Sporting heroes of bygone days may have been more like the rest of us, but their exploits look laughable now, writes Donald Clarke
LATE SUMMER arrives in a year evenly divisible by four. Guess what that means? It's time to gather together a series of moth-eaten whinges about drug taking in the Olympic games and set them beside dewy remembrances of braver, less pampered athletes from muddier epochs.
Ah, yes. Do you remember Biffer Maguire? The finest discus thrower of the 1950s used to eat nothing but saveloys and deep-fried Woodbines but, even after an evening spent drinking whiskey by the barrel, he could still leap out of bed, jog to the stadium and fling his disc far beyond the horizon. There was a real man. To compare Biffer to a pill-guzzling softy like Jarek Steroidovicz is to compare champagne to Cidona. Cidona with drugs in it. Drugs that make you grow ladies' parts.
You know how these pieces go.
Notwithstanding revelations about the long history of drug use in cycling, it is, I suppose, beyond dispute that sportspersons in earlier eras were less likely to take the field in a state of pharmaceutically-enhanced super-humanity. After all, if you spent all Saturday injecting Benzedrine into your eyeballs then you would, surely, be too wired to carry out your duties as a panel beater or a dog catcher on Monday morning.
Older athletes may have been reasonably good at kicking balls or punching Americans, but, those modest talents aside, they were just like you and me.
Hang on a moment. Why would I want to pay money to see some fat schlub like me wheeze averagely around a football pitch or get smacked stupid in the ring? We don't want our movie stars to look like that woman in the sweet shop with the festering goitre and the hacking cough. We want them to undergo so much plastic surgery that they take on the appearance of beautiful, pneumatic robots from some impossible future.
Is it asking too much that our sports stars undergo similar inconveniences to become Nietzschean supermen? Consider, for example, the way professional tennis has changed over the past 40 years. Every now and then, as the latest monsoon empties itself over South London, the BBC will broadcast an item on Wimbledon's prehistory.
A typical piece will include footage of clashes between the likes of Rod Laver and Tony Roche from the mid-1960s. The arrival of that surly bruiser Jimmy Connors was less than a decade away, but the tennis being played in the aftermath of Beatlemania looks faintly laughable to us now. Equipped with rackets made from driftwood and frayed string, dressed in thick woollen shorts, the players balloon the ball gently over the net like rival maiden aunts taking time out from a crochet convention.
I haven't played tennis in 20 years and I was terrible then and I've got a slightly dodgy knee, but I could still have hammered Lew Hoad without breaking a sweat. No, really.
Better informed, less facetious people than I will point out that the faster pace of modern tennis owes as much to the improvement in equipment as it does to the players' increased fitness.
In recent years, the sports boffins have moved on from designing springier bats and bouncier balls to constructing faster, stronger human beings. Earlier this summer, Olympic officials breathed a collective sigh of relief when a runner named Oscar Pistorius narrowly failed to qualify for the South African athletics squad. Pistorius had both legs amputated as an infant, but, thanks to a pair of outrageously flexible prosthetic limbs, he can now run 100 metres in less than 11 seconds.
Certain spoilsports had argued that the springiness of Pistorius's extraordinary pseudo-limbs - j-shaped carbon-fibre blades - actually gave him an advantage over athletes with nothing more exciting to run on than feet. If Blade Runner, as Oscar is nicknamed, had qualified for Beijing a nightmarish tangle of Jesuitical wrangling would surely have followed.
All this gives me an idea. It is, surely, now time to suppress any concerns about playing God and embark on a scheme to fashion the most terrifyingly magnificent sportspeople the world has yet seen. I propose that we impose a two-tiered structure on all professional sports.
Old-fashioned purists can support sporting bodies that continue to impose the strictest sanctions on any athlete caught taking performance-enhancing drugs or buying new ankles from Steve Austin's physician. Each Saturday, the stickler can pull on his cloth cap, buy a bag of bullseyes and light out for the nearest waterlogged field to watch fat men stomp around in baggy shorts.
Meanwhile, the rest of us can set about pumping drugs into adolescents, forcing them to endure bizarre diets, depriving them of any social distraction and, from time to time, hacking off the occasional limb to accommodate suitable flaps, blades, paddles and laser blasters.
Think what a transformative effect this would have on track and field alone. Imagine three-breasted women (and men) throwing javelins over skyscrapers. Imagine runners with thighs the size of Land Rovers and heads the size of pimentos running the 100 metres in less than five seconds. The excessive use of such drugs can, it is true, greatly reduce life expectancy, but that just means that no sports star will hang around long enough to outstay his or her welcome.
Our desire for grotesque achievement and our short attention spans can then snuggle up together in complacent harmony.
Don't laugh too hard. It may yet happen.
• John Waters is on leave