Gaining an Advantage?

There has been so much stuff in the news this summer about cheating in sport. In rugby there was the eye gouging in South Africa made worse by the manager saying that it was just normal rough and tumble and of course there was bloodgate where the Saracens player faked a blood injury to allow their goal kicker to come back on to the field. The past week in football has had a phony outcry about diving - all the top teams do it and they would never ever stand for FIFA or the SFA getting seriously upset about it. I remember Ally McCoist when he was a media man saying that it was a difficult call for a striker - if you are touched in the box you have to decide immediately whether it is enough to go down for! Golf and tennis have also had their moments but it seems that athletics at international level has been as busy as any other sport in this regard this summer - drugs mainly but then there was the Semanya business which was incredibly badly handled which added ti the scandal. All cheating and trying to gain an advantage.

But how about at local level? Frank Clement was fourth in the Montreal Olympics - finishing faster than any of the first six or seven he lost first place by only 0.4 seconds. Just at that time there was an experiment in using a home made drink with a bicarbonate of soda base which was said to help delay the onset of lactic acid. It had also been demonstrated to reduce 800 metres times by approximately two seconds in trials. At a meeting in Glasgow Frank Horwill said it was worth a try but Frank Clement just refused to countenance its use. He said that taking anything to make yourself go faster was the opposite of fair competition. Then there were all the wonder drinks (such as maxim) produced in recent years which were said to aid recovery and so increase the amount of work you were able to do. One internationally renowned Scottish coach used to give the athletes in his squad a glass of Maxim after every training session. Other coaches said it was cheating. But what about the fad at one time for marathon runners to drink two cups of black coffee before a race? There was said to be a scientific reason for it (it released the free flowing fatty acids in the blood stream) and I know of several Scottish men who used it for several years. Is that cheating or organising your diet? The most widespread and best known practice was the carbo-hydrate bleed out diet the week leading into an endurance competition whether it was on the road, on a bike or in the swimming pool. It had some drawbacks but lots of us used it and felt that we gained from it. Are things like that cheating?
I would argue that unless you are taking some chemicals that you would not normally take, you are not. The marathon diet is just eating your normal foods but in a psecific pattern and even the bicarb mixture - I never ever knew anyone who actually used it - is maybe OK. But is taking an aspirin two nights before a marathon, to help you get a night's sleep that nerves would deny you, cheating? What do the club members take the day before or on the day of a big race do or take? lachie Stewart used to take handfuls of biscuits but that would just give me diarrhoea!