The use of performance-enhancing drugs destroys the meaning of sport.

THE president of the International Olympic Committee, Mr Juan Antonio
Samaranch, is fond of telling the world that he occupies one of the most
important and responsible positions: that of upholding the lofty Olympic
ideals of fair play and universal comradeship. And he is right.

So it is wrong for Mr Samaranch even to have hinted at the adoption of a
more pragmatic approach to the scourge of drug use in sport.

His reported suggestion that the use of performance-enhancing drugs should
be tolerated as long as it does not affect athletes' health repudiates the
strongly held international conviction that sporting drugs are used by cheats.

Mr Samaranch is too confident if he assumes that it is easy to determine
when the use of performance-enhancing drugs constitutes a danger to health.
Even under the authoritarian East German regime, when drugs were
administered under strict supervision by specialists in sports medicine,
athletes died. But there is a more fundamental point: the Olympic Games
should not be about awarding gold medals to the athlete with the best
pharmacist or the most astute doctor.

They are about competing to the limit with the physiological, mental and
physical resources one is born with, coupled with liberal doses of hard
training along the way. Australia's federal Minister for Sport, Mr Andrew
Thomson, has rightly asked Mr Samaranch to clarify his reported remarks, and
it can be expected that Mr Thomson's counterparts in other countries that
will compete in the 2000 Olympics in Sydney will make similar requests.

Even if Mr Samaranch's comments are interpreted in the most generous way, he
has indicated that he is out of step with the thinking of the majority of
athletes in the Olympic movement.

During Mr Samaranch's tenure of office with the IOC, he has overseen the
covert and contentious commercialisation of the Games. It would be totally
inappropriate, however, if he were now to steer the Olympic movement towards
acceptance of a quasi-legal drug culture.

Mr Samaranch is 77. If he cannot accept that the use of
performance-enhancing drugs makes a nonsense of competition, he ought to
step aside for a more youthful successor who would be prepared to tackle the
enormous problem posed by drugs in sport, rather than give in to it. At the
very least he could adhere to the Games' motto: ``The most important thing
in the Olympic Games is not to win but to take part, just as the most
important thing in life is not the triumph but the struggle. The essential
thing is not to have conquered but to have fought well.''....

Checked-by: Melodi Cornett