First let’s get it straight: I believe that the taking of performance-enhancing drugs is not only cheating but dangerous and wrong.

The drug cheat demonstrates a narrow- minded view of “winning at all costs” - at all costs to his health and his integrity. He can only see success in his chosen sport and not the bigger picture including his future health and the lives and reputations of people around him. So what are some of the problems involved?

One of the problems is that those who are trying to catch the drug cheats are always one step behind the culprits.

Performance-enhancing drugs don’t start out as such. Before they were used in sports they started off as medical drugs used to treat various legitimate medical conditions. Then some smart cookie works out that this drug can also have a certain physiological effect on healthy people that improves their performance in some aspect of sport. Hey presto, a performance-enhancing drug is born. Although it may improve an athlete’s performance, these drugs also have a lot of negative side effects that can threaten the athlete’s health and shorten their life.

So what sort of mentality does it take to make an athlete resort to taking drugs? Firstly, they would have to think that “winning isn’t everything - it’s the only thing”. Winning is more important than even their own health and quality of life. Now let’s face it, one of the most important things to not take for granted is your health. Secondly there would have to be a lack of confidence not just in their own natural ability as an athlete but also in their worth as a human being. I get worried when I see so many of our young up and coming athletes whose self esteem is directly proportional to their last race performance.

Shouldn’t self-esteem be a reflection of the sum total of one’s life, rather than just one aspect? I am left wondering if these people, who have their whole self worth tied up with their performance, are the ones most susceptible to drug abuse.

The biggest problem with drugs in sport is the fact that exceptional yet clean athletes can be branded as drug cheats simply because of a good performance. In other words, an outstanding athletic performance will now, because of performance-enhancing drugs, draw suspicion to the athlete whether they are guilty of taking drugs or not. Whatever happened to the phrase innocent until proven guilty?

Australians are notoriously knockers of everything. The “tall poppy” syndrome is well and truly rife in the triathlon community in Australia. We all at some stage or other have felt somewhat jealous of a performance produced by someone else. Wouldn’t it make us feel a little better about ourselves if we could somehow justify why they were better than us? After all, it couldn’t be that they actually trained harder or were more talented, they must have cheated somehow by drafting, cutting the course, or perhaps taking drugs.

ASDA, or the Australian Sports Drug Agency, is doing a very good job of keeping our sport of triathlon clean in Australia with their testing and education programs but they will never be able to completely eradicate it.

So ultimately the responsibility for this lies with us as athletes. We need to remember why we got into the sport in the first place. We all started for different reasons but we all began with an idea of fun, a healthy sense of competition, a desire to test our limits, to further those limits through training and hard work, and just plain and simply, because we liked the sport. If you have lost sight of these ideas, the question could be asked, “Why are you still in the sport?” And most certainly, this is the question drug takers should be asking themselves.

Ultimately, even though I am a professional and I rely on this sport for my living. I do triathlon because I love it. I count myself blessed to be able to do so. At the end of the day I want to be able to look at myself in the mirror and know that I have been the best that I can be whilst maintaining my honesty and integrity. This may seem old fashioned but I can live with that.