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 | You and YoursΒ - Transcript Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ Radio 4 |
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| TX: 28.04.04 – PARALYMPICS 3 – How Far Will Disabled Atheletes Go To Win Medals? PRESENTERS: LIZ BARCLAY AND PETER WHITE |
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| THE ATTACHED TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING AND THE DIFFICULTY IN SOME CASES OF IDENTIFYING INDIVIDUAL SPEAKERS, THE Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY BARCLAY Now if you're in any doubt about the seriousness with which disabled athletes approach their sport, you only have to look at the disciplinary problems the Paralympics can sometimes face. The romantic idea that the games are competed for by cheerful disabled people, for whom taking part is quite enough, couldn't be further from the truth. In Sydney one athlete ran her chief opponent's wheelchair off the track, there were arguments about whether athletes were in the right category or pretending to be more disabled than they really were to gain advantage and then there were the drugs. In Peter White's series of reports on the run-up to the Paralympics today we look at the seamier side of disability sport. NEWS CLIP It's been reported in Sydney that about six competitors at the Paralympic Games for athletes with disabilities have tested positive for banned performance enhancing drugs. They're all thought to be powerlifters … WHITE So by the end of the first day of competition in the Sydney Paralympics half a dozen Eastern European athletes had been sent home in disgrace. The effect has been for the International Paralympic Committee to toughen up its line on doping for Athens and bring it into step with mainstream athletics. One of the difficulties peculiar to the Paralympics is that by the very nature of their disabilities some athletes need drugs to control their conditions. Britain's team doctor Anita Biswas explained the kind of issues they have to face. BISWAS It can be anything really from simple things like Salbutamol, which is an inhaler for asthma, which is permitted provided you do have asthma but in the past has been abused by athletes who do not have asthma because it's thought that it maybe gives them a little bit of an edge and makes them a little bit sharper off the mark to start with. And that can go right through to anabolic steroids. WHITE After the doping scandal broke in Sydney a number of newspapers professed themselves shocked and horrified - Disabled athletes cheating? - when they'd wanting to portray them as whiter than white and an example to tarnished able-bodied athletes. It's an attitude which Mike Brace, chairman of the British Paralympic Association, and a versatile visually impaired sportsman himself, can't really understand. BRACE I don't know why they would be surprised in that it is elite sport and it's all of its glory and all of its downsides. The will to win for some people is such that they will do anything in order to achieve that. WHITE One of the main causes of confusion in Paralympic sport is the complex classification system, designed to ensure that in disability terms like competes with like. What that means in say swimming is that the bemused spectator might find himself watching 13 100 metres backstroke races, never being entirely sure what the difference between those athletes is. Nowadays these classes aren't based on your actual medical condition but on what you're physically able to do. I've been talking to swimming gold medal hope David Roberts and his coach Tim Reddish about the practical effects of this. REDDISH It may be that David might swim against an amputee, it may be that he might swim against a paraplegic. He is a cerebral palsy athlete, so it fits into that category. WHITE Does it have to be that complicated? REDDISH Yes. Pre-1990 you had cerebral palsy athletes compete against cerebral palsy athletes in the water, you had wheelchair athletes compete against wheelchair athletes, you had les autres compete against les autres … WHITE Those are the others aren't they. REDDISH Yes. And you'd end up with maybe only three swimmers in the world in your event. That's not elite performance, that's elite participation. And the way to describe it really is that, for example, is it fair that you get a heavyweight boxer compete against a lightweight boxer? And it isn't, so we do a comparison with the classification system to try and get some parity the best we can so that they're competing on a level playing field. WHITE But the classification system itself can be abused, sometimes by a genuine mistake but it's by no means unknown for athletes to be entered in a more severely disabled class than their physical ability justifies, just to give themselves an edge. Which is why competitors, like David Roberts, will have to submit himself to rigorous testing before he can compete to make sure he's as disabled as he says he is. ROBERTS You go in and you're met with three different classifiers. One of them is a physio and the other two are observers. And they basically do a full body check - they make sure what you can and can't do, they check the muscles, they check all the motion, all the range of movement. They'll ask you what you think you can do and they'll ask you to do it and if they think you can do extra they'll get you to do extra. And then they take you into the pool and they ask you to swim all four of the strokes and they'll make sure that you are using the correct range of movement you've already shown them, in the pool. It's not a pleasant experience and it does hurt but it's the only way you're ever going to get a level playing field, they will push you to the limit, they want to see exactly what you can do, so they will push you to the limit of your abilities and that's the way it should be. WHITE Perhaps the most bizarre form of cheating is a phenomenon called "boosting". People with spinal cord injuries above a certain level are prone to a condition called autonomic dysreflexia, which causes very high blood pressure, this puts the body in an unnaturally high state of arousal - the kind of fight or flight mentality ideal for physical competition. And as Dr Anita Biswas explains a few people have been known artificially to induce this condition to aid their performance by some very peculiar means. BISWAS Sometimes what people do is clamp off their catheters, which increases the pressure within their bladder and can set off this procedure. Another typical way that has been described is that male athletes may actually push their testicles underneath them and sit on them, which as you can imagine is quite traumatic and the body reacts by getting stressed and as a result it can cause the same reaction. WHITE The truth is that such cases are extremely rare and Great Britain has a very clean record when it comes to breaking the rules. But as Mike Brace insists this is billed as elite sport and in some countries the stakes are very high. BRACE They will become stars overnight in their own countries, it's incredible the amount of kudos and notoriety that someone with a disability in a number of countries has suddenly got from their performances in the Paralympics. BARCLAY Mike Brace ending that report by Peter White. And in his final report Peter will be looking at how the Paralympics is paid for and why there could be serious problems after the games if more funding isn't found. 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