Sport on TV: Half-baked theories of the dopey professor

ON Open Space this week (BBC 2, Tuesday), Ellis Cashmore, a professor of sociology at Staffordshire University and the author of a book called Making Sense of Sport, got up and said: 'Let's do drugs.' Or words to that effect.

'I'm not convinced that drug-taking in sport is cheating,' said the professor, who was calling for a ban on the ban.

Actually, the logic here is not that difficult. There are rules that prohibit drug-taking. While those rules are in place, to break them deliberately is to cheat. But anyway, it seems clear that the complexities of the prohibited drugs list are a bit of a joke and, for athletes, a complete headache (for which they are not allowed to take Nurofen). I've done a lot of Lemsip in my time without noticing myself subject to startling bursts of pace, but this is a drug on the prohibited list.

Still, just because the restrictions are in a tangle, it doesn't necessarily follow that you drop them altogether - unless you are Professor Cashmore, who argued that sport now dangled before athletes all manner of cash incentives and, with drug prohibition, the athletes were 'being denied the opportunities to capitalise on them'. This was possibly one of the most morally vacuous statements heard on television since The Borgias, a weirdly capitalist version of the 'society's to blame' argument.

Unconsidered here were the clean athletes who worry about the after-effects of performance- enhancing compounds. One has to overcome one's feelings about Carl Lewis, the self-appointed representative of this constituency, and remember that there are many athletes who don't take drugs, not because they are pious and high-minded, but because they don't want to find themselves, in their retirement, growing an additional head. What becomes of them if the authorities give drugs the nod? And if drugs are going to play a legal part in competitive sport, at what point do we start injecting our children? At 12? At 9?

Then again, maybe the professor has got a point. Maybe we should just think: 'To hell with it; break out the laughing powder.' It would certainly be good news for Britain: overnight, Glasgow would become one of the top three cities of sporting excellence, right up there with New York and Marrakesh.

And it would mean that, during the next World Cup, Jack Charlton wouldn't have to content himself with throwing water out to his exhausted players; he could toss them packets of amphetamine and get them to do the job properly.

It would also give television commentators something new to talk about: 'Interestingly, Debbie has opted to ditch the Night-Nurse-and-crushed-Polos combination which did her so well in Stockholm and this afternoon favours a handful of magic mushrooms left to marinade overnight in a can of Tizer.'

And there would be whole new areas of pontification for the studio expert panels: 'The home-grown leaf versions of these drugs are, of course, less potent than the manufactured resins. Jimmy?'

We'd need, of course, to modify the way in which sporting records are kept.

At present in athletics, if a record has been broken in particularly favourable weather conditions, the record books will say so. This could easily be adapted, so you would end up with: Fred Bloggs, 400m world record-holder (heroin-assisted). Or: Frida Bloggovitch, European and Commonwealth shot-put champion (but, like, really out of it at the time).

Unambitious of the professor, surely, to stop at drugs: let's have a sports-wide amnesty on rule-breaking. Let's come right out and say: 'To cheat is neat'. Let's make ball-tampering in cricket legal, so that Michael Atherton can fiddle around in his trousers with impunity. Let's avail 800m runners of the field in the middle of the track; after all, the glory of the winning line is there as an incentive and to make them go all the way round is surely to deny them of their opportunity to capitalise on it. And let's make hand-ball perfectly routine practice in football: it was only the pressures of the money and fame at stake that made Maradona pat that one into the net in the 'Hand of God' incident. How could he have been expected to behave otherwise?

Professor Cashmore made this programme himself and got to have a high old time. He showed himself thumping away at a punch bag. He loomed on to the screen in fetching close-up. He even flashed up a credit at the beginning which read 'A Film by Professor Ellis Cashmore'; though, lacking a plot, movie stars, car chases and a cinema release, this looked suspiciously like a TV programme to me.

Unfortunately, there was no means of subjecting the Professor to a post-broadcast dope test, so we cannot be sure if he himself was on drugs; but he was certainly on television, which may in the end be the most dangerous drug of them all, leading in many cases to a dangerously inflated sense of personal importance, a willingness to put views chiefly to draw attention to yourself and, ultimately, a complete collapse of the synapses.