Drugs are the performance enhancers of athletes and sportsmen. But drugs also serve to enhance and energize controversy. The prevailing opinion is that sportsmen should spurn drugs and those who perform with the help of drugs should be penalized. There is no doubt that in the ensuing Olympic Games, more than the records that will be broken and more than individual achievements, the spotlight will be on doping. This will be a trifle bizarre, more so because the Games this year have returned to its homeland, Greece. The ancient Greeks, who began the games, were lovers of purity in thought and in action. The Olympic Games for them represented the triumph of the free spirit and of healthy bodies. But such an idyll is a thing of the past in the sports arena. Sports has become professionalized and much more competitive today than what could be conceived of even fifty years ago. The ambience in which the games were held in ancient Greece sounds like a fairy tale today. The changed circumstances have placed a very high premium on performance and on winning. Sportsmen no longer enter the Olympic stadium to win honour for themselves by participating in the games, they enter the competition to win. Drugs have come into sports in the wake of this relentless drive to win and to do better than even the best.

Under the circumstances, it is difficult to understand the objections to, and the discomfiture about, performance-enhancing drugs. The simplest way out of the controversy is to remove the ban on drugs. For one thing, it is difficult to decide where the line lies between what is performance-enhancing and what is not. The ancient Greeks would have held that as innocent a substance as glucose is a performance-enhancer. Or to take the argument in another direction, athletes should not be allowed to train with weights because weight training also improves performance through external aids. Certain types of food can even be included in the list of objectionable items. It all depends on where one draws the line of disapproval and how the word dope is defined. There is no prohibition on the consumption of alcohol or tobacco even though by most definitions prevalent in daily life, these two would be labelled intoxicants and thus fall under the rubric of dope.

The pursuit of purity in the Olympic Games is to a large extent utopian. The spirit of the games, if they are to have any relevance in the modern world, will have to change with the changing context. There is nothing to be ashamed about this. There is nothing more ill-fitting for a sportsman than the ideal of an armoured and impoverished knight charging blindly at windmills. Sportsmen perform for the future, not against it.