EDUCATION AND TESTING IS THE WAY TO GO TO SAVE FACE

Since this doping issue became a really big deal a couple weeks ago when five of our athletes including the beloved Asafa Powell, the former 100-metre world record holder, and Sherone Simpson returned adverse findings of their ‘A’ samples, the discussion about doping has been vigorous.

Once more the myth that Jamaica athletes don’t consume performance enhancers has been debunked because no one can say for sure that many of the 18 or so cases since 2008 were not deliberate attempts by our athletes to get an advantage over their rivals. No matter how one tries to spin it, to believe that every single one of those cases was inadvertent would be naive. This is not to say that the two named athletes were intentionally cheating. We have to wait for all the information surrounding their respective cases before we can come to some form of a conclusion.

The discussion has now turned to whether or not we should test our world class teenagers who do so well at Champs, CARIFTA and the respective global meets in which they compete each year. At the recently concluded World Youth Championships, for example, Jamaican student athletes set two world records, one athlete came within 0.01 seconds of another and others produced world best performances that saw Jamaica win six gold medals to finish atop the medal table for the first time in a global event. Ironically, it was that same day that Jamaica secured it’s fifth and sixth gold medals to secure that top ranking that news broke that their senior counterparts had seemingly run afoul of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) code.

In response to proposals that our high school athletes get tested locally, a proposal that had been ignored previously when first mooted years ago but now returns as a viable solution now that our athletes have once more been shamed in the global spotlight, many stakeholders are voicing resistance. How can they test our kids? Kids, they argue, already have enough to worry about like their schoolwork, exams and such, how would it be fair to ask them to study the list of banned substances, the more than 1000 substances on the banned list.

The response was expected, especially in a country where it is virtually illegal to expect anyone to be accountable for anything.

The truth is testing high school athletes and couple that with a rigorous education programme is the only way in which we can kick this drug problem we have. We have a tendency to not want to follow rules unless someone is standing over us with a big stick. It speaks to the general indiscipline that runs amok within all spheres of Jamaican society. So until we can learn to police ourselves at an individual level perhaps it is best to have the system police us.

There have been rumours circulating for years that high school athletes do engage in some form of ‘suspect’ practices that result in the guilty having a competitive edge over their rivals. Perhaps that is where it starts. Practice makes perfect, they say, and if a high school athlete is able to get away with it at that level what is to say that he or she won’t try to get away with some form of  cheating once they make the transition to the senior ranks where the competition gets even tougher.

I am all for getting into the kids’ faces and those of their parents and support staff as well, with the information they need, exposing them from very early about what they choose to ingest and what they should not be doing once they choose to become world-class athletes. That and testing the very best of them to ensure that Jamaica is spared the embarrassment of having to explain why so many of our athletes are running afoul of the rules, is the direction we need to take.

Heck, they are already being tested when they travel overseas to compete. Where is the harm if they undergo those tests here at home? Children live what they learn and we definitely need to teach them from early that cheating is not an option because if they cheat they will be caught.