FRIDAY'S WELL-choreographed and spectacular opening ceremony of the 28th Olympiad in Athens, was a fitting tribute to Greek culture and its contribution to civilisation and modern thought.
Sadly, the ideals of the modern Olympic movement, drawn from concepts of early Greek thought including the sense of character, honour and integrity are being undermined by the scandal of athletes using performance-enhancing drugs.
The ideals of healthy competition among the best trained and most gifted are being undercut increasingly by cheats. Long gone are the days when a referee's or umpire's role was confined to monitoring the conduct of the game or competition itself. Now special investigators and arbitration panels have to be appointed to sift through the claims and charges of dope usage and protestations of innocence.
On Friday, there was enthusiastic applause for Jacques Rogge, the president of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), when he challenged the thousands of athletes to "refuse doping and respect fair play". Yet, according to the IOC, of the many thousands of drug tests conducted on elite athletes this year, about one in 100 has yielded a positive result. This would suggest that the overwhelming majority of athletes are playing fair. But the increasing sophistication of masking substances and the use of labs apparently dedicated to producing chemicals that can be easily absorbed in the body, suggest that many more cheats are probably getting away with their crimes. There is a real danger that conventional doping regulations may soon become unenforceable.
Not surprisingly, in the face of the onslaught of the cheats, some people are now suggesting that using substances to enhance performance is no worse than athletes training in high altitudes to build red blood cells or using weights to build stronger muscles. Of course, this is a nonsense argument for drugs are being used precisely to give the kind of advantage that "natural" training cannot. It should not be forgotten either, that there are side-effects to the use of many of these chemicals that have long-term negative impact on their users.
Underlying this increased use of performance-enhancing substances is the prospect of victors being able to secure financially-lucrative endorsement contracts. So the pursuit of money then is at the root of this pernicious evil. Jamaica, which has had a rich history in the Olympics, born largely out of the honing of the natural talents of our young athletes, has not escaped the drug scandal brush. For the sake of our good name, and for all that is considered decent and fair, there must be full support for the stance taken by Rogge and the IOC doping must be rooted out and the cheats banished from the sport.
