Why I now loathe this sporting life, By: Geoffrey Wheatcroft

Bungs, drugs and wholesale cheating are now the norm in all major sports, leaving true fans in despair

July 30, 2006

'Say it ain't so, Joe.' When the Chicago White Sox were accused of throwing the 1919 World Series in return for bookmakers' money, 'Shoeless' Joe Jackson emerged from the courtroom to hear that plea from a heartbroken boy, words which summed up every lost illusion about sport. If only we could share that heartbreak; sports of every kind are now tainted almost beyond redemption.

All those who watched Floyd Landis on the last Thursday of the Tour de France felt that they were witnessing something quite extraordinary, heroic and redemptive.

This year's race had begun under a huge cloud, with several of the favourites, including Jan Ullrich and Ivan Basso, thrown out when they were implicated in a story which had erupted in Madrid, where another hateful 'sport doctor' had allegedly been charging his customers tens of thousands of euros for each illicit treatment of drugs or blood transfusion.

After a complete collapse the previous day with 'the bonk', as cyclists call it when exhaustion of body sugar almost paralyses a rider, Landis made a magnificent escape over the Alps to claw back most of the time he had lost and put himself in a position to win the race. He duly did so. Yet less than a week later, we learned that his urine sample after that epic ride showed an artificially high level of testosterone. If the 'B' sample confirms this - and he vigorously denies cheating - he will be stripped of his title.

However startling this particular case is, there is by now almost a dull inevitability about doping allegations. After Marion Jones won five medals at the 2000 Olympics in Sydney, she was accused of using steroids by her ex-husband, claims which she has always denied. Shane Warne was sent home from the cricket World Cup when he tested positive for a diuretic, harmless in itself but which acts as a masking agent.

Some tennis aficionados privately complain that, thanks to chemical body building, a game of skill and intelligence has become just another endurance sport; one leading player of the moment certainly has a physique reminiscent of Barry Bonds.

He is the baseball player who has been breaking home-run records since he emerged eight summers ago looking, as one writer put it, as though someone had stuck a bicycle pump into him to blow him up, a transformation which has since been explained by his consumption of synthetic steroids which he said he thought was flaxseed oil. And yet doping is only one kind of cheating. So many sports today are so corrupt, so brutal and so dishonest that even those of us who dearly loved them now find them hard to enjoy and their players impossible to admire.

We have become inured to footballers paid as much each week as a doctor in a year, and who behave like psychopathic criminals. If they aren't hitting each other on the field then off it they are accused of raping - or merely 'roasting' - any available young woman.

Before the World Cup, Michael Henderson wrote a polemic in this paper against English football and everything it had come to represent. As events showed, he understated his case. Apart from being a bitterly disappointing football tournament, what we saw from Germany was an orgy of violence, gamesmanship and plain fraud, notably the kind known as diving or simulation. The winners were Italy, who had earlier been unable to beat Australia until gaining a last-minute goal with an outrageous dive. Cristiano Ronaldo of Portugal is a wonderfully gifted player, but he and his team-mates showed in the game against Holland how frankly disgusting a spectacle, more street brawl than match, football has become.

What makes it worse is the prevailing cynicism which accepts cheating as a fact of life. Years ago, 'professional foul' became an almost an admiring phrase, implying that the only thing that matters is what you can get away with.

And that is now true in rugby as well as football. In the 2002 Heineken Cup Final, Munster lost to Leicester. The Irish side might have scored in the dying minutes but for Neil Back using his hand to knock down the ball being fed by the Munster scrum-half Peter Stringer, of which incident Anthony Foley of Munster later said: 'We've never blamed the result on Neil Back. Fair play to him. The Leicester team of that era had a very ruthless and dominant streak that, under no circumstances, were they going to lose. You've got to credit them for that.'

With his perfectly ludicrous use of the Irishism 'fair play to him' - this of deliberately foul play - Foley summed up the spirit of the age, in the same way that football writers will say a striker 'went to ground' to win a penalty, as if it was all part of the game. And anyone who disagrees is treated as a prig or a prude: that's the way it is, grow up, get a life.

There is an answer to that. Cheating is cheating, diving is cheating, handling the ball in a scrum is cheating. If these are acceptable - or at least accepted - parts of their games, then why should it be any less acceptable to bribe a referee to ensure that your team wins a match?

The scandal which has seen Juventus relegated from Italy's Serie A for match-fixing may be unusually lurid, but is scarcely surprising given a culture whose only commandment is: 'Thou shalt not get caught.'

Doping is cheating, too, for all that it has for so long been part of the ethos of cycling. One great champion, Jacques Anquetil, said that only a fool thought they could ride the Tour on nothing but mineral water, and another, Fausto Coppi, when asked if he had ever used dope, he said: 'Only when necessary.' And how often? 'Almost all the time.'

In their day, the drug of choice was amphetamines, lethal in large enough quantities, as was evident when Tommy Simpson collapsed and died on the 1967 Tour.

But the picture has grown much darker thanks to steroids and then Erythropoietin (EPO). By enhancing red blood cells, EPO makes blood harder to circulate, and we can date its arrival with horrible accuracy: between 1987 and 1992, seven young Swedish orienteering athletes and as many as 20 Belgian and Dutch cyclists died from nocturnal heart attacks.

Say it ain't so? But too often it is so: a 'sporting life' of cheating, bribery, corruption, and young men conditioned to think that losing is literally worse than death.

· Geoffrey Wheatcroft's books include Le Tour: A History of the Tour de France 1903-2003 and The Strange Death of Tory England