The art of flogging a dead horse

I think I write for the many who contribute to this organ when I begin my post today by stressing that our antipathy to performance-enhancing drug-taking among sportsmen and sportswomen is semi-absolute – by which I mean that one must always allow for the scintilla of of a possibility that some poor athlete or another in any particular case  has made a genuinely innocent or naive mistake, or has alternatively been a victim of cruel and unexplained circumstance.

That registered, in my humble opinion the only rational attitude to adopt to anyone who has ever ‘failed to make themselves available’ for random drugs tests upon whatever number of occasions is decreed by the authorities to be deemed an offence in itself … or who has supposedly eaten ‘steroid-contaminated meat’ in a top class hotel … or who didn’t realise that in a certain country certain anti-histamine intolerance pills are banned …  is that, in the modern world where the sophisticated science available to prospective cheats tends to be a step and a half ahead of that of the scientific detective,  the laudable and time-honoured legal principle of ‘innocent until proven guilty’ is just not enough.

Time and again throughout sporting history too often the benefit of hindsight has either proved or raised suspicions as to whether the greatest sporting achievements were achieved without ‘illegal’ assistance.

Simply because the benefits of either immortality (in terms of Olympic and/or World Cup medal glory) or alternatively straightforward money-making in elite sporting careers – which tend to last no more than a decade at best and sometimes less than half than that when random interventions as such as injuries, oddities of team selection and/or contractual disputes occur – are potentially great enough that one can understand how, rightly or wrongly, ‘making it whilst you can’ becomes a personal imperative above all others.

Again, for the record I’d wish to emphasise that we do not ‘have it in’ it for either any particular sportsman or woman – or indeed nationals of any country including our own.

However. Purely in the interests of bringing relevant updates to Rust readers, here are links to:

Firstly, a link to a piece by Kenan Malik upon the brilliance of Chris Froome’s victory effort in the recent Giro d-Italia, as can be read today upon the website of – THE GUARDIAN

And secondly, a similar to a report by Jack Austen upon cyclist Froome ‘abnormal drugs test’ result, as appears upon the website today of – THE INDEPENDENT