Why we need to go easy on the C-word

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This was published 4 years ago

Opinion

Why we need to go easy on the C-word

Before we descend into the more serious dissection, let me set the scene - three decades ago the soap opera of Wrestlemania V played out in Atlantic City. The main event saw Hulk Hogan trounce his then arch-nemesis, Randy “Macho Man” Savage.

Now Atlantic City is a boardwalk town full of two-toothed carnies and shysters, where - as one might put it - everything’s tinged with just a little bit o’ fraud. Professional wrestling ain’t terribly different, even if it’s 90 per cent real.

Banned for doping, it was eventually ruled that Maria Sharapova's fault and negligence wasn’t significant.

Banned for doping, it was eventually ruled that Maria Sharapova's fault and negligence wasn’t significant.Credit: AAP

For reasons never explained, the festivus circa 1989 included a Wrestlemania marathon, its course winding through the town’s beaches, casinos and along the Atlantic coast. A (ridiculously) late entrant to the race was wrestling’s managerial uber-villain, Mr Fuji, who determined upon entering the race he would shamble the 26 miles (42 kilometres) in his tuxedo and bowler hat, walking cane in one hand. Think of a jogging Odd Job, and you’ll get the picture.

For some reason, the highlights of this absurd escapade were deliberately spliced into the Wrestlemania coverage, including the bits where Mr Fuji “won” the race, and then where he was sprung red-handed for catching a limo for four-fifths of it, stealthily alighting just before the finish line.

Hitching a ride in a stretch limousine during a marathon: THAT’S CHEATING!!! That, my friends, is the most pure, unadulterated (let alone asinine) explainer of “cheating” I think I can conjure up.

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The Oxford Dictionary defines “cheat” as meaning to deceive or trick; to gain an unfair advantage dishonestly or unfairly; or to engage in a trick or fraud.

Now, let’s just contemplate the definition for a second, in circumstances where it’s exquisitely too easy to smear any athlete, at any particular time, as being a “cheat”; a mandatory consequence of that athlete traversing what are, invariably, incredibly onerous and highly technical sports rules. And, where the adherence to those rules squarely overrides and consumes any reasonable expectations that an elite athlete might enjoy even some semblance of a normal existence.

Take the archetypal example of an athlete “glowing orange” at a routine doping control test, after achieving a podium result in an Olympic final. By absolute necessity, doping rules are written in such a way where it’s wholly unnecessary to prove that the athlete intended to ingest the prohibited substance detected in his or her system, or how it got there. Intent is not an element of guilt, the opposite of an intent to kill being a mandatory element of a murder charge.

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The entire doping rules regime is constructed on the bedrock of the “strict liability” premise, where there’s no requirement whatsoever to prove what the athlete intended to do, or not do. A prima facie doping case is established once it’s evidenced that a blood or urine sample has been taken from an athlete in accordance with the technical rules, where no “chinks” in the integrity of the chain of custody are identified, where the scientific analysis is spot-on accurate, and where a prohibited substance is identified.

There’s no mental element, middle ground or “I didn’t mean it” escape in any of that. No need to prove the proverbial “hopping into a limo in the middle of a marathon” intent to hoodwink, hoax and dupe. That’s not to say some athletes know what’s banned but use it anyway, but it’s not an element of the evidence in a vast number of cases.

Were Essendon players drug cheats or merely duped?

Were Essendon players drug cheats or merely duped?Credit: The Age

So, as straightforward as I can ask the question: is it really the case, that if an athlete is found to have committed an anti-doping rule violation or even just has charges levelled against them, they’re immediately destined to have to wear a jumbo scarlet letter ‘‘C” on their back, for time immemorial? Or should we be a little more sophisticated than that?

The answer to the question is that the actual act of “cheating” requires a mens rea. An actual choice, to behave with disregard for the rules, whether that disregard is insolent or decidedly more nuanced. There’s a mental integer to the act of cheating, which requires something far more than simply identifying a breach of a sport’s rules.

Did the 34 Essendon footballers banned from the 2016 AFL season cheat? Or, conversely, was their worst crime to blindly believe the bullshit of a snidely snake-oil salesman, who in reality was about as useful to a footballer as a diagnosis of prostate cancer?

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Is Diego Maradona a cheat because of his goal which was “a little with the head of Maradona and a little with the hand of God”? It wasn’t within Maradona’s remit to call a foul on himself, was it? The linesmen had a job to do, and presumably their eyes weren’t painted on.

The book Faust’s Gold tells the stories of the manifest evil inflicted on thousands of athletes by the East German doping machine. Athletes who were impossibly outwitted, lied to and used as lab rats for political purposes. Athletes who in many instances won Olympic gold (East German athletes “won” 107 Olympic titles between 1972 and 1980) only to succumb to disease, organ damage and horrible cancers, all caused by doping.

Were those East German athletes cheats? Or do they represent the cheated? The answer’s not as straightforward as people sometimes like to think. Far less so anyway, than the same question posed in respect to the devious Soviet pentathlete Boris Onischenko. An Olympic champion in 1972, he was disqualified from the Montreal Games four years later after it was discovered he’d deployed a “magic” epee.

Do we still consider the Melbourne Storm’s Sandor Earl a “cheat”? He spent four years out of sport for using prohibited peptides. Earl’s contention has always remained that he’d relied on what he trusted as expert medical advice.

Is Maria Sharapova a cheat, for continuing to use a limited-availability Latvian pharmaceutical, after it was added to WADA’s list of banned substances in 2016? Sharapova plainly breached her sport’s anti-doping rules. Yet, on a final appeal, the Court of Arbitration for Sport found that even despite her breach, her fault and her negligence wasn’t significant in the overall prevailing circumstances.

Sandor Earl spent a considerable time out of rugby league due to his indiscretions.

Sandor Earl spent a considerable time out of rugby league due to his indiscretions.Credit: Jeffrey Chan

Instead, the CAS determined that the concentric circles of management, advisers, doctors and trainers that had surrounded Sharapova - and who she’d relied on for years - had failed her. She too had failed in that the ultimate responsibility for ingesting any substance stopped with her; she’d displayed negligence, and especially so when she had so, so much to lose. But on the facts, she didn’t cheat.

Ben Johnson will forever be a cheat. Lance Armstrong is the epitome of a cheat, even though he’s still in denial all these years later. Each of them set out to win no matter the cost, no matter the damage and no matter who they brought down with them. Dave Warner, Steve Smith and Cameron Bancroft - there’ll always be a whiff of cheating about each of them, squarely because each played their part in a grand conspiracy to knowingly break the rules.

But, at the risk of seeming to channel Seinfeld’s Jackie Chiles, it’s unreasonable, undesirable and preposterous to blindly smear every athlete who is alleged to have traversed a sport’s particular rules with the same brush. One must have absolute regard for the proved facts and circumstances.

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