Christine Ohuruogu's dazzling gold medal win at the World Athletics Championships has been greeted with a lot of scepticism. The Today programme's Gary Richardson was at his most unpleasantly insinuating when interviewing her this morning (8.26) and, fair enough, it does seem odd that Britain's only winner so far in Osaka managed to be in the wrong place three times when she should have been available for drug tests, resulting in a ban which was lifted just in time for her to compete in Japan. That said, her community of fellow athletes - notably the fiercely anti-drug Darren Campbell - seems to have accepted that she is just a scatterbrain not a cheat.
This makes such loud airing of doubts about Ohuruogu seem a bit extreme. But with the Beijing Olympics on the horizon and London's five years away I suppose it's just a taste of things to come. So if we're going to have the drugs debate from now until 2012 how about opening it up properly? Is an "anti-doping" strategy really workable and, if not, how can it be justified when some will get away with cheating and others won't? More philosophically, why are performance-enhancing drugs regarded as cheating when other performance-enhancing techniques, such as dietary and training regimes or improved equipment, aren't?
Here's an exchange from Kenan Malik's 2004 Radio 4 Analysis programme on the subject between Malik and sports sociologist Ellis Cashmore:
Malik:"Athletes, the argument runs, should not do anything that is either unnatural or gives them an unfair advantage. But athletes commonly do many things - from high altitude training to high protein diets - that are neither natural nor maintain a level playing field."
Cashmore: "If you look at the history of sport, you'll see that cheating has been really a function of how we define what's fair play, of course, and that's manifestly obvious.If, for example, we turn the clock back and look at the time where spikes were introduced, for example, there was a hue and cry over it. People said hang on, you can't run in spikes, that's giving you an unfair advantage over the competitors who run in flats. And when world records were set on synthetic tracks as opposed to cinders, again people were saying is this fair, or isn't it fair? And we adjusted the rules. We adapted to the changes in technology. In other words, they are making the most of what technologies are available. It just so happens that some of those technologies are subject to bans and of course pharmaceuticals are one of them."
Malik: "So are you saying that there's nothing natural about sport?"
Cashmore: "I think that this is a fallacy that there's any kind of natural state of the human body. I mean we can trace it back to the 18th century and the days when gentlemen and players competed. And of course the players got wise to the idea that if you trained it would benefit your performance. The gentlemen said hang on, you can't go away and train because that isn't in the spirit of fair play. But they did train, of course, and they did enhance their performance through training. So training in itself changes the characteristics of the human body. It confers on us new qualities - we can run faster, jump higher, have more stamina."
Cheating, in other words, is what sport's law-makers define it as being. And once those definitions become unenforceable, as many think they are with drugs in athletics, doesn't fairness demand that the laws are changed?
