What’s happened to sport? Where’s the ideology gone? The problem is that someone made it a bit too competitive. Oh. It is competitive. That’s what its all about really. The nature of ‘sport’. Competition. They’re equivalents. So you want to win. Always. And sometimes you need to try a bit harder, work a bit longer, be a bit more aggressive. Sometimes you just need ‘an edge’.

So the cricketer puts some gravel in his pocket to rough up the ball. The footballer dives when no-one touched him. The motor racing driver has a car that is just 3mm lower/longer/faster than it should be.

And everyone else takes drugs. Shit loads of them. Steroids, growth hormones. Uppers. Performance enhancers. Go fasters. Throw longers. And we call them cheats.

Quite rightly.

All sports have rules. To ensure everyone’s on the same page. Then someone introduced a few more pages.

And now every sport is rife with cheating. And it all started with a Canadian. Typical. When Ben Johnson beat Carl Lewis in the 100 metres Olympic final it was the most mind-blowing run I’d ever seen. (Usain Bolt hadn’t been invented yet). It was amazing. Lewis was the world champion, tall, lithe and elegant. Johnson was stockier, pure muscle, pure power. Mixed with just the right amount of steroids as it transpired and they took his medal away. But the man flew. Just flew.

Baseball had the two biggest hitters of all time in the same season, both replacing the regulation chewing tobacco with something a little more pharmaceutically synthesised.

Then came the cycling fiasco. Followed by every Russian athlete ever. All on drugs. Regular ‘trainers’ replaced with pharmacologists. They’re cheaper and much more efficient.

Tennis. Sharapova is on drugs for a heart condition she’s never had, taking the prescribed 6-week course for 14 years.

And now its Chinese swimmers. Replacing their diet of rice noodles with a cocktail of something a little more potent, more helpful, more illegal.

All that happens is that the drugs, as they’re made illegal, are then made harder to detect. These chemists are clever and devious.

They should just have two parallel sporting worlds. The ‘natural’ one and the ‘drug enhanced’ one. And although the former would be more important, the latter would be much more fun to watch.

Shame on the whole fucking lot of them

Happy Thursday

A xxxx