I have had several emails lately asking why I haven’t posted for a while. Well- the fact is I have five children, a wife, and a fox terrier, and have been busy in my other life since I came back from the USA in May.

So what I’d like to do today is have a go at a “BIG ONE”- drugs in sport.

We don’t know what to believe today, with all the drug scandals involving world-class athletes over the last decade, do we?

Apparently, there was a survey done some years ago amongst world-class athletes who were asked what they would do if given a choice between:

1. Taking a wonder-drug that was undetectable, but enabling them to win a gold medal at the Olympics, but be dead soon after…and…

2. competing unassisted and living to a healthy old age.

The astounding thing is that a large proportion of these dipsticks chose Option 1.

I can’t cite this particular study, or say where I read about it, but it did stick in my mind. What an indictment on the whole meaning of sport, where short-term glory and not getting caught are more important than honest effort and fair play.

A good friend of mine was at the 1988 Seoul Olympics as a marathoner, and out of curiosity she went up to Florence Griffith Joyner in the Olympic village on the pretence of getting an autograph. Really, she was just curious to see what a ‘woman’ who had run 10.49s for 100m looked like up close and personal. Pretty scary, apparently.

Think “Five o’clock shadow” emerging from beneath caked tan makeup. The poor woman was dead at 38. The coroner’s report said she’d suffered a massive epileptic seizure in her sleep that followed on from the rupture of a congenital anomaly in her brain (‘cavernous angioma’). There was no immediate association with possible steroid abuse, but this was 10 years down the track. Later, allegations surfaced that the US Olympic Committee of the time was aware of 19 serious drug violations amongst its athletes that went unreported. So the system is corrupt from the top down.

Sport should be about developing persistence, belief, and character, in the face of all the odds. These traits are not developed at the end of a needle. Anyone who needs to resort to drugs to feel that they belong on the podium must be totally lacking in confidence and therefore be a mental midget, or otherwise have no remorse whatsoever and be a certifiable sociopath. I’d like to see sports cheats jailed, actually.

Sociopaths (aka psychopaths) are everywhere. Apparently 5 out of 100 people in western culture have strong sociopathic tendencies, and 4 of these 5 would be male. Two of the characteristics of a true sociopath are an inability to empathize with another human being, and having no sense of remorse. I daresay about the same percentage of Olympians have these traits, if we can extrapolate to another population sample, but perhaps, because the Olympics is perceived to be all about getting to the top of the heap, no matter the cost, the proportion of sociopaths can exceed that in the rest of society. A sociopath is not necessarily a serial killer, but he or she will quite happily assassinate your character, self-esteem, and confidence if it serves his or her purpose. Sociopaths are very cunning, and can imitate and act out what they observe to be decent human traits of empathy and vulnerability, again if it serves their purposes.

Remember the tears and grief from Marion Jones when she was first accused of drug use? Butter wouldn’t have melted in her mouth! The idiocy of her situation was that she likely had the talent to win all her medals regardless of drug use. The drug she allegedly used was EPO (erythropoietin), which is about the most stupid drug that a sprinter could choose. It has definite uses in endurance sports which require access to maximum oxygen uptake, but as she was a power athlete and her longest event was 200m, there was not a lot of thinking going on.

There is a coldness there that allows drug cheats to lie with impunity. These people can justify anything to themselves. From the workplace bully to the halls of the US Olympic Committee, sociopaths are crawling over each other like cockroaches to get to the top of the dung pile. And they get threatened by anyone who could spoil their end-game. Which is literally on the top of a heap of dung.

I’ve just finished reading Charlie Spedding’s remarkable autobiography, ‘From Last to First’, where he stated quite openly that although he reached international class as a distance runner when still in his 20’s, it was only when he realized that until his self-confidence and belief matched his training that he had his major breakthroughs as a London marathon winner, Olympic bronze medallist (1984) , and also Olympic 6^th (1988). Charlie somehow managed to ‘perform down’ to his self-image for years.

Charlie started off life behind the pack, academically, physically, and possibly neurologically. He says that he had a “squint” as a child (this is a sign of hemispheric imbalance, and consistent with learning difficulties), and he was 41^st out of 42 in his class in Primary School. He was uncoordinated and introverted, but he was persistent.

Charlie’s story is one of gradual awakenings, and the key is persistence, all the way through his tale. He went through more achilles tendon surgeries over the years than seems possible to recover from to a world class level (from what I could read, too much intensity at a young age and not enough long steady easy running- but that is only my opinion- I wasn’t there).

The more he persisted at the one thing he seemed to be able to do well, running, the more his self-esteem rose, and he took this confidence back into the classroom, eventually graduating as a pharmacist like his father.

One of Charlie’s best observations is that the development and realization of one’s ability is a slow process that takes many years, and is the exact opposite of “instant success”.

There are huge disadvantages that ‘steroid queens’ (male and female) create for themselves, mentally and physically. Sensible hard training with excellent nutrition and recovery is far more reliable, and can turn in results as good as any achieved by cheats.