ATHLETICS
Martin Gillingham
The news that top sprinter Adri Schoeman has tested positive for the use of an anabolic steroid should surprise no one. The metamorphosis her body has been through over the course of the past few years makes the changes underwent by Flo-Jo (Florence Griffiths-Joyner) in the late Eighties look like nothing more than a superficial cosmetic makeover.
The pretty and decidedly feminine figure that the former Miss de Jongh cut as she sprinted to a national title in Secunda eight years ago has since given way to a muscle-bound powerhouse. A television interview three weeks ago after her win at the Absa meeting in Bloemfontein even revealed a voice that, in her year away from the track, has slipped an octave or two.
So why do some athletes put themselves through such pain and, to some extent, irreversible physical change? Where Schoeman is concerned it was a self-consuming lust for sporting success. On an average evening she would have spent two to three hours pumping weights in the unpretentious gym that stands a stone’s throw from the Herman Immelman stadium in Germiston. And that’s not all. In her first session of the day she would have run 300m repetitions time after time, one after another, rain or shine, until either her legs gave way to lactic acid or her lungs to hyperventilation. Such was the life of a driven young woman.
In fact, it was on her home track last month in the season-opening Absa meeting that Schoeman launched her comeback with victory in the 200m in 23,19sec. It was less than four-tenths of a second outside her lifetime best which had been set five years earlier. It was a remarkable performance. Among other things it will have served to justify the sacrifices she made to be there. Sacrifices such as the time spent away from her new baby and even the threat her dope regime might have placed on her long-term health.
But Schoeman has never been one to do things by halves. It goes for her theatrical performances off the track every bit as much as the dramatic roles she often played on it. Victories were always marked with emotional celebrations while failures were acted out like a Shakespearean tragedy. In 1997 at the world championships in Athens she crashed to the track with no apparent explanation midway through her qualifying heat of the 400m. She told reporters outside the stadium that she had “blacked out” and been robbed of her place in the next round. A more likely explanation was that, having run flat-out for the first half of the race, she had simply shot her bolt and in a characteristically rash moment thrown herself to the ground.
In the same vein, Schoeman’s overstatement in protesting her innocence last week should fool no one. “Please, tell the people that I am not a druggie, I’m begging you,” is how she pleaded to one reporter. Another was gifted one of the quotes of the year: “I suffered so much pain I would have drunk snake venom if I thought that would help.”
That last utterance was in support of her alibi, that she took the steroid stanazolol which was contained in a pain killer prescribed by a sports doctor in Pretoria. Schoeman claims it was to provide relief from a back injury which had deteriorated since she gave birth last year. It is a failing of sport’s anti-doping procedures that such alibis are never tested. To the “court” on this occasion an Athletics South Africa disciplinary hearing the positive test itself is sufficient evidence to “convict”. Having said that, it’s hard to imagine how any self-respecting sports doctor could ever prescribe medication that contains stanazolol, one of the most notorious elixirs. Even my ageing mother will tell you: “It’s the stuff Ben Johnson was on.”