When Winning Loses Out
This is the year that integrity will count for more than victory at any price
BY KATE NOBLE
To win. that's the whole point of sport. Coming in second is losing. Ask any of the silver medalists at the Olympics. Or the Italian team at last year's European Championship football tournament. But this year the drive to win will lose out to another goal: honesty.
Winning through drugs is not new. Athletes at the ancient Olympics took stimulants. But the prevalence of drugs nowadays has tainted all of sport. The humbling of the 1998 Tour de France when stashes of drugs were found in a Festina team support car and the positive drug tests on athletic champions like Linford Christie, Merlene Ottey and Marion Jones' husband C. J. Hunter have made the public suspicious of all athletes. People may accept cheating in other walks of life, but sport demands a level playing field. If some are cheating or fixing results, everyone loses.
The authorities' habit of turning a blind eye has done even more damage. The International Olympic Committee, guardian of sport's holy flame, long seemed to drag its feet on the issue of performance-enhancing drugs. But the committee took a positive step by setting up the World Anti-Doping Authority late in 1999, giving it enough money to conduct out-of-competition testing and authorizing a combined blood and urine test for the blood-enhancing drug erythropoietin (EPO).
The cheats' chemists may still be one step ahead, but the evidence of the Sydney Olympics suggests that the authorities are beginning to win: 35 Chinese athletes stayed at home, and a number of other competitors were caught — including the unfortunate Romanian gymnast Andreea Raducan, who took a cold remedy that included a banned drug. This year more athletes will be handed two-year bans, and doping offenses will be criminalized in countries other than France and Italy.
Sport's image is likely to be further undermined in 2001 by another form of cheating: bribery. Last year saw the distinctly ungentlemanly conduct of South Africa's and India's cricket captains, Hansie Cronje and Mohammed Azharuddin, who both admitted taking money from bookmakers for supplying match information and were found guilty of fixing results. As sports gambling moves to the Internet, the money — and the incentive to fix — will grow.
Money will be the big winner in 2001. The year is likely to produce ever-richer contracts following the record 10-year, $252 million deal given to baseball's Alex Rodriguez. That came just months after Real Madrid paid Barcelona $55 million for the services of Luis Figo. But for some, the money may be running out. While English Premier League football clubs have spent an estimated $2.69 billion in transfer fees in the past five years, they have saddled themselves with such enormous wage bills that income can no longer sustain them. Even Manchester United, the world's richest club with revenues of $166 million last year, saw profits drop by 25%.
When winning means everything, everyone is suspect — even, shockingly, the disabled. After the Sydney Paralympics, Spain's basketballers were forced to return their gold medals after admitting that none of their players was handicapped. With the International Amateur (Amateur!) Athletic Federation offering million-dollar prizes to athletes unbeaten in a season, money has taken over.
This year sport has a chance to redeem itself. In July, Juan Antonio Samaranch finally retires as president of the i.o.c. His replacement, either Belgium's Jacques Rogge or Canadian Dick Pound, will bring some tough standards to a committee still tainted by the Salt Lake City corruption allegations. At the same time, the i.o.c. will choose a city to host the 2008 Summer Games. It will ignore American TV pressure to select a time-zone friendly place like Toronto and instead choose Beijing, which lost the 2000 Games because of objections to China's human rights record. The Ryder Cup, one of the last bastions of sport without prize money, will be played in England. There, players and spectators will remember the bad manners of the Americans last time — and demonstrate that respect for each other matters more than winning.
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