Sideline Cut / Keith Duggan: It is inevitable, in today's suspicious and bureaucratic world, that the watchdogs at Wada - the World Anti-Doping Agency - are laying down the ground rules for the rights and wrongs of prohibited substance abuse for our GAA athletes.
But somehow, any link between these two associations does not ring true.
We all know what Wada represents in sport today. In a week when Tim Montgomery, the titular fastest man on the planet, was stripped of his records, his reputation and, potentially, the last of his financial assets, Wada stands as the body trying to rescue athletics from decades of moral ruination. Running, the most pure and simple of sporting endeavours, has been tarnished irreparably over the last 20 years and there is the sense that by isolating and disgracing athletes like Montgomery, the IAAF are merely shooting fish in a barrel.
Although the practice of substance abuse is as ancient as sport itself, the shocking notoriety of its consequences only became fully apparent after the systematic doping systems employed by the former Eastern Bloc countries in the 1970s. It seems laughably innocent now, the stories of female hammer throwers with husky voices or swimmers with facial hair. But the physical manipulation of those young people plucked from penurious circumstances and exploited for their athletic excellence was, when you think about it, obscene.
But it was more than Eastern European coaches who were big in the craft of substance manipulation. And after the exposure of Ben Johnson in 1988, athletics and, specifically, the Olympic Games, began to lose a foothold on credibility. Think back to the summer grand prix races of 20 years ago and how wonderfully atmospheric the athletics stadiums of Europe were then. Athletics is a ghost world today in comparison.
The pageantry and money behind the Olympic Games masks the real sense of paranoia and distrust that exists down at track side and in the mixed zones where the athletes gather after races.
People who really know and love athletics are reluctant to believe what their eyes are seeing, however athletically supreme and majestic it looks on a given summer night, for fear that their trust or naivety will be exposed in three, four or 10 years down the line.
In Sydney, Marion Jones was America's heroine and her "drive for five" gold medals was one of the signature stories of those Games. Athletics is a minority sport in America but Jones, a confident, skilled communicator and photogenic, was on the threshold of breaking through to a mainstream audience, becoming the first Afro-American to appear on the cover of Vogue in the history of the glossy fashion magazine. Stalked by allegations and rumour during last summer's Olympics in Athens, her Olympics ended in tears when she - symbolically and actually - failed to pass on the baton in the relay sprint.
To stand in the crazed tunnel underneath the stadium that night as the US media gleefully, it seemed, fed on the downfall of Jones, was a disquieting experience. The backlash against Jones was particularly vitriolic and some of the hysterical terms used to describe her alleged misconduct have been the stuff of Salem, one US commentator even describing her as " a witch that needs hunting".
Whether Jones will be investigated as thoroughly as Montgomery, her former partner, remains to be seen. Either way, she might as well wear Nathaniel Hawthorne's scarlet letter, her appearance potential vanished and what once looked like an assured post-athletic life with a lucrative media organisation job surely gone.
Wada's principal job has been to restore some moral order and sanity to an athletics world that is effectively in delirium tremens right now. Other sports, most notably baseball where slugging the bat requires brute strength, have had their scandals.
The fear is that it will happen in the GAA sooner or later. Gaelic games, are, of course, amateur, but this is not the only reason the GAA and Wada seem such unlikely bedfellows. The arbitrary testing procedure is designed to expose all manners of chemical abuse, be it for performance enhancement or recreation. But the mere notion of drugs flies in the face of the prevailing culture.
This is the GAA, whose top-level athletes are probably the most abstemious 20-something men left in the western world. By their own admission, they live almost perversely boring lives. And they also live to a very serious ethical and collective code. It may be the thing for hipsters all over Ireland to be guzzling pills for thrills but among serious GAA teams, that behaviour just wouldn't be tolerated. It would be a breach, a compromise of what they stand and train for.
And although it is fashionable to state that cocaine is the drug of choice in modern Ireland, that is definitely not the case in the GAA dressingroom. You may be certain that any flecks of white powder on the county star's jacket at the annual dinner dance is evidence only that he went a bit wild with the salt cellar on the Salmon Supreme. As for marijuana, well, in the burgeoning corpus of GAA county stars there might well be one or two lads who like to relive their collegiate days by flicking on MTV and puffing the magic dragon. But it is doubtful that they feature in All-Ireland finals.
As for the argument that GAA players may be tempted to use supplements to boost their body strength, it is hard to imagine it, for one simple reason. The wonderful contradiction about the GAA is that although teams play in front of crowds from 30,000 to 80,000 all summer long, the scene is intensely local. Only 44 GAA players a year have been (randomly) tested in the last two years. If one of those players tested positive for some strain of steroids, he wouldn't be regarded so much as an eternal cheat, the fate that awaits Montgomery. No, his fate would be more intimate and severe than that. He would have to walk around his home town, among his work colleagues and the locals in his pub feeling like a complete miscreant.
The trick about being an exceptional GAA player is that you must be deadly serious about it without ever sounding or behaving too serious. To get caught swallowing illegal vitamin shakes could be interpreted as getting too big for your boots. You would run the risk of being exposed not as a drugs cheat but infinitely worse, as a gobshite.
The point is that the GAA remains, thankfully, spiritually and culturally removed from the sort of problems that make Wada so necessary in sport today.
Of course, the random testing should continue and will probably increase in coming seasons. But it is mostly about appearances and ticking off boxes. The GAA may have many faults but it is, at heart, a simple and unpolluted old soul. In fact, maybe the good people at Wada, world weary and cynical after years of trying to keep account of sly and ingenious methods of cheating to win, could use a few complimentary tickets for next year's All-Ireland finals. It would remind them what sport is all about.
