It might be a pain but drug testing enhances the GAA
You could well be dehydrated as well as deflated, and so it might take you hours to supply the required sample.
Which means either the team bus is held up waiting for you, or else you’re stuck there with maybe just a team medic as well as the testers there with you for company.
Sometimes you might even be joined by an opponent from the victors; awkward company for all involved.
Bad enough to have lost, your summer over, and now this?
It wouldn’t be lost on such a player either that they are amateur. And that in many of the professional team sports, drug-testing is, to put it mildly, lax.
The man has waged enough wars against doping and inept administrators in the name of pure sport to last several lifetimes, but last year watching Paul Kimmage begin asking questions of rugby while we simultaneously watched the major sports and media of America remain so lethargic to the issue of doping, this column couldn’t help but think of how that scene could do with the Dubliner and his old colleague David Walsh on the case.
True, some elements of the sportswriting community there have raised the odd eyebrow or question or objection to real or potential cases of doping.
We were in America the morning after the Baseball Hall of Fame had decided on its class of 2013 and sports section produced a classic frontpage. The headline read ‘And the Inductees Are’.
The rest of the page was blank.
“We saw the chance to capture the very old, very dispiriting story of steroids in baseball in a freshly powerful way,” their sports editor Joe Sexton would explain.
“Yes, it was not a surprise that [Barry] Bonds and [Roger] Clemens didn’t make it. But it felt like history had spoken. How to convey that to our readers? I think we did it — a striking, profound emptiness.”
It brought home just how much of a plague performance enhancing drugs — or PEDs as America just call them now — have been on that sport, though at times American sport and its media seems ambiguous about whether the real shame was that the cheating was committed or exposed.
The NBA may feature the most astonishing team sport athletes in the world but it seems rather indifferent to how some players may be going about becoming so athletic.
Take the two starting forwards for the Orlando Magic that reached the 2009 NBA finals against Kobe Bryant’s LA Lakers.
That same season Rashard Lewis became only the sixth NBA player since testing was introduced 10 years earlier to produce a positive result.
Lewis would claim that he took an over- the-counter supplement that included a substance he did not realise was banned.
In other sports — like, as Monaghan fringe player Thomas Corrigan would discover last year – that would result in a two-year ban.
Lewis was only banned for 10 games in a league that features an 82-game season.
Three years later, Hedo Turkoglu also tested positive. He was suspended for 20 games.
This season the NBA has introduced blood testing for human growth hormone, but it still has huge gaps.
A first positive PEDs test still only results in a 20-game suspension (if it’s cocaine, though, you’re kicked out of the league).
A second violation means you miss 45 games. It’s only on your third strike that you’re out.
The NFL is similarly lenient. At the end of this season just ended the Baltimore Ravens’ Nick Boyle was suspended for four games for failing a first test.
He’s now tested positive for a second time, meaning he’ll miss the first 10 games of next season. But that means he’ll still be back for the last six games of the season — and the play-offs.
The biggest team sport on the planet — soccer — is similarly underscrutinised, and could do with a Walsh investigating it after he’s finished with athletics, just like he was such a watchdog of cycling. (You take Manhattan, Kimmage. Then, Walsh, you take Berlin).
It’s maybe because we’ve had journalists of such stature and conviction and a conscientious Sports Council so mindful of the shame and scandal that was the Michelle Smith case and others that Irish sport and its media over the last decade strongly champions rigorous doping.
And there’s something good about that. And similarly it’s why it should actually be a source of pride within the GAA and its inter-county playing population that it complies with best drug- testing protocol and the introduction of blood testing.
With too much sport now, people find it hard to know whether to believe what they’re seeing or they don’t want to know why they’re seeing some of what they’re seeing.
Gaelic games has no monopoly on virtue, nor is it a bastion of it. Other forms of cheating or gamesmanship are commonly practiced within its sports, especially football. But there is an honesty about it that is becoming rarer in sport.
Think Dublin-Mayo last year. 82,000 in the house twice for a game that wasn’t even an All-Ireland final. Serious elite sport, played by amateurs, that thanks to the testing in place, we can believe were also clean.
The GAA for all its flaws has something unique. Drug testing further seals and protects that uniqueness.
And what’s more the blood testing they may even get on the bus and home or to the pub to drink the sorrows a good bit quicker.
A pain in the arm or the arse it might still be, but it’s another way of taking a hit for a team much bigger than even your own.
