Commissions won’t stop use of drugs in sport

‘‘STEROIDS DO shrink your genitals,’’ Commonwealth discus champion Robin Tait told journalists in 1970. ‘‘That’s why they call me the 20-stone bombshell with the two-inch fuse.’’

Tait’s stunning honesty then about his massive drug intake almost got him sent home from the Edinburgh Commonwealth Games.

But, as the only athlete I’ve ever met who was breathtakingly open about how steroids, in particular, helped him succeed in his sport, he continued later to offer a window into the usually murky world of doping.

Most testimony we hear about drugs in sport is coerced, or, think Lance Armstrong, astonishingly self serving. But Tait was a lone voice who, under no pressure beyond his love of shocking an audience, spelled out why stamping drugs out of sport is always going to be a long, bruising battle, that all the commissions in Australia and bans in America won’t shut down overnight. Forget the coaches, the team managers, the doctors, or the dealers.

As Tait pointed out, some sportspeople are gagging to cheat with drugs because (a) they improve your performance and (b) winning at all costs is the only thing that matters. Occasionally drug cheats will repent, and feel guilty about using them to win.

The religious beliefs of Graham May, the giant weightlifter who won gold in Christchurch at the 1974 Commonwealth Games, led him, 15 years later, to offer to return his medal because he won it on steroids. The offer was apparently declined. But May’s attitude is far from the norm.

What is common with those who use drugs is a reckless attitude that

That’s why they call me the 20-stone bombshell with the two-inch fuse.

Robin Tait

Commonwealth discus champion reflects competitive tunnel vision. In that narrow world, worries about personal safety and health can quickly be relegated to the status of unnecessary fussing.

A world class Australian athlete in the 1980s used drops designed for greyhounds before an event here. Asked if she thought it was safe she blithely replied: ‘‘Sure, the trainer told me it’d be OK because with the greyhounds they’re only used for bitches.’’

I’ve seen a world champion English athlete with foam pouring from his nose because the cocaine he thought he was taking to sharpen his reflexes was actually soap powder he’d bought from a back street dealer in Edinburgh.

So when the Aussie investigation reveals that the drugs in current sport in Australia are often supplied by hard-core criminals, how can we be surprised?

Sportspeople have also been protected by the fact outing drug users has never been a popular cause for journalists.

Years before David Walsh of the Sunday Times was being abused and sued by Lance Armstrong, Auckland Star journalist Roy Williams was jeered at by not only Finn Lasse Viren, but also by a Viren-adoring media corps after Viren won 5000 metres gold at the 1976 Olympic Games in Montreal.

It would be revealed Williams was barking up absolutely the right tree when he quizzed Viren about blood doping, because although Viren has always denied it, a Finnish team doctor and a Finnish steeplechaser, Mikko AlaLeppilampi, have admitted blood doping was being used in Finnish athletics at the time. But in 1976 Viren’s smart-arse reply to Williams, that he’d been drinking reindeer milk, was treated as the height of sharp, clever wit by Williams’ media peer group.

You even wonder if, apart from the anti-drug agencies, the only group of people truly offended by doping are the clean athletes.

I can personally vouch that Valerie Adams’ outrage at Nadzeya Ostapchuk’s cheating in London was not manufactured. The first time I spoke to Adams after Ostapchuk’s drug use was revealed she unleashed a brilliantly inventive stream of verbal abuse. Then she paused, laughed, and said: ‘‘But of course I’m moving on and not letting it upset me.’’

Sadly, the Australian investigation is likely to reveal that while some sportspeople will have been naı¨ve and almost tricked into using illegal drugs, the vast majority caught out will have been happy to run into the sleazy arms of the suppliers.