Abandon dope, all ye who enter here

The World Anti-Doping Agency has just called on Russia to confront its wrongdoing and generally shape up. Well, good luck with that boys. The great and good of Wada would be better advised to visit a sharp and troubling new play at the Park Theatre in London. It’s called Deny Deny Deny (standard advice to athletes accused of doping before they come up with some hitherto unknown medical condition) and is by a former TV journalist, Jonathan Maitland. It tells of a young star athlete called Eve (Garden of Eden anyone?) who as she aims for Olympic gold falls under the influence of a ferocious female coach who persuades her to try gene modification. To find out what happens you will have to see it (it finishes on 3 December) but it is utterly riveting.

The plot is futuristic, but not by much. The EPO gene is a small protein that increases the number of red blood cells, enhancing oxygen delivery and massively increasing performance and recovery levels in aerobic and endurance sports. If you are clean, you jack up your EPO by altitude training. If you are Lance Armstrong, and many, many others, you inject synthetic EPO, a process banned by Wada but difficult to detect. Whatever you think of Armstrong though, it wasn’t a needleful of dope that won seven Tours de France; it was Lance Armstrong. Even dopers have to have supreme talent.

All sport is about seizing advantage. Is some miraculous advance in training, kit or diet so very different from a chemical or medical tweak? Well, I think so, but are we living in fantasy land when we want sport to be pure, a level playing field? Arguably, that stopped when all sport turned professional and the money poured in.