Usain Bolt, Olympic 100m champion and world record holder.
You can only really get away with saying something like that if you can do 100m in less than 9.70 seconds…
Not that this really needs anything more than the headline, but here’s the summary: 24-year-old former world youth champion Jonathan Moore jumped naked, from a height of about seven metres, off the roof of a house in Potchefstroom, South Africa. Thankfully: his fall was broken when he hit the canopy of a pick-up truck belonging to the owner of the house.
While I’m on the subject of drug use in sport, I want to write a little about the Dwain Chambers court case. For those of you who don’t know about this, he’s a 100m sprinter who was banned a few years ago for steroid use.
Since completing his ban, he’s been running clean, and wants to compete in the British team at the Olympics this summer. But the British Olympics Association (BOA) has a blanket ban on anyone ever caught using drugs representing Britain at subsequent Olympic Games, which includes Chambers.
Having failed in his appeals to the BOA, he has now gone to the courts to adjudicate on the legality and enforceability of this BOA ban. More background here.
Personally, I hope he fails and that he is never allowed to represent Britain again. When it comes to drug use in sport, once a cheat is always a cheat, to my mind.
My reasoning is that the use of steroids is not like using nitrous in a car. It’s not an instant boost with no long-lasting effects. Steroid use (over many years) actually changes your physiology. It makes your bones stronger, your muscles denser, can increase blood flow and generally make you harder, better, faster, stronger.
[Aside: Wow, that Daft Punk song has just had an extra layer added to it]
And these things don’t instantly go away when you stop using drugs, unlike the effects of nitrous. You remain stronger, with your insides irrevocably altered. So even if you’re clean five years later, you still have the benefits of having used drugs previously.
As such, it’s unfair on other competitors who have always been clean, and use training to improve their natural physical abilities. For this reason, I don’t see why drug cheats should be allowed back into any sport, especially one such as athletics where 1/100th of a second can mean the difference between winning and losing.
It’s this 1/100th that can be gained by the alterations in your physiology thanks to drug use years before, giving steroids a lasting effect on results and competition.
I sincerely hope Dwain Chambers is not allowed to compete at the Olympics next month, and my support for athletics (especially British athletics) will be at an all-time low if he does.
Reading about a new world record in the men’s 110m hurdles, I went to the wiki to look at athletics world records in general.
I was hugely surprised to read that none of the women’s sprint records have been improved since the end of the 1980s. That’s 100m, 200m, 400m and 800m (I’m including 800m as borderline between sprint and distance). Hell, the 800m hasn’t been beaten for 25 years.
On the men’s side of things, the 100m record has been consistently shaved off, but the other three are over/nearly 10 years old. Michael Johnson holds two, and I don’t see them being beaten for a good while yet. His 200m time, for example, is over half a second faster than the quickest so far this year.
That guy was awesome in his time, and it’s good to see that he’s a believer in fair competition too, returning his relay medals when it became clear that one or more of his teammates were using drugs at the time.
I can’t help but feel that drugs are part of the reason why the women’s records haven’t been beaten since the 1980s. Flo-Jo holds the 100m and 200m records, but her performances are dogged by rumours of drug use.
The 200m and 400m records are held by an East German and Czechoslovakian woman, respectively. Both of these countries’ athletics programmes have since been shown to have been heavily tainted by drugs in the 1970s and 1980s.
Could it be that since athletics got clean(er) in the 1990s, women’s performances have declined through the absence of drugs? Using testosterone and similar drugs will have a more marked effect on women because they naturally don’t produce as much as men.
So the times run/distances thrown/jumped will be much better for women on drugs than they will be for men. When these drugs are removed, it’s more difficult for women as a whole to reproduce the same results as those who were using them.
Of course, there are always exceptions, and exceptional athletes. Michael Johnson is a prime example, but there are others. We may see one yet emerge in the field of women’s sprints, but as yet none has grabbed the mantle.
On the plus side, though, records may not be being broken, but the competition is much better. There are many athletes capable of running similar times, so the actual races are much closer and more exciting.
Here’s looking forward to a great Olympics.
Jeez, I remember when it first dipped below 9.90 seconds and that being a massive deal. Then Maurice Green took it below 9.80 and everyone thought that it would never be beaten. 9 years later and we’re at 9.72 seconds, with the possibility of 9.70 being beaten at the Olympics later this year. Incredible stuff. I know that the whole sport of athletics has that whiff of drugs around it, and that almost every world record holder is viewed with suspicion, but it is impressive that in 25 years they’ve managed to shave off nearly a quarter of a second. Doesn’t sound like much (what can you actually do in a quarter of a second), but considering it took nearly 50 years to do the previous quarter, it’s one hell of an achievement.
