Cutting the corner

It is hard to believe that four years have passed since the Summer Olympics were hosted by Sydney. In that time the athletes will have pushed themselves harder in training, shaved vital milliseconds off their personal best, found themselves lucrative sponsors and some will have experimented with the latest undetectable performance enhancing drugs. Of course, I can't wait for them to be sensationally detected and a maelstrom of publicity to destroy their reputation.

Cheating has been a part of the Olympics ever since 388 BC when the boxer Eupolus of Thessaly bribed three opponents to take a dive and in AD 67 Emperor Nero bribed the judges to declare him chariot champion, overlooking the fact that he fell out and never finished the race. During the last few Olympics cheating has become increasingly common but it is not the epidemic that some would have us believe. At Sydney approximately 11,000 athletes participated and 50 were caught, while a recent doping scandal involving Team USA, an Australian cyclist and a Jamaican athlete have shown the start of the process once again.

The necessity for promoting Pierre de Coubertin's Olympic ideal of fair play and honesty has never been greater: "Olympism is a philosophy of life which glorifies the qualities of the body, the will and the mind by unifying them into a perfectly balanced entity. Uniting sport, culture and education, Olympism wishes to create a way of life based on contentment born of effort, on the educational value of setting the example and on the respect of universal ethical principles."

To any individual who has respect for himself, his team or his country, the very idea would be an anathema, but despite the old adage, "Cheat and you only cheat yourself," it seems that the potential lucrative sponsorship deals outweigh the moral implications. Don't tell me, 'It is the taking part that counts.' Money, fame, power: winning is everything in a society plagued with corruption. Society has turned sports into a business. Pressure for success is high, temptation is inevitable and some athletes do turn to the dark side.

Ben Johnson's notorious Olympic 100m final win was the moment that the world sat up and took note of the arrival of steroids. Johnson tested positive for furosemide, a diuretic that can mask steroid presence, but he is not alone on the list: World and Olympic 5000m silver medallist Ali Saidi-Sief, high jumper Juana Arrendel, Canadian sprinter Venolyn Clarke, 11 Paralympians and three Bulgarian weightlifters were all guilty of the same crime.

Anabolic steroids were primarily associated with weightlifters and Eastern Bloc athletes for many years because of their ability to produce the male sex hormone testosterone that stimulates the build-up of muscular tissue. Irish swimmer Michelle Smith was suspected of using steroids and after years of dodging tests she reluctantly produced a urine sample, which was later found to be tainted by enough alcohol to kill her; the presumption was that Smith had added alcohol to the specimen to mask other drugs or make a rather unusual cocktail.

Annually, prohibited substances increase in number, whether they are stimulants, narcotics, anabolic agents, diuretics or hormone treatments, there are back doors and ways to avoid detection. Doctors often help athletes bend the rules and testers acknowledge that some sportsmen will risk being caught, so they send a message about what are the safest legal substances to take. One expert on performance enhancers stated that athletes who quit taking erythropoietin (Human Growth Hormone) a week before an event would remain undiscovered.

At the Atlanta Games it was thought that many athletes were using the hormone and escaping being detected as there was, and still is, no effective test for it. Benefits of the hormone include increased protein production, rapid muscle growth, fat burning and regulated red-cell production that can improve a marathon by 4 minutes. An overdose with synthetic EPO, on the other hand, makes the blood too thick for the heart to pump, leading to cardiac arrest. Olympic-calibre cyclists are believed to be regular customers for the substance, though it is has resulted in over 25 deaths among their profession in the past 23 years. Sad.

Judgement on those who test positive should be withheld until all the facts are heard. Dennis Mitchell, the US 100m champion and 1992 Olympic bronze medallist, showed high levels of testosterone but claimed it was a result of having sex at least four times the night before and drinking five bottles of beer, which should be part of any athletes training regime. Ignorance has also proved costly; Andrea Raducan had to return her gymnastic gold medal after discovering that the cold medicine given to her by the team doctor contained a banned steroid, pseudoephedrin, which ironically could have impeded her performance.

Despite all the talk about drug taking, it is not the only form of cheating to occur at the Olympic Games. Some of the best scandals have a comical yet creative twist to them suitable for any movie screenplay: Soviet army major Borys Onishchenko was caught using a fencing sword that tricked the electronic scoring system into awarding him extra points and officials at Sydney's Paralympics discovered that only two of the gold-winning Spanish basketball team actually had a disability.

Sadly only a minority of coaches and athletes are corrupt, the majority choose to win their sport fairly. To ensure that athletes are under constant scrutiny the responsibility falls to official sports bodies to continue hounding and finding new tests to uncover undetectable drugs. Until then, I believe they have to test every medal winner and uncover at least one cheat because the public would feel the cheats have won if over the course of an Olympic Games nobody was found guilty.

One grim satisfaction comes from knowing that the drug cheats will eventually face further indignity in the form of a lengthy list of side effects: hardened arteries; muscle shrinkage and wasting; brittle bones; circulation problems; shrinking testicles; reduced libido; impotence and infertility; immune system problems; heart failure; strokes; liver, kidney and prostrate gland cancers; death. And let's not forget they have to live with a tainted Olympic medal should they ever escape detection.