Letters: Sports and recreational drugs

Mon, 05/25/2009 2:40 PM  |  Reader's Forum

This is a response to an article titled "Gasquet allegations show fuzzy line in drug rules," (The Jakarta Post, May 18)

Suspending athletes for using recreational drugs is spiteful. Certainly many governments, including the US government, maintain laws designed to persecute users of certain drugs. But that is not an excuse for sports administrators to seize the whip and join in the cruelty.

It is also true that some athletes' sponsors abandon them on the grounds that their behavior tarnishes the company's image. But sports administrators are supposed to manage a sport for the benefit of practitioners and fans. They are not running a profit-making enterprise. And even if they were, there is no evidence that general interest in any sport has been diminished by competitors' use of recreational drugs. One of the beauties of sport, evident from the ancient Olympics, is that people of different cultures come together in peace and celebrate shared human aspirations to excellence rather than trivial cultural differences.

Another beauty of sport is that it is meritocratic. Everyone competes in their chosen event according to explicit rules, irrespective of extraneous factors.

Although biased or incompetent judging is a problem in some sports, competition is theoretically fair and just. There is no favoritism toward the wealthy, the socially well-connected, the racially privileged, or toward those with marketable personalities, or with private habits extolled as virtuous by the state.

What tarnishes the beauty of sport is not sports heroes using drugs toward which some people feel irrational hostility, but rather administrators and promoters of sports manipulating the rules in order to indulge their prejudices, to curry political favor or to seek commercial gain.

Historically, the International Olympic Committee confiscated the gold medals of 1912 decathlon winner Jim Thorpe, an American Indian, on the pretext that he had earlier played baseball for money. Currently, the American Ladies Professional Golf Association is aiming to exclude some Asian golfers by requiring competitors to speak fluent English, and FIFA President Sepp Blatter is working to keep African players from becoming heroes in European soccer leagues.

For sports administrators, often representing wealth and aristocracy, the holy trinity of prejudice, power and profit takes precedence over the celebration of differences and the promotion of free and fair competition. Thus sport today emphases monoculture and monolingualism oriented to commercial deals and the tastes of the media and public who care more about celebrity gossip than sporting competition.

They would rather stick the boot in an athlete for what they regard as a sin than acknowledge the endless hours of training and struggle undertaken every day from childhood to reach the pinnacle of human achievement. But let those who do appreciate striving and sporting brilliance enjoy them. And let those who seek an outlet for their bigotry, fashionable or otherwise, seek it elsewhere.

John Hargreaves
Jakarta

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