SAMARANCH MARS THE OLYMPIC IDEAL

The use of performance-enhancing drugs destroys the meaning of sport.

THE president of the International Olympic Committee, Mr Juan Antonio Samaranch, is fond of telling the world that he occupies one of the most important and responsible positions: that of upholding the lofty Olympic ideals of fair play and universal comradeship. And he is right.

So it is wrong for Mr Samaranch even to have hinted at the adoption of a more pragmatic approach to the scourge of drug use in sport.

His reported suggestion that the use of performance-enhancing drugs should be tolerated as long as it does not affect athletes’ health repudiates the strongly held international conviction that sporting drugs are used by cheats.

Mr Samaranch is too confident if he assumes that it is easy to determine when the use of performance-enhancing drugs constitutes a danger to health. Even under the authoritarian East German regime, when drugs were administered under strict supervision by specialists in sports medicine, athletes died. But there is a more fundamental point: the Olympic Games should not be about awarding gold medals to the athlete with the best pharmacist or the most astute doctor.

They are about competing to the limit with the physiological, mental and physical resources one is born with, coupled with liberal doses of hard training along the way. Australia’s federal Minister for Sport, Mr Andrew Thomson, has rightly asked Mr Samaranch to clarify his reported remarks, and it can be expected that Mr Thomson’s counterparts in other countries that will compete in the 2000 Olympics in Sydney will make similar requests.

Even if Mr Samaranch’s comments are interpreted in the most generous way, he has indicated that he is out of step with the thinking of the majority of athletes in the Olympic movement.

During Mr Samaranch’s tenure of office with the IOC, he has overseen the covert and contentious commercialisation of the Games. It would be totally inappropriate, however, if he were now to steer the Olympic movement towards acceptance of a quasi-legal drug culture.

Mr Samaranch is 77. If he cannot accept that the use of performance-enhancing drugs makes a nonsense of competition, he ought to step aside for a more youthful successor who would be prepared to tackle the enormous problem posed by drugs in sport, rather than give in to it. At the very least he could adhere to the Games’ motto: "The most important thing in the Olympic Games is not to win but to take part, just as the most important thing in life is not the triumph but the struggle. The essential thing is not to have conquered but to have fought well.".

(Ed. note: Sometimes the juxtaposition of news stories is too deliciously ironic. We couldn’t make this up.)
July 29, 1998
From the Associated Press
GOVERNING BODY OF WORLD BASKETBALL VOTES TO PENALIZE USE OF CANNABIS

FIBA NOTE: The FIBA World Congress meeting this week in Athens elected Abdoulaye Seye Moreau of Senegal as its new president. He replaced American George E. Killian who served for eight years.