For all its long, rich history for indulging boozers and gamblers and rakes, one vice cricketers never really seem to have acquired is doping. So far as the sport has ever had a problem, it’s been with the drugs that impair performance, rather the ones that enhance it. Plenty of cricketers have been caught, and occasionally even confessed to using, cannabis, cocaine, even, in one especially recherché recent case, opium. So far as PEDs go though, there have been a handful of players banned because they’d taken masking agents, usually diet pills or the like, or steroids of one kind or another. But almost no one has ever confessed to doing it deliberately. Cricket, then, would seem to be clean, or as close to it as any modern-day sport gets.
Which, conversely, already suggests that it might be more vulnerable than it appears, unless you believe that cricketers are immune to the temptations other sportspeople succumb to. If no one’s being caught, you have to ask how hard anyone’s looking. The ICC recently stepped up its anti-doping programme. At the Champions Trophy earlier this year, it started blood testing for the first time, a move which was wildly overdue because the urine tests it had been using can’t detect human growth hormone. The blood testing will allow it to set up a biological passport system, which will allow it to scan for the effects of doping over time, if not detect the substance or method itself. It’s a leap forward for the sport’s anti-doping programme at the elite level.
Cricket may not have a doping problem right now, but the course of the sport is in a direction in which one may well develop. For a long time a lot of fans have relied on the lazy thinking that because cricket’s so skill-driven, it’s safe. And of course it’s true that PEDs won’t necessarily help a batsman hit a cover drive, or a spinner turn his googly, just as they can’t help a shot putter hone his throwing technique or a sprinter improve his start. The 101 lesson here is that athletes dope for two reasons: to make themselves stronger, and to help themselves train harder and recover quicker.
As T20 continues to grow, those very qualities have become more important then ever before. There are a lot of cricketers competing for a small number of lucrative short-term contracts, the rewards are greater, the off-season shorter, and the consequences of injuries more severe. Human Growth Hormone can make a huge difference to the amount of time it takes for an athlete to recover from a musculoskeletal injury. Some studies have shown that an athlete using it can recover as much as six-times faster than they would without it. Which could easily be the difference between being out until next season, or being back in time for that big match in the knock-out rounds.
At the same time, T20 has put more of an onus on strength and power. Sixes sell. And a player can make themselves a name, and a lot of money, if they hit them hard enough, often enough. The skills a player needs in T20 are more akin to the set they use in baseball, a sport which has been struggling to control its own doping problem for decades now. And if the ICC has a good grip on anti-doping in its own events, it’s a lot harder to implement a consistent programme in all those new T20 leagues mushrooming around the world. You can get an idea of the difficulties by looking at the current situation in the world’s leading T20 league, the IPL.
There’s a reason the issue of anti-doping is bubbling up right now. The long-running soap opera at the BCCI has an old plot thread about the board’s anti-doping programme, which has come centre stage these last few weeks. The board is in dispute with India’s Department of Sports and the National Anti-Doping Agency. This has been going on since the mid-2000s, when the ICC first signed up to work with the World Anti-Doping Agency. The BCCI refused to commit to Wada’s whereabouts system, because its star players were worried about the security risk they’d be taking if they revealed their home addresses to the drug-testers.
Instead, after a year of negotiations, the BCCI and the ICC concocted a bespoke anti-doping programme which broadly satisfied both parties, and so, in 2011, the sport became Wada-compliant. India, meanwhile, outsourced their domestic doping control to a private firm based in Sweden, International Doping Tests & Management, who now operate the anti-doping programme for the IPL and other domestic competitions. But in April this year, Wada ran an audit of India’s National Anti-Doping Agency, and found that because the BCCI doesn’t recognise Nada’s authority, or allow it to conduct any tests at its events, Nada is in contravention of the Wada code.
The immediate question, then, is one of jurisdiction. The Indian Department of Sport asked the BCCI to allow Nada to run an anti-doping programme in domestic cricket. Wada increased the pressure on the BCCI by revealing that one of the BCCI’s accredited players did fail a recent doping test, without revealing who it was or what substance he had tested positive for. But just last week, the BCCI refused to comply. The BCCI argues that since it’s technically an autonomous body and not a national sports federation, Nada doesn’t have the right to be involved in its operation.
The BCCI’s anti-doping set-up is run by Vece Paes, father of the tennis player Leander Paes. And, by its own account, it is robust, better, perhaps, than Nada’s own. It says it doesn’t need the additional scrutiny. The squabble between the two seems to have become yet another baroque power struggle for control over an aspect of the sport in India. But the upshot is that the issue of anti-doping has become politicised, and, as a result, opaque, confused, and convoluted. The ICC, meanwhile, seems reluctant to publicly comment, much less intervene in the dispute. No doubt cricketers have the motive to dope. The question is, whether they have the opportunity, too.
• This is an extract taken from The Spin, the Guardian’s weekly cricket email. To subscribe to the Spin, just visit this page and follow the instructions.