This week Ruta Meilutyte who is 15 years old and from Lithuania won a Gold Medal for Swimming at the London Olympics. Fair play to her.
This week Ye Shiwen who is 16 years old and from PR China won two Gold Medals at Swimming. Fair play to her also.
Any reasonable person would want to congratulate these two young women. But an American coach has raised the possibility that one of these achievements might be too good to be true. Which one? Well its the Chinese…..er obviously. This has allowed the rest of the Media to speculate……about the Chinese girl. By a happy coincidence the Lithuanian girl has lived in England for some years, has an English coach and attends the same posh school as Tom Daley, poster boy of the British team.
The Chinese of course have form as drug cheats. So do the Lithuanians from their days as part of the old Soviet system. So do the British of course…..Dwain Chambers is on the Olympic team. So do the Irish for that matter. The Americans also had their fair share of Drugs cheats.
However this is the point where the speculation becomes Sour Grapes. The Chinese notoriously had a State-sponsored Doping programme and the speculation this time surrounds just one athlete. If Doping is involved it might reasonably be expected that the Chinese would be doping their entire team.
The thing about 15 year old and 16 year old athletes is that they lack Fear. They also get stronger by the day. And they get better year by year. They knock massive amounts off their times in a way that would be impossible as they reach their twenties.
While there has certainly been state-sponsored Doping…….there is also doping on an individual level. But perhaps every major sport and nation is plagued by teams within teams. For example the Canadian drug cheats in the late 1980s were effectively a seperate team within the Canadian team.
The Americans have of course accused swimmers from other nations of being drug cheats. Michelle Smyth was the victim of a hate campaign in the American media when she won three gold medals in Atlanta. We all wanted to believe she was “clean” but two years after the Olympics she was discovered to be doping. Although she keeps her medals, her Olympic medals are tarnished and her name is never mentioned in Irish sporting circles. But as we pointed out sixteen years ago……she was swimming faster than she had ever swam before…….but her rivals were swimming much slower than they had done before. Why?
Statistically the Chinese SHOULD win a lot of medals. Theres more than one billion of them and they make up one in seven of the worlds population. They SHOULD beat (say) Belgium at Womens Basketball because it is easier for them to round up a squad of young women who would simply tower above their Belgian opponents. And the Chinese SHOULD beat (say) Malawi at Canoeing because the Chinese sporting system is so much more developed.
It was not always so. There have been power shifts thru Olympic History. Britain, France, USA, Germany have dominated. Later USSR and China dominated. But most recent power shifts indicate that Brazil, PDR Korea and Korea Republic are “rising”. And future trends might well see Middle East countries “rise” as Sport catches up with Economic Power.
This is bad news for Western Europe and North America. A recent BBC documentary had Michael Johnson, the great American Olympian investigate the controversial subject that athletes from Jamaica have an advantage in Sprinting. They are….it is argued……descendents of the strongest slaves who crossed the Atlantic. Success was literally bred on Slave Plantations. And of course this might also be true of American sprinters.
People of my age will remember Abebe Bikile, the Ethiopian marathon runner who won the gold medal at both Rome (1960) and Tokyo (1964). He was the first of a line of African runners which included the magnificent Kipchonge “Kip” Keino, the Kenyan who defeated Australian Ron Clarke in the 1966 Commonwealth Games 5,000 metres AND American Jim Ryun in the 1500 metres at Mexico City (1968).
Keino was popular in Europe. I think in part because he was unique… a novelty….an African. Back in the 1960s, British athletics from the White City in London was a staple of Saturday “Grandstand”…….Alan Simpson, John Whetton, Peter Radford, Robbie Brightwell, David Hemery, John Cooper, Lynn Davies……and women such as Mary Bignall-Rand, Dorothy Hyman, Lilian Board and Ann Packer were the faces of British athletics. ……the white faces of British athletics.
Indeed the first “black” British athlete I can recall was Marilyn Neufville, a 400 metres runner. Born in Jamaica but brought up in Britain, she represented Britain before electing to compete for Jamaica which earned her charges of Treason in the British press. This was in the “Black Power Years”.
The 1980s brought black athletes especially from Eastern Africa…..Kenya, Ethiopia and Tanzania to the fore….and nobody ever accused them of being doped. Rather the charge was that they were natural athletes, especially in events from 1,500 metres to Marathon. It is seriously suggested that “white” athletes need doping to compete on a level playing field.
It is somewhat ironic that Athletics loses popularity in the western world (in part due to doping) as the African power rises. Is it racist? Effectively black athletes were always disadvantaged , not just in South Africa. Sport has its origins in Leisure activity and it is still uneven. This year I was pleased to see a female Jamaican swimmer come fourth in a final. There are at least two black guys on the American Swimming Team…..but I have yet to see a black face on the British Rowing Squad, the American Show Jumping Team, the German Sailing Team.
Before the Second World War, USA had segregated sport….certainly in Baseball and Basketball and possibly in American Football. The influx of black players is said to have detached mainly white American spectators and TV viewers from Baseball. It undermined the whole “Take Me Out To The Ball Game” narrative of American self-image. I dont know enough to say if this is a true analysis but certainly there must have been difficult transition years before black people were fully accepted in American sporting circles.
The simple truth is that “white” people have dominated sport far beyond their actual numbers. Black people are now key parts of (say) American and British teams but have a demographic……they are involved in Athletics, Boxing, Basketball…but not seemingly involved in Three Day Eventing, Rowing and Cycling.
When we support a national team…..we see ourselves. Those people are “just like me”. And that gives racists an awkward kinda choice. We see it too in Premiership Football. Back in the 1960s, guys from the Gorbals , Salford, Belfast, Dublin and Ashington played for Manchester United and travelled to Old Trafford on a bus. In 2012…….we are detached from our millionaire footballers.
Which is possibly why Bradley Wiggins seems like a throwback to a different time. Even the sideburns belong in the 1970s.
Keeping An Eye On the Czar of Russia 