If I had a dollar for every time someone asked me about Lance Armstrong I’d be living long and I’d be living strong.
Now thanks to recent events in Australian sport I hope to empty my piggy bank in the next few weeks as I barrage my footy mates with questions about their codes. Time to get stuck in!
In all seriousness though, the release of the ACC report Organised Crime and Drugs in Sport makes me a happy man. No honestly it does.
Don’t get me wrong, I wish it wasn’t so. But it is.
So let’s soak up the reality and move towards a better future.
If there is one thing I loathe, it’s ignorance. There is no bliss in unknowingly being beaten by those with an unfairly gained extra gear. Conversely, one thing that riles me even more is unnecessary pessimism.
There seem to be two camps in this game, both as deluded as each other. One says that everyone is on drugs, so you must be on drugs to compete. The other says of course my favourite sport is clean, all athletes are noble pillars of society.
Ignorance and pessimism battle it out while the optimism of the realists like myself seems to get squeezed out of the picture.
Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and 100 percent clean sport all make us happy, but one day we learn the truth.
It seems ludicrous to me though, that understanding the reality of many professional sports and the situations faced by elite athletes must include such a grave loss of innocence for us as fans. If we place our heroes on pedestals then yes, we will be let down.
Sport reflects life. There will always remain some very murky shades of grey. It’s up to us to examine them.
Sport reflects life because in life there will always be cheaters. People cheat on university exams, steal millions on Wall St, are killed fighting wars they have no control over. Life is big, it’s bad and it’s not fair.
Perhaps many of us love sport because it allows us to escape these very aspects of life. Although completely understandable, perhaps it’s time to get real.
We need to stop envisaging our heroes in black and white. We need to stop visualising them striding gracefully in slow motion along the beach while ‘Chariots of Fire’ plays in the background.
These heroes exist in a workplace just like us, and in this workplace there will always be people willing to cheat. Even if it were not a workplace of such commercial lust, there would even then remain an element who break the rules.
Increased commercialisation certainly increases incentives to cheat. Such a simple view, however, completely undermines the whole gamut of emotions from pride to petulance that motivates some athletes to seek an unfair advantage.
But please, don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.
You exist in a workplace do you not? Do you cheat? Are you heinously corrupt? Unless your name is Lance and you’re reading this, my bet is that you’re not.
Go back to where it all began. That first pedal stroke, the wobbling, the learning to balance. Riding a bike for the first time gave you a sense of freedom that you’d never even dared to imagine.
What about the first goal you ever scored from a free kick? The first time you made par on the tenth? The first wicket or your first boundary? These memories will always be cherished.
Sport reflects life not simply because there will always be people who cheat.
Sport also reflects life because if we do it right, we end up doing what we love. And when we do what we love, there is nothing that anyone can do to dampen that.
Yesterday I rose at 04:30am and ended up riding for nearly eight hours. The day was an amalgamation of sights, sounds, social interaction.
It was not only an enjoyable day but it also served as preparation for upcoming events. If I turn up to one of these events and I don’t come away with the prize, that’s OK.
If someone is desperate enough to risk their health on some form of substance to take that prize from me, that’s OK too. Because there is nothing that anyone can do to take the enjoyment of yesterday’s ride away from me.
And don’t think it was just naive old me yesterday either. I rode with many others. We passed sporting fields packed with families. Weekend sport surrounded us every which way we went. The message for me was clear.
Maybe we just need to recalibrate our own expectations of our heroes. Maybe we need to re-address anti-doping guidelines. We definitely need to demand increased resources be poured into anti-doping processes.
The one thing we should never do, however, is forget why we love sport in the first place.
Even if an apple is bruised, you don’t throw the whole thing away. You salvage what you can, then move on. I think we as athletes and as fans need to stop looking for that perfect apple. It only comes with the aid of pesticides and genetic modification.
Let’s go back out into the orchard, and learn to be happy with the crop that we’ve got.
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