Business of Sport: Let's not kid ourselves any more. Modern sport is not about the love of the game, or the thrill of the spirit. These are emotions that draw us into participation or watching. But when you get to high competitive levels - say Olympic standard - the simple economics of competing to the highest standard possible take over.
Why then are we losing the run of ourselves in rushing to condemn Cathal Lombard's positive drugs test? Why are we Irish so quick to take the moral high ground and allow ourselves to be surprised when one of our own cheats? Because we like to fool ourselves into believing athletes are living comfortably, happy to struggle in insecurity. But Lombard is a victim of a system that financially rewards excellence, not just any excellence but being the best of the best. Achievement equates with monetary success. Gold medals reflect in dollar green.
It is not just Nike sponsorship deals we are talking about. Our own system of carding, evaluating and providing funding based on high performance has helped create a culture in which our own athletes, struggling to find time to train, unable to take time off work, must achieve the high-performance standard set by the Irish Sports Council to earn enough.
If you struggle to get there, sometimes an extra kick may be needed. Sometimes the boost to the body isn't always to achieve gold and Olympic glory, sometimes it is to achieve enough financial security to continue in your chosen sport full-time.
Now put yourself in a struggling athlete's shoes. Ask yourself if you're truly happy. Did you always harbour a secret ambition for acting or maybe fancied yourself as a writer? Why then, did you never achieve it? What would you really do to follow your dream? If it is about not having enough talent or skill, maybe it was also about not being prepared to follow that dream.
How many of us dare take the risk of pursuing our dreams no matter what cost? How many of us would quit our jobs to take on Hollywood, to take on the publishing houses or the business world? Could you live with the financial uncertainty of not having a weekly pay cheque, of hoping your talent and hard work are enough to earn an occasional freelancer's pay?
Now put yourself in Cathal Lombard's shoes, or indeed any other amateur athlete's shoes, who is struggling to make it all count. You are running to follow your dream; the hard slog, the training sessions and the pain are worth it because it is something you have to do no matter what. This is what defines you and you have no choice and you wouldn't have it another way.
You know you will never win an Olympic medal, but how nice it would be to compete in one Olympics, to walk out into the magnificent stadium behind your country's flag knowing the world is watching. Knowing you have achieved and arrived. Knowing you are taking part in the greatest sports spectacle that comes once in a lifetime for most athletes lucky enough to even qualify.
Meanwhile, all you want to do is get by and keep up. But you know you are competing in a world where performance-enhancers and supplements exist to give others extra help. It's around you, you know people are doing better but you resist. The end result? Not even Olympic gold or glory but simply doing better to help you get by even easier.
The longer you resist, the longer your hard work, talent and training don't keep up, the more you suffer and the tougher it becomes. All you want is to succeed making a decent living.
All you want is to train full-time with good trainers, the best advice and in the best conditions. In the normal working world, we call them minimum wage, training and health and safety.
In the athletics world no such standards exist. If you are not high performance you do not get top funding. Even then, the funding that does exist, would be below the average industrial wage.
In English football, Jimmy Hill helped introduce the minimum wage in the 1960s; in Ireland, SIPTU and the government only reached agreement on a legal mimimum wage for the first time in 2000, so what chance that athletes can expect to receive similar conditions and standards?
Remember that Irish athletes are not living off the fat of the land nor are there financial incentives to allow them retire by 30 and bask in glory. Our athletes are out mornings and evenings rain, hail and snow, doing the daily grind. Not because they want to but because they have to, because it is part of what drives them. They are prepared to do something they love and will risk it all and risk security for it.
To us outsiders, looking on with amazement, we shake our heads in awe and pose questions as to their sanity. But then we go home at night and often think back ruefully of a dream we once had and sometimes wonder what if?
Before jumping on the bandwagon and condemning those who went too far in that pursuit, ask yourself would you do the same if it just meant providing security and comfort to let you live your dream, if just a little?
bizofsport@eircom.net
$44 Despite its ubiquity in
Athens over the next two weeks, Coca-Cola's share price has
been tumbling from $52 at the start of the summer.
$101 million Value of the broadcasting rights to the 1980 Moscow Olympics
$1.5 billion Value of the broadcasting rights to the 2004 Athens Olympics
The Greeks, it seems, are a bit like the Irish. Wait 100 years for the world's biggest sports event to come around again and shrug the shoulders with a sigh of indifference, until the last week that is.
Struggling to entice locals to snap up Olympics tickets, the past week has seen record sales every day. Whether sales figures can beat Sydney 2000 remains to be seen.
The politics and power plays in the world of anti-doping continue with World Anti-Doping Agency chairman Richard Pound, saying USA Track & Field must shoulder the blame for the multitude of positive tests.
Although George W Bush came out strongly against drugs in sport in his State of the Union address back in January, many question the willingness to take on the supplements industry, estimated to be worth $18 billion a year.
Sponsorship, the lifeblood of modern sport, has been around since the first Olympics in 1896 when a leading sponsor was the patriot Georgios Averof.
He was central to the replacement of the ancient Athenian Stadium and he himself organised the repairs in Athens during the Olympic Games as well as donating the grand total of 920,000 drachmas.
ListenToLombardi: "If winning isn't everything, why do they keep score?"
