Money isn’t the only form of motivation.
Heck, a professional cyclist or an athlete dabbling in performance-enhancing drugs probably isn’t in the right mindset to think so clearly and so long term about how this is going to help better their image, improve their sponsorship deals and garner lucrative new contracts on down the line.
No, they’re thinking about getting better by whatever means necessary. They’re thinking about winning.
Listen, there’s no culture of this sort of carry on in the GAA. There’s no way that it could ever be a county-sponsored project where the whole squad are using performance-enhancing drugs to gain an illegal advantage over the rest. It’s not possible. It costs too much money, these guys play with other teams as it is, and there’s no way of ensuring that the 31st or 32nd ranked player on the panel isn’t going to drop off in a huff at some stage and maintain his silence forever.
This will never be a team problem in the GAA and it probably won’t ever be a big problem in the GAA but it doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t still be regulated.
#GAAHour's @Woolberto and @ConanDoherty going at it… again https://t.co/XYZ2qjJF9j
— SportsJOE (@SportsJOEdotie) May 30, 2017
If anyone’s naive enough to think that a player wouldn’t bother with performance-enhancing drugs just because he’s an amateur, for God’s sake look at what they’re doing already. Look at the work and time they’re pouring into the GAA. Look at what club players are bloody doing.
People are absolutely killing themselves for the cause and they’re doing it before and after work, they’re doing it at the expense of their social lives, their family time, and they’re doing it by travelling all over the country by bus or by car. Whether it’s for their own profile, their own crazed desire to help make the team better, their unceasing ambition to win or just for the good, old-fashioned love of the game, players are doing whatever it takes to improve.
Don’t tell me they have nothing to gain from using stimulants or whatever else.
The narrative has suggested that GAA players don’t need to use performance-enhancing drugs because, unlike professionals, they have no monetary benefit to take from it. But, if that’s your thinking, consider for one second that it’s the professional who has everything to lose from being caught – his livelihood, his post-career prospects, his sponsorship deals and everything. If a professional is caught cheating, they have to start their lives all over again.
The amateur has none of that to worry about. The amateur has nothing to lose.
And this amateur that we all feel sorry for because he sits in an office all day but then has to be subjected to blood tests and maybe his name being smeared, think of the poor f**ker sitting next to him in the office all day who’s actually honest and genuine in his training and he’s running straight from work to get to get to a session and he’s not getting home until almost 10 at night. And some people would happily have those lads screwed over or cheated if it meant we could protect everyone absolutely.
The GAA has an obligation to ensure that what we’re watching is clean and that what we’re competing in is fair.
It might be innocent, the majority of those minority cases where someone would test positive for a prohibited substance, but that’s all the more reason to continue testing so the information and education improves and ignorance of the law becomes less of an excuse. It’s also another reason to conduct more than 97 tests in the GAA for a whole year – what was done in 2015. That’s nowhere near good enough.
This is not a cultural problem but no-one can ever say with any degree of certainty that everyone in the GAA is clean. They can’t say there are no bad eggs – unintentionally or not. So, in the interests of everyone else, we shouldn’t be so quick to just shut down questions.
We should welcome testing in the GAA. Especially if we have nothing to hide.
