In defense of the indefensible

On July 8, the B samples of Mandeep Kaur, Sini Jose, Juana Murmu and Tiana Mary tested positive for steroids. They were among eight elite athletes who failed dope tests prior to the Asian Athletics Championships. Three of this bunch were members of the women’s relay squad that won gold at the Commonwealth and Asian Games in 2010. With these revelations, the heady feeling of optimism that had been building as preparations for the London Olympics in 2012 continued was swept away, and how.

“[Ashwini] Akkunji [who also tested positive] was the poster girl of Indian athletics, a double gold medallist at the Asian Games, and expected to go on to even greater things. There were genuine hopes of a medal at the London Olympics, but that dream now seems shattered,” wrote Gordon Farquar on the BBC website. They now face automatic two-year bans that will effectively end their careers.

Hopes shattered, dreams dashed, nations humiliated, medals confiscated—that’s how most dope stories usually pan out. But this doping saga is not new. We have heard this story through and through. The athletes get caught, they plead innocence, coaches get sacked and then we start all over again. We decided to take a look at where it all stems from.

“It has to be appreciated that at the time the menace of doping for the health of athletes... had yet to enter the morals because, after this marathon, the official race report said: The marathon has shown, from a medical point of view, how drugs can be very useful to athletes in long-distance races.”
This was said by Dr. Jean-Pierre de Modernard, a scholar in the history of doping in sport.

Dr Modernard was referring to the marathon at the 1904 Olympic Games. The race was won by Thomas Hicks, an American competitor. Hicks actually finished the race second, but the runner finishing first was disqualified because it was found he “ran” half the race in a car. But Hicks too had outside help. When trainer Charles Lucas found his runner flagging, he decided to inject him with a milligramme of sulphate of strychnine and make him drink a large glass of brandy. With four miles of the race to go, Lucas administered another injection. Far from being illegal at the time, the use of medical drugs was considered beneficial and even essential to an athlete.

Let’s put things in perspective. Today, strychnine is used as a pesticide to kill small birds and rodents. After ingestion, the body starts to spasm, which turns into violent convulsions before death by either asphyxiation or sheer exhaustion.
Fred Lorz finished first in 1904 after his 11-mile car ride. “It was just a joke,” he told his interrogators after being found out. “It seemed like a funny idea at the time. I was going to tell you before you gave me the medal. Honest.” They believed his story, but still took away his medal and banned him for a year and gave the gold to the dope-addled, and probably drunk, Hicks.

Times have changed, though, and so has technology. Along with changing times, our morals have gone through a transformation as well. At some stage in the history of sport, the effects of drugs on athletes were considered inhumane. That was when the era of doping control began. But why did athletes start taking performance-enhancing substances in the first place?

It may be an oversimplification but the idea that an army marches on its stomach is not a new one. Nor is it obsolete. Wars throughout history have been won or lost based on the ability of an army to feed and supply itself.

In North Korea today, while the masses starve, the army is always kept well fed. The idea that nutrition corresponds to improved physical performance is pure logic. And the expansion of the definition of nutrition to include a variety of other substances is merely an extension of that chain of thought. Across continents and cultures, naturally occurring drugs like mescaline, opium and cocaine have been used to reduce pain, tiredness, hunger and thirst and result in better performance, whether on the battlefield, while harvesting fields, or in the bedroom. And what is sport if not toil, labour, performance, even war?

So if we were to extend the logic just a little further, the most natural thing for an athlete to do would be to find any way to get an edge over an opponent. It is even more natural for a coach as hungry for success as his ward, to look for other avenues when he finds that the young man or woman he is training will never be good enough to win anything without some help.

Although this may sound like it, it is not an attempt to defend the indefensible. Our 21st-century morals tell us, in no uncertain terms, that sport should be pure. There should be no fixing, no doping, no rigging and no cheating.

But if we were to examine the Indian context, the standard of our sporting achievements is constantly ridiculed when compared with the rest of the world.
Yet, these men and women compete with athletes on whom millions of dollars are spent every year to ensure that they train under the right conditions, travel and live in comfort, have access to the best in terms of sport science, training techniques, medicine and nutrition. Our elite lot get something to the tune of Rs 600 a day when they are part of a national training camp.

The Sports Authority of India is an organisation with limited means. It has political bosses who demand results. It also has to deal with pressure from the media, which is constantly critical of the way it functions and the performance of the athletes under its care. There is pressure from the public, too, which demand medals. The weight of these demands can get too much. If performance targets are not met, funding will be withdrawn, leaving athletes, officials, trainers and administrators to suffer.

For the good of the majority, a few have to make the sacrifice.
Federations fiercely protect these athletes. Tests are engineered or fixed and samples are swapped. This continues until there is a change in the regime. When a new boss comes in, he wants a new coach or athletes from his state. So, the federation stops protecting its doped-up golden geese and the cycle begins again.
Dr. P.S.M. Chandran, a former director of medicine with SAI, has said repeatedly that doping has been a part of the system for over two decades.

But the problem is as much a system that allows doping as it is a system that doesn’t really exist. After the latest story broke, every media outlet went out and demonstrated just how easy it was to get your hands on banned performance enhancers.
It was too hot in New Delhi, so we decided to check if we could just have the dope delivered. Turns out you can. And you don’t even need a credit card. After shooting off e-mails, we received lists of the available drugs, delivery charges and even friendly advice on what to take, depending on how serious we were and what results we wanted. Steroids at the touch of a trackpad—that’s how easy it is.

The trouble, though, is that the systemic failure extends beyond ease of access and “overlooking”. While in countries with more money there are dedicated labs to create masking agents good enough to hide the drugs in an athlete’s urine sample, here, the guinea pig is also the lamb that goes to slaughter.