It is long past the time when some concerted international effort should have been taken to get to grips with the increasing problem of drug abuse in sport. There should, therefore, be a welcome for the initiative undertaken this week by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to establish four task forces to examine the problem and to come back with recommendations on how best to resolve it. But there has to be some degree of scepticism on the grounds that this could turn out to be merely a public relations stunt to offset the recent unfortunate remarks by the IOC President, Juan Antonio Samaranch, giving apparent approval for the use of some performance-enhancing pharmaceutical substances.
It can have come as no surprise that these remarks were vigorously attacked by the head of the IOC's medical commission, Prince Alexandre de Merode: "people who want to reduce the list of banned drugs are those who want doping to continue" he is reported as saying in what is a rare public confrontation in the upper echelons of the IOC. It will be February, when the task forces report back, before people will be able to assess the degree of commitment to fighting the drug problem. And it will be actions taken by the IOC following the two-day conference in Lausanne which hear the task force reports, that will determine the ultimate outcome of this process.
One thing, however, is already certain: the task of eliminating drug abuse from sport will not be easy. It may not even prove a simple matter to identify the substances which should be banned and it is obvious that the detection of these substances can be both scientifically and politically difficult. And even when they are detected, the imposition of penalties upon those people who have abused them, can prove legally difficult and subject to almost infinite variability within different national and international jurisdictions.
It is not immediately apparent from the terms of reference of the task forces that any of the various difficulties can readily be overcome. The first of the four areas of concern set out - the protection of athletes - should be a given. It is hard to see how the second area identified - the political and legal position and governmental co-operation - can come to any kind of satisfactory closure without extended consultations and agreements with a great variety of different sovereign governments. The third area - ethics and prevention - sounds dangerously liable to produce a degree of pious waffle which would be unlikely to have much practical effect, and the fourth area - the relationship between doping and money - could require more global detective work than a task force would have the resources to undertake. But difficult as the tasks will surely be, and vague and unhelpful as the terms of reference may seem, there can be no doubt that the problem needs to be urgently addressed. No nation (including our own) is immune from the problem and the recent Tour de France - dubbed the Tour de Farce where it should more seriously have been described as the Tour de Pharmacie - gave a depressingly vivid picture of the need to rid sport of the menace of drug abuse.