- Video
-
Club Roar
Captured a great grassroots sporting moment? We want to see it!Content Collections
The Roar Community
- Join
- Login
Dr. Michael Ashenden was quoted a couple of weeks ago in an article in the Sydney Morning Herald as saying that the Tour Down Under had “prostituted itself” when it ‘invited’ (i.e. paid) Lance Armstrong to make his comeback at the 2009 version of the event.
He chose an interesting word he chose, and it has to be said that it was quite apt.
We all know the most common definition of prostitution, to engage in sexual intercourse for cash. But there is one other to be found in Webster’s Dictionary that perfectly describes what Ashenden is talking about:
1. base or unworthy use, as of talent, ability or resources.
And another still that perfectly describes Armstrong:
2. a person who offers his talent or work for unworthy purposes.
How ironic that a man held up to be just about the fittest on the planet, to be the ideal athletic machine, whose body he would have us think was a temple, cured of cancer and transformed by chemotherapy, happened to be by and large a product of science, pumped so full of PEDs that he was a synthetic cyborg.
So is Armstrong a prostitute, or the customer? A lot of both, surely…
But back to Ashenden and his scathing appraisal of the Tour Down Under in 2009.
What I suggest we do is take his words and extend them to all of professional cycling, and in turn to all pro sports.
All major sports have become dog-eared ladies of the night, rent boys loitering down by the river in the gathering gloom.
For as little as a nod and a wink and a mouthwatering rights deal with a major TV network, they all laid back on their grubby mattresses and thought of the promised land, eyes screwed up tight as they’re bent over and rutted in every imaginable position.
Every athlete cheating to win or even just to compete is the greasy-haired John or lascivious Mary, grunting away with a dead-eyed leer and hyper-efficient cardiovascular system, working out before the job’s even done how they can get out without paying the agreed fee.
Rugby, swimming, baseball, cycling, they aren’t even high-class hustlers. They’ll sell decades, centuries of gilded history, dreams and myths, hopes and ambitions for whatever they can get.
Your spouse finds out? No worries, $100,000 will cover up those troubling little problems, we have a carpet just about big enough to get everything swept up and squared off.
The recent findings by the Australian Crime Commission shocked not just the nation but the sporting world. This isn’t just about cycling, and it isn’t just about the Chinese, the Eastern Europeans and the Italians.
The recent confession of Dr Fuentes in which he listed a number of sporting disciplines whose proponents had beaten a path to his grimy door only served to strengthen the nausea down in the pit of the collective gut.
Other revelations tell a woeful tale of highly organised crime, of corruption not just of doping but of the fixing of high-level sporting events across the planet. WADA recently said that the sickness is “bigger and more serious” than previously imagined and that it’s “getting too big for sport to manage.”
WADA says that of all their dope tests in a year, just 2% came back positive, but that retroactive testing is bringing back a tally of around 14%. Other estimates suggest that four out of five doped athletes never get caught.
So where are we? Us, the cuckolded husbands and wives, the real fools in all this? Surely we stand, as does the whole notion of sport itself, at the most blatantly obvious crossroads. Three signs point to ‘More Of The Same’ over the smoothest roads, all leading to the same destination.
Only one offers anything different but offers nothing other than a question mark, because no-one knows where that uneven road will end up.
There can be no more cherishing of the Olympian Ideal. That mangy and flea-bitten carthorse is, at best, out to pasture on its last legs on the kids’ playing fields and in amateur bike races that garner nothing more than a couple of dozen bystanders, and even then there are kids simulating injuries to get fouls and amateur bikers doping up.
We won’t be revisiting The Ideal anytime soon.
The veil has been lifted. They cheat now, they cheated then, it was always thus.
The only difference was that dope like amphetamine and testosterone look so damn innocent next to the crap they pump in now.
We can’t rewire the human mind, can’t reprogram people predisposed to cheat. It’s just way too late for that nonsense. We can’t expect our athletes to operate outside of society, in some Never Never Land where values, ethics and morals rule over greed and trickery.
We need people in positions of power with integrity and vision. It’s a Herculean task facing them, but the other option, to keep on keeping on, would mean a complete and utter capitulation of all that sport is supposed to mean.
‘But so what?’ You may think. ‘Who cares?’ Millions of us, billions, that’s who.
We look to sport, love sport, because it possesses an incredible capacity to make men equal, to teach right from wrong, to instil values of hard work, determination and co-operation. Winning is fantastic, but if it is everything, really, truly everything, then perspective is lost and all becomes permissible in the pursuit of victory.
Sport humbles many and glorifies a few, but when it’s played in the right spirit, with sportsmanship rather than gamesmanship, it has the singular power to elevate us simple human beings to the idea of what we believe we can become, however fleetingly.
And that’s why all this is generating such debate, because it’s about every one of us, on a very personal level. It transcends class, race, age, nationality and creed. It has promulgated such intense scrutiny because it strikes at the very essence of the idea of what it is to be human.
A life on our backs? Or on our feet?
Ultimately, giving up on this would mean giving up on us.
Fancy a wager on your favourite sport? Head on over to PlayUp for great odds and friendly customer service and pick a winner. Chances are you’re about to lose. Set a deposit limit.