Recent news in the UK has featured two knights of the kingdom. The death of Sir Roger Bannister, the athlete who ran the first four-minute mile at Oxford in 1954 and was later knighted for his contributions to medicine, was announced. Bannister competed in the amateur era and is said to have made no financial profit from the sport. Sir Bradley Wiggins, on the other hand, acted in the modern era in which every elite sport is professional and is handsomely rewarded. He was in the news because a parliamentary committee found that while he had not done anything illegal, he had nevertheless acted unethically by taking prescription drugs not to treat an affliction, but simply to improve his performance by winning the Tour cycle race. of France in 2012. This latest in a long series of stories about drug abuse in professional sport raises the question of whether it is still a sport in the traditional sense and whether ethical behavior can survive in an era ruled by the big Business.
International cycling competition had gotten a bad rap for drug abuse when a former seven-time Tour de France winner, Lance Armstrong, was stripped of all his accomplishments after his abuse was revealed in 2012. The US Anti-Doping Agency The United States described him as the ringleader of “the most sophisticated, professionalized and successful doping program the sport has ever seen.” The Sky cycling team, of which Wiggins was a member, was launched under the guise of being a champion of fair sport. It has now been revealed that he acts in a way that was technically legal but unethical, behavior that can be considered characteristic of much modern business.
Recently, FIFA’s decision to allow the use of television monitoring facilities at soccer matches to aid referees’ decisions provided another interesting reflection on trends in modern sport. Various systems are already in use in cricket and rugby, in which replays are shown to viewers on a large television screen. However, action replays will not be displayed this way in soccer matches as fans would not be prepared to accept fringe decisions that go against their team. This is surely a severe condemnation of a sport by its own governing body, and it shows just how far sportsmanship and ethics have sunk in the most commercialized sport.
The lesson of all this would seem to be that the authorities will continue to fight for legality in sport, as in business, but that little can be done to ensure ethical behavior, and pure sportsmanship can be expected to survive only in the amateur realm. .
