We're on drugs

So often in the Australian media we see the 'outroige' when a top foreign athlete who competes with Australians for medals and status is busted taking a banned drug. Sure there's no 'outroige' yet from the Aussie media on the news of Jessica Hardy's positive doping test, but that's only because the news isn't official yet. It'll come.

All it says to me, when these athletes are caught, is that our athletes are probably on something too. After all, if a top US swimmer takes performance-enhancing drugs and sometimes beats a top Australian swimmer, sometimes doesn't, are we really so naive as to believe that it's always natural talent that got our guys there? That all Australian swimmers are clean? The same thing goes for the Tour de France, that embarrassing, drug-riddled farce of a cycling competition. If the cyclist who's coming 12th, or 20th is busted and carted off by the police, is it really so easy to believe that the cyclists who are coming first, second, third and fourth are just genetically superior athletes, or that they train that much harder? It really is that easy to believe if it's an Australian, if the media coverage is to be trusted.

And before we start trumpeting our rigourous testing regime, as various sporting bodies in Australia do, we need to bear in mind that they can't test for everything. And when they do test for something, sometimes the laboratory just doesn't do a very good job. Or the measure for a positive test is set so high that even the most obvious positive samples pass with a negative.

Is such cynicism unfair on the top athletes who actually are clean, assuming there are any? Yes. The cynicism in itself is fair, given the situation with doping in world sport. For a hard-working athlete who not only has to go up against the cheats and undoubtedly lose out to them in competition from time to time but then be tainted by association simply by having matched it with the drug-enhanced freaks, however, it must be truly galling.

So for me, it's not only Channel 7's appallingly narrow, crappy and jingoistic coverage that will have me avoiding switching on the TV for the Beijing Olympics, it's the drugs. As if the influence of economic disparity on athlete performance wasn't enough to render the idea of an 'international competition' a fantasy, the use of performance-enhancing drugs have sapped any of the thrill from the competition.