Topic: News: Doping and Dirty Politics in China

[Chris Ⓐ LeRoux]

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Dirty Politics on Two Legs
By James Rose

No doubt Liu Xiang's amazing efforts in Lausanne last week have given exhausted Chinese sports fans, recovering from a wee-hours World Cup, something to jump up and down about. Chinese fans should indeed hail the new king of hurdles, but as 2008 approaches, fans around the world have cause to hope that Liu's stunning achievements can be replicated in Beijing.

No doubt Liu Xiang's amazing efforts in Lausanne last week have given exhausted Chinese sports fans, recovering from a wee-hours World Cup, something to jump up and down about. Chinese fans should indeed hail the new king of hurdles, but as 2008 approaches, fans around the world have cause to hope that Liu's stunning achievements can be replicated in Beijing.

It's not sporting achievement I'm talking about; it's whether China can overcome the massive hurdles of corruption and graft that seem widespread in the world of sports today.

Call me a cynic, but reading of Liu's world record run got me thinking about the seedier side of global sports. That Liu appears to have achieved his world- beating feats free of, shall we say, artificial enhancement is more credit to him and the mainland sports officials involved. But the unfortunate thing is my first thought was "drugs" when I read of his success in Switzerland.

That's probably highly unfair to Liu, but many global sports events have become tainted, in some cases irrevocably, by proof positive that drugs are being used to enhance performance. Sports like weightlifting, cycling, and even the big two at the Olympics - swimming and athletics - have had their images battered by prevalent doping.

Chinese athletes have been among the most criticized on doping. The major controversy over Chinese swimmers in the late 1990s - who will forget TV pictures of one female Chinese swimmer with a drug-pumped torso like an inverted equilateral triangle at the 1998 World Championships? - still casts a cloud over all Chinese athletes, rightly or wrongly.

In China's case, Beijing has always claimed the doping problem was not endemic, and was certainly not government policy.

Whether we believe that or not, the truth is that since the Eastern Bloc days in the 1960s and 1970s, the increased use of drugs in sports has generally been accompanied by high-level political support.

Doping in sports is just dirty politics on legs.

Politics, in both clean and muddy forms, seeps into the highest levels of international sports. Bodies like the International Olympic Committee and FIFA - soccer's world body - have been regularly exposed as being rife with corruption, much of it created by various levels of political and bureaucratic turf wars.

The IOC seems to have worked hard to clean up its image since the days when the former Franco general, Spain's Juan Antonio Samaranch, was at the helm. But it still struggles to argue that it is not deeply political and that it is working 100 percent in the interests of the Olympic Games and all they supposedly stand for.

FIFA under Sepp Blatter is forced to even fight harder, no more so than during a World Cup, to counter allegations that it is a highly corrupted organization, accountable to no one and doling out favors and funds not in the interests of the game, but in the interests of its head office administrators.

And so, back to China, a country marked by endemic corruption at all levels of its administrative hierarchy and where, come 2008, the Olympic fire will burn for two weeks.

The combination of a culture of fraud and bribery - where a dog-eat- dog market system has been grafted onto an extraordinarily poisonous and unfair system of patronage and backdoor dealings in the pre-market era - and the arrival of the Olympics - with all the pressures for host-nation gold medals that it brings - looks extremely volatile and hazardous not just for China but for the Olympic movement itself.

Anti-corruption laws and cases have been hot topics in Beijing for some years now. A constant stream of seemingly harsh regulations, accompanied by high-level prosecutions in graft cases, and even, sadly, the occasional execution on corruption charges, signal that some at least in the government's upper reaches are serious about corruption.

But stamping out corruption in business or in provincial governments is one thing. Sporting achievement on the world stage, especially as an Olympic host, reflects directly not only on the government, but on the population. It will be harder to ensure corruption does not induce a wave of doping in sports and their administration in China in the next years simply because there's more at stake.

Recently, Beijing vice mayor Liu Zhihua was removed following claims his Olympic work, which included demolitions and construction approvals, was about feathering his own nest more than any greater good. A high-level head chopped, but it surely doesn't stop there: it's an indication that aspects of the pre-Olympic race are already perverted.

The real test will be whether China's government bigwigs can guarantee they and their underlings will not be tempted to push doping on athletes or to otherwise cheat in the name of national glory and political face-saving.