My day job since 2008 has been in elite sport, and in recent weeks there have been times when instead of being considered a glamorous and interesting job to many who I met socially, it has become a reason for mockery and condemnation. This reminds me of a great book cover that seems to have been a staple of airport bookstores for the last few years – Don’t Tell Mom I Work on the Rigs: She Thinks I’m a Piano Player in a Whorehouse.
Drugs, gangs, betting, and match fixing are allegedly rife within world and Australian sport. Suddenly to a great many people, what sport means has radically changed. It has happened before – Ben Johnson at the Seoul Olympics in 1988 and the Festina Affair at the Tour de France in 1998 both leap to mind and sadly, looking at the aftermath of these two global scandals, history suggests it will almost certainly happen again.
The aftermath of both scandals saw great outrage from the general public and media, and stern PR reactions (not actions) from governing bodies. Both the Olympics and Le Tour roll on, but it could be argued that something has been lost from both. Ben Johnson vs Carl Lewis was the last great Track and Field rivalry to capture the attention of the world, not just athletics aficionados (for a great article about that race on that day, click here). Without Usain Bolt, the sport of Track & Field would be sliding towards redundancy even more quickly than it – in my opinion – currently is.
Cycling has limped along for fifteen years since the Festina Affair with drugs scandal after drugs scandal. I’m sure that if cycling were a topic on Family Feud, one of the top five answers would most certainly be drugs. "Well at least we're not like cycling" has been the easy schadenfreude answer from all fans and administrators of other sports whenever their sport has been tainted with drugs. This now appears to have been a naive view.
Already this year has seen a redefinition of society's view of professional sport, particularly in Australia. We have had Lance Armstrong finally out himself as a cheat, worldwide match-fixing in football, the re-testing of track and field athletes' samples (with positive test results), admissions of systematic supplement injections and peptide use at a football club, allegations of pre-competition boorishness and prescription drug abuse in swimmers, whispers of match fixing in the major Australian sporting codes (the NRL and the AFL) by the Australian Federal Police, and hints of involvement with illicit drugs by undisclosed individuals.
If nothing else, it has been interesting to see the minor redefinitions that have floated along in the wake of the major shake-up that is rumbling along in world sport. According to some, “cheating” has narrowed to only mean gaining advantage over your competition as opposed to explicitly and systematically breaking the rules. According to others, “supplement use” has expanded from popping some vitamin pills and drinking protein shakes to include injection of substances directly into your belly. And finally, according to apparently everyone in Australia, the definition of “peptides” has expanded from meaning "small chains of amino acids" to mean performance enhancing drugs.
It will be interesting to see how many more definitions will be tweaked in the coming months, and also how many more revelations will be forthcoming. For the sake of amusement, I hope there will be many more of the former, and for the sake of my love of sport, I hope there turns out to be no more of the latter.
If nothing else, it has been interesting to see the minor redefinitions that have floated along in the wake of the major shake-up that is rumbling along in world sport. According to some, “cheating” has narrowed to only mean gaining advantage over your competition as opposed to explicitly and systematically breaking the rules. According to others, “supplement use” has expanded from popping some vitamin pills and drinking protein shakes to include injection of substances directly into your belly. And finally, according to apparently everyone in Australia, the definition of “peptides” has expanded from meaning "small chains of amino acids" to mean performance enhancing drugs.
It will be interesting to see how many more definitions will be tweaked in the coming months, and also how many more revelations will be forthcoming. For the sake of amusement, I hope there will be many more of the former, and for the sake of my love of sport, I hope there turns out to be no more of the latter.