Fair play for all Gerrard's aim

"I could sense what was happening in East Germany. You didn't have to be a physician to see it...
"I could sense what was happening in East Germany. You didn't have to be a physician to see it and that kindled in my mind the unfairness of the doping issue and the cheating." Photo by Craig Baxter.
All cheats are naughty, but some cheats are naughtier than others. Sports reporter Adrian Seconi asks passionate anti-doping crusader David Gerrard why he believes it is so important to tackle the issue of performance-enhancing drugs in sport.

Knocking the ball into the goal with your fist is cheating, even if God provided the helping hand.

So is a dramatic, unassisted, sideways leap from the line-out. But it is not going to get you banned.

You can even use a little crystal meth, like Andre Agassi, and hold on to your titles.

But take a little pep-me-up, or a steroid or two, and suddenly, you are a pariah.

We are told performance-enhancing drugs are bad. And they are bad for three reasons.

They put the athlete's health at risk, they give an athlete an unfair advantage and they contravene the spirit of sport.

If a substance satisfies two of those three criteria, it winds up on the World Anti-Doping Agency's (Wada) band list.

Get caught taking a banned substance without clearance and there is hell to pay.

Just ask disgraced United States sprinter Marion Jones.

Jones won five medals, including three golds, at the Sydney Olympics in 2000 and was the toast of the sporting world until an investigation into Balco (Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative) revealed the Californian had taken a designer steroid dubbed "The Clear".

After eventually confessing her steroid use, she was stripped of her five medals and her results erased.

She was also given a six-month prison sentence in January 2008 for lying in court.

She cheated, she was caught and she paid a heavy price.

But does the punishment match the crime?One of the world's leading sports medicine experts, University of Otago Associate Prof David Gerrard, thinks so.

Gerrard is a member of the Wada health medicine and research committee and chairman of therapeutic use exception committee, and he is also an adviser for the minister of sport Murray McCully.

A former swimmer, he won gold in the 220 yards butterfly at the 1966 British Empire and Commonwealth Games in Jamaica.

He also won a bronze with the New Zealand 4x110 yards medley relay team.

It was during his competitive days Gerrard's attitude towards performance-enhancing drugs hardened.

While he was playing a straight bat, so to speak, other athletes, particularly the East Germans, were getting an unfair advantage. "I could sense what was happening in East Germany.

You didn't have to be a physician to see it and that kindled in my mind the unfairness of the doping issue and the cheating," Gerrard said.

East Germany became a sporting powerhouse through the '70s and '80s, when thousands of athletes were given performance-enhancing steroids.

Many of the athletes believed they were simply taking vitamins.

It was the most vile exploitation and it was not until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the onset of some negative side effects that the real stories started to emerge.

"We needed to work collectively to ensure all athletes were treated equally and the cheats were caught," Gerrard said.

"It's a huge undertaking to catch the cheats, because the cheats are not necessarily the athletes who were taking the drugs.

"If I prescribed anabolic steroids to a fit, healthy athlete for other than their intended purposes, it would be illegal and unethical. I could be struck off."

No-one with the athlete's best interests at heart would advocate taking a substance which causes harm.

And taking potentially harmful products would erode one of the core reasons for participating in sport: it is meant to promote health and fitness, not undermine it.

But risk and sport go hand-in-hand.

And generally, the bigger the risk the bigger the reward.

It is a culture which in a way leans itself to abuse.

"It is positively unhealthy running ultra-marathons in Death Valley [in California], or climbing without oxygen," Gerrard acknowledges.

"But what sports medicine has done over the years is help us understand how the body works. I like to compare the athlete to a Formula 1 racing car.

"The design of the car you and I drive has come about because of the extreme design features of Formula 1 racing.

"The tyres, the power steering, braking systems and safety features have all come about by studying the high-performance vehicle.

"In the same way, one can understand more about nutrition if they study high-performance athletes."

Ironically, opponents of Wada use a similar argument.

Remove prohibition and in a new, open environment doctors can study the effects and provide informed advice.

Resources spent on testing athletes could instead be spent on education.

They argue banning performance-enhancing substances actually helps create an environment in which drugs flourish and removing prohibition would remove the incentive.

People cheat because they believe it will give them an advantage.

If there is no advantage, perhaps athletes will think twice.

"It is an interesting slant to take. It rather suggests that it [the ban] happens to be one of the rules.

"If entering a ruck from the wrong side is against the rules, then you get penalised for it, and if you continue to infringe you get a yellow card or you might get a red card.

"You take the chance, you get caught, you get punished. It is a rule and you have to abide by the rules. If you don't, sport becomes totally incontrollable."

The same argument applies to recreational drugs which are not performance-enhancing.

It is just against the rules. Alcohol is fine. Cannabis is banned.

It is that black and white, but Gerrard does have some sympathy for athletes who get caught up in a win-at-all-costs mentality and look for a short cut to success.

"The current culture is contributing. We are seeing a young generation coming into sport who are far more privileged than those before them."

Today's high-performance society has bred athletes whose expectations are, once you get to a certain level, the grants, product endorsements and performance fees will come flooding in.

With that comes the pressure to perform.

Despite the challenges, Gerrard believes Wada is winning the battle.

Governments and sports bodies are working together to combat what he describes as "the scourge of modern sport".

"There is a misconception that there is a whole bunch of designer steroids out there that we don't know about.

"But there is not an infinite number of chemical structures that could be introduced or a thousand designer steroids waiting to be invented."

There are new generations of EPO which are much harder to detect but the next big challenge is "genetic doping".

But rest assured, "Wada is on to it and they are putting up big money and using some of the best universities and best research scientists to keep ahead of it."

 

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