Learning sport’s real life lessons

Listening to Allison Wagner last week speak about the torment she suffered for many years after finishing second to Michelle Smith, we couldn’t help but think how there was more than one swimmer in that Atlanta pool 20 years ago who sadly lost perspective on what sport is supposed to be all about.

Wagner was speaking to Newstalk’s Ger Gilroy from the Web Summit in Lisbon, where she and fellow Olympian swimmer Nikki Dryden were campaigning to clean up international athletics. Their campaign is as admirable and important. Twenty years on from Atlanta and the testing of athletes at Rio was so haphazard as to be a token gesture. There is still too much doping and cheating going on, and too many clean athletes still being wronged.

Regardless of how successful their campaign is, however, no athlete should allow themselves to be as affected as Wagner was.