Drugs in sport

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The big story in world sport at the moment is the Lance Armstrong issue, where he has been stripped of his 7 Tour De France titles for systemic drug use. He is not, of course, alone, which makes the performance of Australia's Cadel Evans two years ago even more admirable, as he is drug free. I don't know if cycling can survive this latest drug scandal, with another winner recently disqualified for the same crime. But it brings up an issue in other sports. In our recent Grand Final (Superbowl equivalent) in Australian Rules football, and it also happens in the other two codes we play here, Rugby League and Rugby Union, one of the winning side's main players had three pain killing injections during the game to allow him to continue, and this raises for many people the question of whether this too should be judged as the use of performance enhancing drugs. I don't think the argument that pain killers don't enhance performance as such, merely allow someone to continue, holds water. When I played at a slightly lower level of one of those sports as a young man, if you were too injured to continue you were replaced by one of the two reserves (who had both already played a game in the second fifteen immediately before the main game), and if a team suffered three such injuries, stiff, they had to finish the game with a man short. That was how the game was played, and I think the use of pain killers changes it to something altogether other. Like Gridiron, perhaps? Any ideas? Lash