The world cup bid has centred attention on corrupt sport. Bidding processes aside not a major competition goes by without headlines relating to ‘performance enhancing drugs’. There is little evidence that banned drugs are effective indeed the American college of Paediatrics state that there is little or no evidence of their effectiveness or safety. Even for the best known of these drugs, anabolic steroids , the evidence is largely anecdotal. There is no good evidence adrenaline related cold remedies enhance performance either.
The most effective cheating strategy is to get into a category where you are competing with someone who is younger, female or is less disabled than you.
The Spanish ‘learning disabilities’ basketball team in the 2001 Paralympics was comprised of 10 of 12 non disabled players. Players also often are reclassified with different disabilities when their status is challenged. During the course of the 2008 Games there were 99 functional reclassifications, 63 visual impairment reclassifications and 13 athletes reclassified again after their first appearance in front of the classifiers!
Junior international football is also a fertile area for this sort of cheating. Much of it is flagrant – whole teams with the same date of birth on their forged birth certificates and ‘under 16’ players all going shopping for their children. The distal radius in the wrist should be fused in less than 1% of 17 year olds. In a trial of wrist MR scanning to look for this there were rates of up to 35%. When wrist MR scaning was introduced for the under 17 World Cup in 2009 some teams replaced up to 15 of their squads!
The plain fact is that professional sport is a dirty and unpleasant business and fell running should have as little as possible to do with it!