive evidence that erythropoietin an artificially produced
exact model of a hormone that appears in the body, is used by distance runners,
those who need to be able to transport a lot of oxygen, because what it does
is enhance the production of red blood cells so that you have more red blood
cells that can carry more oxygen around the body to the muscles. Its end effect
is actually the same as that of training at altitude. Beta-blockers are of
potential value in a few sports where one does not want to have the sort of
nervous tension that most athletes rely on. So in rifle shooting, pistol shooting,
archery, billiards, snooker, sports like that, beta-blockers may well give
some advantage.
KENAN MALIK Drug testing was first introduced
into the Olympic Games in 1968. Over the past four decades a fully-fledged
drug detection industry has developed, with the establishment of the World
Anti-Doping Agency, the creation of specialist pharmaceutical labs, and an
ever-expanding list of banned substances. But has the anti-doping industry
become as much of a monster as drug-taking itself? Not satisfied with testing
sprinters and weight-lifters, the World Anti-Doping Agency now wants urine
samples from - wait for it - chess and bridge players. And among the drugs
that they will have to avoid are coffee and Nurofen. At the Sydney Games four
years ago, the 16-year old Romanian gymnast Andrea Raducan was stripped of
her gold medal for taking two Nurofen tablets that everyone agreed had done
nothing to improve her performance.So what does the sprinter and 1996 Olympic
silver medallist Mark Richardson do when he gets the sniffles?
MARK RICHARDSON I don't take anything. It's
best. As an athlete, you can't afford, I just can't afford to take the chance
of failing a drugs test, so I just sweat it out. I take
good old-fashioned paracetemol or an aspirin simply because it is a minefield
out there. As it stands, as the laws of the sport stand, you have to be very
careful. And, yes, some people may legitimately be taking something which
has pseudoephedrine to help them recover from a cold and it's perfectly legitimate
for everyday people on the street, but you get other people who are trying
to push the system and it is a legal minefield, to be honest.
KENAN MALIK Four years ago Mark Richardson himself
fell victim to the drugs police. He tested positive for the anabolic steroid
nandralone, which he says he unwittingly ingested from a legal dietary supplement.
As a result, he had to sit out the Sydney Olympics.
MARK RICHARDSON I did miss the Sydney Olympics,
yes, but I voluntarily withdrew because I was kind of forced into a corner.
The IAAF wanted me to have an arbitration hearing just prior to the Olympics
and I knew the science hadn't worked quick enough. Unfortunately the laboratory
hadn't got the conclusive evidence and proof that I needed. I made the decision
to withdraw from the games.
KENAN MALIK You were later cleared totally of
the charges, but how did you feel at the time at having to miss the Olympics?
MARK RICHARDSON I can't even begin to describe
it. Obviously it was a very low point. I was deprived of a medal, to be honest.
I was in great, great shape. There was only one person who was regularly beating
me and that was Michael Johnson. Everyone knows what he went on to achieve
at the Olympics. But I can't turn the clock back. For me, at that time, the
most important thing was to clear my name. You know my name is something that's
going to be with me for the rest of my life and I did not want anyone
thinking I was a drugs cheat, that I knowingly took an illegal product. I
just couldn't live with that and so I had to do everything in my power to
prove my innocence.
KENAN MALIK All this might suggest that current
drugs policies are both overly intrusive and deeply unfair, arbitrarily depriving
both individuals and nations of medals and glory. Many, however, like Mark
Richardson and Tessa Sanderson, defend the draconian powers of the drugs police
- including the rule that athletes are guilty even if they've unknowingly
taken a banned substance. They think too many athletes are both cheating their
fellow competitors and harming their own bodies, while the anti-doping industry
is forever lagging behind, as athletes move from one supposed wonder drug
to the next. Richard Callicott is Chief Executive of UK Sport, the government
body that runs elite sport in this country and is responsible for drugs testing.
Does he agree with those who say he's always playing catch-up?
RICHARD CALLICOTT I would reluctantly have to
concede that they have a point. That said, however, the discovery recently
of a previously non-detectable steroid is an indication the extent to which
some cheats will go and, frankly, some unscrupulous people will go in laboratories,
chemists, whoever they may be in order to try and con the public and con athletes
and cheats by taking these sorts of undetectable substances. But the good
news is that the formation of the World Anti-Doping Agency means that for
the first time we've actually got governments of the world working together
with sports federations, international federations. And we've never had that
before. It's always been operating very much in isolation and there's been
no coordination. But now we have a coordinated approach and as more countries
come into that process and that programme, then the information that's passed
between us will increase. The important part is we've got to get to youngsters
to recognise that winning at all costs isn't necessarily the answer, but winning
is okay but winning clear and winning fair. That's the important part.
KENAN MALIK But it's never been clean and fair.
For as long as sports have existed, sportsmen have taken drugs. Ancient Greek
athletes used magic mushrooms to fortify themselves. In the 1904 Olympic Marathon,
Thomas Hicks ran to victory thanks to injections of strychnine and doses of
brandy administered to him during the race. It was the Cold War which turned
sport - and drugs - into an ideological weapon. There was outrage in the West
about the way that Eastern bloc coaches encouraged their athletes to pop a
pill as easily as they slipped on a pair of spikes. Not that all Western athletes
were squeaky clean. Tessa Sanderson, who became Olympic javelin champion in
1984, was well aware that many of her rivals from East and West were doped
up. It's strengthened her conviction that drugs have no place on the sports
field.
TESSA SANDERSON When you're putting something
in your body that is not natural, then you know there's got to be some harm
that it is doing. So I can say, yes, that I really do feel that some athletes
who take drugs probably feel that it is going to enhance their performance.
But then you get the other side of it because you do get some sportsmen or
athletes who probably have been taking drugs for a long time and it hasn't
done a thing for them.
KENAN MALIK When you were a competitor, was
there any pressure on you to take drugs?
TESSA SANDERSON Very much so. Not as much as
I suppose there is nowadays, but there was a lot of pressure in the sense
that I was asked to and also you know by people who even people who you knew.
You know it was like, 'Here, girl, why don't you try this?'. And I thought
you know you must be crazy. There were times that I was offered you know drugs
to take, but I totally refused because, for one, I was frightened to death
and thought well you know I'm sure this is going to harm your body somewhat,
and also because you know I had a lot of confidence in my coach, I had a lot
of confidence in my natural ability and I had good parentage behind me.
KENAN MALIK Athletes, the argument runs, should
not do anything that is either unnatural or gives them an unfair advantage.
But athletes commonly do many things - from high altitude training to high
protein diets - that are neither natural nor maintain a level playing field.
ELLIS CASHMORE If you look at the history of
sport, you'll see that cheating has been really a function of how we define
what's fair play, of course, and that's
manifestly obvious.
KENAN MALIK Ellis Cashmore, Professor of Sports,
Media and Culture at Staffordshire University.
ELLIS CASHMORE If, for example, we turn the
clock back and look at the time where spikes were introduced, for example,
there was a hue and cry over it. People said
hang on, you can't run in spikes, that's giving you an unfair advantage over
the competitors who run in flats. And when world records were set on synthetic
tracks as opposed to cinders, again people were saying is this fair, or isn't
it fair? And we adjusted the rules. We adapted to the changes in technology.
In other words, they are making the most of what technologies are available.
It just so happens that some of those technologies are subject to bans and
of course pharmaceuticals are one of them.
KENAN MALIK So are you saying that there's nothing
natural about sport?
ELLIS CASHMORE I think that this is a fallacy
that there's any kind of natural state of the human body. I mean we can trace
it back to the 18th century and the days when
gentlemen and players competed. And of course the players got wise to the
idea that if you trained it would benefit your performance. The gentlemen
said hang on, you can't go away and train because that isn't in the spirit
of fair play. But they did train, of course, and they did enhance their performance
through training. So training in itself changes the characteristics of the
human body. It confers on us new qualities - we can run faster, jump higher,
have more stamina.
KENAN MALIK But what evidence is there that
performance-enhancing drugs really enhance performance? Dr Richard Nicholson.
RICHARD NICHOLSON There has been very little
research about how any of these drugs enhance performance. There have been
some studies, but remarkably few overall - only about two or three that are
scientifically credible - which show that giving steroids to fit, young people
will enhance their performance in certain athletic events, but the amount
of evidence is quite small. One of the commonly found drugs for which sportsmen
are disqualified or banned are stimulants. There is absolutely no evidence
that any stimulant has ever enhanced anybody's performance in any sport. The
research hasn't been done. It's all supposition. And in that field, it's quite
interesting how the supposition was fuelled by the sporting authorities because
for years in the 50s and 60s as soon as - and more recently - as soon as any
sports authority heard that some sportsman was trying out some sort of stimulant,
then they would ban it and that would give the message to everybody else in
the sport that it must be effective. Why else would they bother to ban it?
But the scientific evidence simply isn't there.
KENAN MALIK You seem to be suggesting that despite
the panic about drugs and sport, there is actually very little we know about
how they're used, what drugs are used and what effects they have on enhancing
performance. Is that right?
RICHARD NICHOLSON It is right that we know very
little because the problem is that the sports authorities have put a certain
amount of money into this field but only into trying to improve detection
rates. They're only now, through the World Anti-Doping Agency, beginning to
do some of their own research and that research is still into how to detect
drugs better.
KENAN MALIK This year Britain alone will spend
more than £3m on drug tests. Worldwide, the figure is estimated at over
£100m. Why bother, if most drugs have no effect? For Dr Vivienne Nathanson,
such spending is necessary, not to stop athletes cheating, but to prevent
them harming their health.
VIVIENNE NATHANSON We have considerable evidence
of the harms, but some of the harms are less well documented than others.
It's very interesting that young people take anabolics because they think
it'll make them more attractive, but for women it's likely to give you quite
severe acne, it may stop your periods, it may make your breasts get smaller;
in men the exact opposite happens - they're likely to get breast enlargement
and testicular atrophy. In both, you can get problems with fertility both
short term and permanent. So those are just short-term effects. And long term
of course, because it's having an effect on muscle, the heart is a muscle,
it can damage the heart and it can cause permanent heart damage; that we'll
see people with potentially lethal cardiac muscle, heart muscle abnormalities,
in younger and younger age groups.
JIM PARRY People say that you shouldn't take
drugs in sport because your testicles will shrivel and then you'll die. Well
actually this doesn't appear to be the case.
KENAN MALIK Jim Parry, once a striker with Derby
County, now a lecturer in Philosophy at Leeds University.
JIM PARRY There've been very few doping related
deaths in elite sport. There doesn't seem to be any documented evidence that
performance enhancing drugs are anywhere near as harmful as tobacco smoking
or alcohol, both of which are legal. Also sports itself is very harmful. There
aren't really any figures for how many people are rendered paraplegic through
participation in gymnastics and rugby, but you bet your life that the harms
caused by sport itself are at least as high as the harms caused by the drugs
that are taken.
KENAN MALIK There is considerable anecdotal
and personal evidence - much of it from East European athletes - that long-term
use of performance enhancing drugs does create all manner of health problems.
The East German shot putter Heidi Krieger, for instance, was forced into a
sex change, the result she says of years of steroid abuse. Yet the scientific
evidence for such harm remains thin. The British Medical Association has launched
a campaign against the use of drugs, in particular anabolic steroids. Yet
its own report, Drugs in Sport, acknowledges that 'Systematic life-threatening
side-effects of anabolic steroids have not been substantiated' and that 'only
speculative evidence links anabolic steroids and coronary heart disease'.
In any case, as Jim Parry observes, sports by their very nature can be dangerous.
Around 100 people die each year in Britain from sports-related injuries. While
there are no figures for deaths from the use of performance enhancing drugs,
most people accept that it's considerably less. But we allow people to hanglide,
go rock climbing, box and play American football because they are making informed
decisions about the risks they are willing to take. Why can’t we treat
drugs in the same way? Professor Ellis Cashmore.
ELLIS CASHMORE Any policy that is based on the
idea of banning the use of performance enhancers in sport is doomed to failure.
I propose that we abolish the regime of this surveillance in drug testing
in sport and perhaps replace it with some kind of mechanism for monitoring.
I would ask athletes for disclosure so that we knew what products they were
taking at what intervals and for what parts of the year. And then I think
we could advise accordingly. It'd be transparent. And I think that that would
create an environment which is far healthier for the athletes.
RICHARD CALLICOTT I couldn't reject that proposition
more violently. That is a totally unacceptable way of going. That suggests
that we want to end up with
chemical games.
KENAN MALIK Richard Callicott of UK Sport.
RICHARD CALLICOTT That suggests that we want
to try and somehow see which drug is better at running a hundred metres than
another drug and that's unacceptable. That's not the ethos of sport. That's
not what sport is about. I reject that totally. All that means is that the
strongest scientists will win medals and actually that's not what those of
us that work in sport, and have worked in sport all our lives, stand for.
I think that there is a new mood. I think there's a cultural swing and I sense
that that swing wants more than ever for the United Kingdom, amongst others,
to set a new standard in the ethics of world sport by standing up for principle.
KENAN MALIK But scientists already help athletes
win. Cyclist Chris Boardman won his Olympic Gold in Barcelona in 1992 sitting
on a specially-engineered machine. In the Rugby World Cup, England players
wore body-hugging shirts specifically designed to help evade tackles. In neither
case did the scientific work in the labs devalue the sporting triumph in the
stadium. Why view drug use differently?
It's difficult, in any case, for proponents of the current drugs policy to
assume the moral high ground. Not only are the arguments for a draconian drugs
regime flawed, but the policies often lead to dubious consequences. Is depriving
a 16-year Romanian gymnast of her life's dream because she took a couple of
Nurofen tablets really to stand on principle? One can't help wondering whether
the cultural swing in sport is largely the consequence of financial and political
pressures to present a cleaner image. Tessa Sanderson manages about a hundred
up-and-coming athletes around the world. One of her jobs is to negotiate with
sponsors.
TESSA SANDERSON The first thing they'll probably
say, 'None of you’re athletes is caught up in drugs, are they, or anything
like that?'. Because a lot of them or the majority of them are very, very
much aware that you know this goes on but they don't want it with their product.
They do not want it with their product because they don't see it as you know
a good thing. They care about the young people who are coming through. And
because, especially with track and field, a lot of sponsors wants to keep
that image of it's family entertainment, you know, and they don't want it
tarnished. So they are more likely to stay away from you if they know that
you have been tarnished with drugs than you know come with you and just think
oh well it will be pushed under the cover and because you're a star. It'll
happen. No, I do think that mud sticks, you see, and a lot of them are concerned
about this.
KENAN MALIK So that's the direction we're heading:
football or rugby or athletics as family entertainment; sportsmen and women
as clean-cut role models. But being clean-cut is not why fans worship Diego
Maradonna or Eric Cantona, or why John McEnroe stirs the soul in the way Pete
Sampras never could. What we want is passion and rebelliousness as well as
sporting prowess. For Ellis Cashmore, the problem is not that money has corrupted
the soul of sport but more that it has corrupted the soul of sportsmen.
ELLIS CASHMORE What I think we've witnessed
in recent months and perhaps years is the formation of an elite group of celebrity
footballers who have more money really than they ever imagined they'd have
and they have it by the time they're twenty-five. And they somehow have got
into the frame of mind where they believe they're above the law, you know
they occupy the same status as rock stars and movie stars and you know they
expect the red carpet treatment wherever they go. Someone gives them a sample
bottle and says we need a sample for a drug test and they say 'Don't bother
me with such trivialities. You know I've got to do some shopping at Harvey
Nicks. Get out of my way.' You know you suddenly get a young person and you
start funneling several millions pounds into their bank accounts and then
watch them go out of control.
KENAN MALIK But perhaps we should be less pious
about loadsamoney footballers. Yes, many behave badly. But why are we surprised
at that? Why do we insist that rich young men and women, whose main concern
is to score goals and win medals, should become moral standard bearers? Yet,
many argue that sportsmen and women already are role models, and that their
behaviour influences millions.
VIVIENNE NATHANSON Certainly young people when
questioned don't seem to see drugs used in sport as a problem. They don't
see it as an issue, something they should avoid doing. Because they hear of
elite athletes using drugs, they think well if it's good enough for somebody
and might make them a world champion potentially, then it might help me.
KENAN MALIK The BMA's Vivienne Nathanson. There
is particular concern among doctors
about the extent of the misuse of anabolic steroids by non-athletes.
VIVIENNE NATHANSON The consequences that we
see are not just immediate, the short term consequences, but we're going to
see long term effects of people who have done permanent harm to their bodies
from using these drugs. We have no real idea of numbers. We just know that
in some gyms the percentage is maybe as high as sixty or seventy percent of
people using their gyms have said they've used them. People feel you know
before they go away on their holidays in the summer, they want some muscle
definition and that this will make them look good on the beach and so on,
so that's why they take anabolics. As with all other casual drug use that
becomes apparently almost socially acceptable, you start to see increasing
numbers of people and therefore almost an epidemic spread. And it's a public
health problem because this is the health of large numbers of people being
affected. And, as doctors, we can't just deal with the individuals; we have
to deal with the root cause, which means the availability of these drugs,
people's attitude to them and their understanding of toxicity.
KENAN MALIK There is certainly evidence that
steroids are freely available, in gyms and through the internet, and that
they are increasingly widely used. But have they become socially acceptable
merely because top athletes use them? Surely it's too easy to blame complex
social ills on the behaviour of a handful of people we first put on pedestals,
and then knock down. Perhaps the real difficulty is that we use the same word
- drugs - to describe both an issue in sport and a problem in society. Jim
Parry of Leeds University.
JIM PARRY I think the moral panic about social
drugs - and I think we're right to be very worried about social drugs - transfers
to the worries about drugs in sport. I don't think that doping substances
can be made equivalent to heroine and cocaine and shouldn't be. They're separate
problems and should be treated differently. We shouldn't have a moral panic
on about doping in sport in the same way that we have a moral panic about
heroine and cocaine. Heroine and cocaine are social problems: they're problems
for society and they require political and police activity. Doping in sport
is a problem for sport, not for politics. It's not a social problem in a way.
It's an internal problem for sport which affects the internal ethics of sport
and that's the big problem.
KENAN MALIK The very language of the drugs debate
often precludes a rational discussion. Drugs baron and innocent victim, dirty
needles and crack dens - the imagery of drugs is highly potent and morally
charged. Transferring this debate from society to sport does little to help
us address the issue in either sphere. For Jim Parry the pressures to take
drugs are rooted in the competitive nature of sport itself.
JIM PARRY If you take the Olympic motto 'citius,
altius, fortius' - faster, higher, stronger - you can see that within it is
a logic of the everlasting progress of sport through record-breaking and through
higher and higher achievement, so that increasing demands are being put on
athletes to become better and better all the time. And so the idea is that
the internal logic of sport pushes the equipment that the athlete has to use
and the athlete himself further and further towards the limits of human capability.
The athlete comes to see his own body as an instrument for the production
of a new
record and this can produce abuses. Think about cyclists. What do you want
to find out - which is the best cyclist, or which is the best bicycle? I have
a prejudice that I'd like to think that we were watching the best cyclists,
not the people who were riding the best bikes that had been produced by an
advanced economy. It's the same with sprinters. Wouldn't it be nice if all
the sprinters were as they were in ancient times - almost naked, running on
the earth, not on a specially prepared track; running in bare feet, not in
specially prepared shoes? Then you know who's the best sprinter.
KENAN MALIK Oh, what a wonderful image that
conjures up! But, I fear, we won’t be seeing many naked men running
across Hackney Marshes, even if the 2012 Olympics comes to London. We certainly
need a more rational drugs policy but one that’s rooted in 21st century
Britain not in Ancient Greece. To create such a policy, we could start by
scrapping the whole multi-million pound anti-doping industry and putting the
money instead into some basic research into the impact of drugs on both performance
and health. And once we have the facts, then we can start making decisions
on which drugs
are useful, which harmful and which we might wish to ban. It’s time
the sports authorities started taking pragmatic decisions that will benefit
both sport and those who take part in it.