When Andre Agassi recently revealed he had taken crystal meth in a serialisation of his forthcoming autobiography there is no doubt it was a move motivated to increase book sales. The admissions have however, also raised yet more questions about drugs in sport and the resulting punishments for anybody found guilty of taking banned substances.
Firstly, there is a distinctive difference between taking drugs for recreational purposes and using them to enhance performance. Neither abuse should be tolerated but the responses should be different. The punishment should far more severe if an athlete is found to use drugs to enhance their performance.
AGASSI…The fall out from his admission continues
Each case should also be handled individually with the circumstances taken into account. The danger now is that with WADA (the World Anti-Doping Agency) now monitoring several sports, all cases will be treated the same. Bans should obviously be issued to anyone found guilty of taking drugs but the severity and the impact of these bans should vary depending on the circumstances.
Dwain Chambers took the performance-enhancing drug THG and as a result is now banned from competing in the Olympics. Athletics is sadly littered with men and women determined to get ahead by using drugs and so the sentence given to Chambers sent out a necessary message. Chambers also showed little remorse for his actions when interviewed and so he can have few complaints about his ban.
However there are other instances where the punishment has not fitted the crime. Take former Chelsea striker Adrian Mutu for example. Mutu was a man spiralling out of control and tested positive for cocaine while in England in 2004. Rather than standing by their player and getting him help, Chelsea discarded Mutu only a month later. His football career will probably never hit the heights it may well have done and he only has himself to blame. It is however, laughable that Mutu must pay Chelsea nearly £15 million in compensation after they were the ones who elected to sack him.
As for the Agassi case, the most worrying thing to note is the revelation that the tennis authorities did not ruthlessly explore the allegations because of Agassi’s stature within the sport. It would have been a huge blow for tennis had Agassi’s confessions hit the papers last decade and perhaps this was praying on the minds of those involved. Rafael Nadal hit the nail firmly on the head when he said: “If they covered for the player and punished others for the same thing that would seem to me to be a lack of respect for all sportsmen.”
Had Agassi been banned permanently from the sport we would never have witnessed his remarkable turnaround, which culminated in the American becoming the oldest man ever to hold the No 1 ranking. After falling to number 141 in the world he shot back to the top of the rankings after cleaning himself up and obtaining a new focus. It is a fairytale story that the world would have been robbed of if Agassi had been banned. Nevertheless, Agassi’s story should once again serve as a lesson to others that drugs are a major problem and hopefully cases like his never arise again.
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