Sunday Roast - Sunday Telegraph
Sunday Magazine July 11 2004
JOLLY GOOD SPORTS
So, our cyclists are having a high time of it at the moment. But it’s not their fault, says Wil Anderson. If sport was a little easier, they wouldn’t need to horse around.
So an Olympic cyclist walks into a bar, and the bartender says why the long face? That’s right, some Australian cyclists are on the horse. Equine Growth Hormone [EGH]. That is. Apparently, officials first became suspicious of our BMX bandits when riders claimed they could only grab gold at the Athens Olympic Games if the AOC provided little men to sit on their backs and whip them.
Suspicions were confirmed when they realised some of the cyclists had ponytails, signalled how many laps they had left by stomping their feet and, post-race, refused the usual meal of oranges, instead opting for apples and two cubes of sugar.
A further giveaway was the tight lycra bike-shorts. Let’s just say, after a few weeks on the EGH, it wasn’t only their hearts that were as big as Phar Lap.
Sadly, there was also the tragic accident when one of our cyclists got his tail caught in the spokes, fell off his bike and had to be put down. But as they say in the classics, "roses are red, violets are blue, cyclists who lose are turned into glue".
Yes, it seems if the AIS were a haystack, then it would be pretty easy to find needles in it.
I’m not sure what’s worse. That one of our leading cyclists was found with a bucket of syringes in his room (some containing EGH), or that they weren’t discovered by our highly effective drug testing regime but by someone saying, "Housekeeping!"
Obviously, our athletes don’t have a problem with drugs, they have a problem with cleanliness. They don’t need to be lectured by an expert from ASDA, they just need a visit from Big Kev.
Although I do think the cyclists should have owned up straightaway. I’m pretty sure no one was ever going to swallow their excuse that they had been given the drugs by Warnie’s mum, or that they were taking EGH to treat their ADHD.
As well as EGH, the syringes also contained a banned drug called glucocorticosteroid, which suggests to me a simple rule for our athletes should be "if you can’t spell it, don’t take it". Unfortunately, for most foofty players this would mean they couldn’t breathe air.
Or it’s only a nutritional supplement if it has the words "Uncle" and "Toby" on the side.
Sadly, whatever the truth turns out to be with Australian cycling, worldwide, this is just the tip of the drug-filled needle. The Olympic motto in Athens 2004 is no longer Citius, Altius, Fortius (Swifter, Higher, Stronger) but simply Altius, Altius, Altius.
Gone are the days where track marks were something you found on the track; where white lines weren’t for sniffing; and where the only thing being stuck up someone’s nose was a rubber peg to stop the synchronised swimmers filling up with water.
In 2004, the Olympic opening ceremony will have more fit young bodies squeezed into lycra and filled with drugs than last year’s Mardi Gras and, at this rate, the only thing the Olympic flame will be good for is to light the Olympic bong.
While experts call for greater education and more rigorous testing, to me the solution seems much simpler: make the sport easier.
It seems obvious to me the main reason so many people are shooting steroids and having a go at EPO is that sport is just way too hard. I don’t blame the cyclists dabbling in deals on wheels, I’ve tried cycling fast over really long distances and it sucks. You get really sweaty, puffed, and don’t even get me started on chaffing – that’s why I own a car.
If we’re really serious about making the Olympics drug-free, start by making the events easier to kick arse at. Here’s a simple way to break records in the 100m, make it 80m, and then give each of the finalists a scooter.
Replace the shot-put with a tennis ball, the discus with a Frisbee, and make the javelin more entertaining by giving them something to aim at – like the cast of Comedy Inc.
Want to break the high-jump world record? Shouldn’t be a problem now that we’ve put a trampoline in front of the mat, and wait until you see how well you do in the quadruple jump. (That’s hop, step, step and jump.)
Or for those who like the endurance events, we’ve replaced the marathon with a movie marathon, where the person who can get through the director’s cut of all three The Lord of the Rings movies without having to go and give a urine sample goes home with the medal (and a Gollum action figure).
And let’s not forget the decathlon or, as we have renamed it, the pub-crawlathlon. In this event, competitors have to negotiate a gruelling course of 10 different drinks in 10 different pubs and the first one to stumble across the finish line without spewing is the winner. Now that would be guaranteed gold, gold, gold to Australia…
Wil Anderson is the host of The Brekkie Show on Triple J with Adam Spencer, as well as co-host of The Glass House on ABC TV
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