Olympic sportsmanship - 3 July 1992

By decree of Theodosius the Great, Christianity in its Catholic form was declared to be the religion of the Roman Empire in AD 380. Fourteen years later, the emperor abolished the Olympic Games.

Spoken just that way, I've given you a gross example of the commonest of all logical errors, but I'm afraid its one we live by every day. A happened then B happened, therefore B happened because of A. To be truthful, I have no idea if Theodosius abolished the Games because he thought they were becoming too pagan or, as some people have written, because Greece had lost her independence and a national games festival that excluded any non-Greek was not the sort of thing Rome could tolerate. You can choose from a handful or headful of reasons which we won't go into.

In passing, I notice – that when the games were established in 776 BC in a very humble form – a foot race the length of the stadium for the prize of a branch of wild olive. Before the starting trumpet sounded, the athletes lined up and took a vow to honour just decisions and themselves to use no fraud or guile. I've seen that vow translated as taking a pledge of sportsmanship, but I doubt very much whether the word or the notion existed in Greece.

In my old and wonderful and mouldy Webster 1848, there are innumerable definitions of sport and sportsman, but all of them are descriptive: a man who hunts, fishes, shoots, kicks a wall whatever, none of them carries a moral note. I go to the sacred Oxford Dictionary and make what for me is a startling discovery. It says "sportsmanlike: one who displays the typical good qualities of a sportsman". And what do you know, the word didn't come into our language till 1894. It does seem as if being a good loser, never questioning an umpire's ruling were rather recent ideas, Victorian or as one very young athlete put it to me comical. He must look on Chris Evert as a very comical old lady if he ever hears about the time she went up to the chair umpire and asked him to reverse a ruling that he'd given in her favour. She'd done something nobody had spotted: the ball had hit her racket twice.

Another ceremony of the first day of the Olympic games happened after the starting gun – the trumpet –had sounded and the herald had shouted, "Let the runners put their feet to the line". I imagine that meant stand in position, not crouch for the getaway, since the herald was about to say something else. Just like a parson at a wedding who, by our quaint custom waits till the very last moment before he asks if there is a spoilsport in the house, so the herald now said, "The spectators are challenged to say if anyone should be disqualified by reason of blood or character", by reason of blood meant in the beginning and for about eight centuries that you must be of pure Hellenic descent.

Well, the 1992 Olympic Games have an interesting link with this ceremony, we – that is to say the various ruling bodies speaking in the International Amateur Athletic Federation – have given a new twist to the act of disqualifying by reason of blood. We, having for more years than we care to count watched the bulging muscles and the monotonous first place finishes of some East European athletes and then some of our own, we now use blood to mean an illegal substance gone into the bloodstream. Of course, we're talking about steroids – to be fussy, anabolic steroids.

First, not to be too technical, a steroid is one of a group of compounds with four carbon rings, no intended relation to the five rings of the Olympic logo. Anabolism is a process by which food is changed into living tissue, literally it means 'building up' and the purpose of using anabolic steroids is to build up muscle in humans. And a note in my medical dictionary, written surely before the whole hullabaloo about steroids, sounds almost naive today, says "indiscriminate use of anabolic agents is inadvisable because of the undesirable side-effects they may produce, particularly in women". For instance, hirsutism sprouting suspicion of a beard and masculinisation. Well, the athletes who use these steroids prefer to build little or ignore that warning because the main effect, the really striking development of muscle, is well worth to them the risk of the side-effects. Except, you may say, making women look or perform more like a man is surely for them the main effect, so it is, in fact, steroids do more for women than for men and do it more quickly.

A doctor who was formerly the Chief Medical Officer of the United States Olympic Committee commented on this fact the other day: what an irony, steroids bring us women competing as chemically induced men. Well, this year – surely for the first time certainly in my awareness of the games – a depressing amount of news about the coming Barcelona Games is devoted to the scandalous possibilities of steroids in the trials, especially the track trials.

So far the big dust up is over Harry "Butch" Reynolds, the world's champion of the 400 metre race. He's been suspended because of a charge, which he denies, of using steroids in 1990. He not only denied it then, he got busy spending a small fortune in lawyers' fees trying to prove his case and clear his name. Eventually, a United States district that is a federal court ruled that the urine analysis, which caused him to be suspended, was bungled in the adjudicating lab. The lab, by the way, was chosen by the lofty IAAF, the top ruling body, as I said for track events. Well, the IAAF stuck with its ban. Reynolds went onwards and upwards, finally having his freedom to run upheld by a justice of the United States Supreme Court. The IAAF, which regards itself as the ultimate court in these matters, was not in the least intimidated by the Supreme Court. It said not only did the ban on Reynolds stand but anybody who ran against him – that's every other competing runner – would be banned, too. It relented on that extreme position with a scalding note, it suggested that some unnamed American authority should make the running of amateur sports independent of the judicial system – that is, of the American courts.

This reminds me of an old English friend of mine, a staunch Labour man who, when the Congress – oh, 40 more years ago – passed a law giving workers the right not to join a union. He said, "I don't think that any government should make laws affecting labour. Work, wages, hours and so on should surely exist outside the courts." I'd certainly like to see the faces of the nine exalted justices of the Supreme Court when a body, a foreign body at that, advises them that, while in the United States, of course, there is nothing in human life that it's lived in society, nothing that may not come before the highest court for judgement. A committee in London says, "Yes, of course, in the States, but we are the supreme judge when it comes to amateur sports". The Reynolds case is only the most contentious of all the cases, the rumours and accusations that are knocking on many doors.

I mentioned earlier that wry comment of a doctor about the race going to the swiftest, especially if the swiftest is a chemically induced male. His name is Dr Robert Voy and he seems to have thought about steroids and what they're doing to sports more than most people. He ceased to be Chief Medical Officer to the United States Olympic Committee when he tangled with its President on this very matter of steroids. Dr Voy wanted vigorous, widespread, random testing. He was to put it mildly, discouraged. Discouraged to the point of resigning – a surrender he now regrets, but he's not changed his mind. He sees a very rough road ahead for anyone who crusades for testing because steroids do work so well at what the athlete believes to be their main purpose, they produce winners and world champions. The doctor remarks that when Ben Johnson failed to make a comeback when he was clean, steroids had their best commercial.

Since that notorious suspension, the athletes and cooperating chemists have discovered ways to make some steroids undetectable. There's a growth hormone, for instance, that does not show up in a urine sample.

Recently, an independent commission here looked into the steroid question, but its president's final statement said, "winning medals must always be the primary goal". Combine that thought with the immortal observation of the late baseball manager Leo Durocher – "nice guys come in last" – and you have, I think, the prevailing attitude – literally the mindset – of, I should guess, very many of the Olympic competitors and other sports people. It's not only a habit a solution for runners. John McEnroe says steroids are widely used among tennis players. he named no names, but nasty inferences are drawn from any woman's decision not to compete in Barcelona. McEnroe is, so far as I know, the only powerful voice raised for regular random testing in tennis. And, by the way, McEnroe – that unlikely moralist – added furthermore the money in tennis is obscene. So it is in most sports.

Dr Voy's battle with the US Olympic Committee about steroid testing drew from the American sportswriter Robert Lipsyte the shrewd remark positive results could lead to negative cash flow and that's it. The advertiser is king and dictator. Who is to blame for the money mania that has engulfed most sports? Dr Voy picks two villains: the good old boy in the stands urging his team on and the big companies, the corporations – they only want to sponsor winners. By the way, if you really want the true answer to the question 'what is a steroid?', the answer is, an organic compound containing in it's chemical nucleus the per Cyclopentanoperhydrophenanthrene ring.

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