BUSINESS OF SPORT/Daire Whelan: Leinster GAA Playstation Summer Camps, FAI Pepsi Summer Schools, McDonald's GAA Catch & Kick and Lift & Strike Programmes, SuperValu Buntús School Sports Initiative. Spot a link? It's not summer or schools. It's the increased commercialisation of kids' sport in Ireland.

Playing sport at underage level, you can't lift a hurley these days before having a Big Mac, you can't take a penalty without quenching your thirst for a Pepsi, you can't play Gaelic football in Leinster without sitting down to exercise your thumbs on a Playstation and you have to do your shopping in SuperValu to maintain a healthy lifestyle.

While the Minister for Sport, John O'Donoghue, proclaims in speeches at awards ceremonies and openings just how much the Government has spent on sport, his speeches will state: "The provision for the development of new sporting infrastructure and to support sporting programmes in the 2004 Estimates is approximately € 110 million, which represents a multiple of the funding available when we first assumed office in 1997."

Or else: "The provision for the development of new sporting infrastructure and to support sporting programmes in the 2004 Estimates is approximately € 110 million, which includes over € 30 million for the Irish Sports Council, in comparison to just over € 13 million a few years ago."

Or maybe even: "I am pleased to have been able to support the Irish Sports Council in this work through increased annual funding from just over € 13 million in 1999 to € 30.75 million for this year."

Which all prompts the question: why are sports bodies so desperately in need of sponsorship for underage projects?

We're being told nearly 20 per cent of Irish children are clinically overweight and yet our sports organisations are forced to bring on board, and publicly endorse, through association, fast-food and computer-game sponsorship of our youth sports programmes.

Last week, this column highlighted the fact only €500,000 was spent on third-level sports scholarship programmes, and despite the Government's declarations of their investment in sport, the reality is McDonald's provide balls, hurls, sliotars, cones, bibs, pumps, kit bags and manuals, while SuperValu will supply equipment and teaching aids - the basics for any sporting culture to exist.

But shouldn't we be wary of corporate intentions? As Tom Senger, a former Coca Cola employee and now advertising executive in America, revealed: "Soft drink manufacturers, as well as most packaged-food companies, realise that one of the best ways to stay relevant to parents and young consumers alike is through corporate philanthropy."

Are we in danger of corporatising even the sport of our children?

In the US it's already well-established practice. Things have gone so far there, a high-school senior, Mike Cameron, was suspended for wearing a Pepsi shirt in defiance of his high school's support of Coke.

In 1996, students at the University of Wisconsin discovered an agreement between their college and Reebok contained a clause stating, ". . . the university will not issue any official statement that disparages Reebok. Additionally, the university will take necessary steps to address any remark by any university employee, agent, or representative that disparages Reebok."

In Ireland, the practice of corporate sponsorship of sport at juvenile level has now found its feet and unless the Government counters it with serious investment, it will continue to grow and be more pervasive in our children's sporting lives.

And when they find they don't want to play anymore because of obesity and a sedentary lifestyle, there's always the Hamburger University that they can attend to get a career where more than 65,000 managers in McDonald's restaurants have graduated and where translators and electronic equipment enable professors to teach and communicate in 22 languages at one time.

It's the future, folks, unless you can believe Naomi Klein, who argues in No Logo: "At this point in our history the argument against transforming education into a brand-extension exercise is much the same as the one for national parks and nature reserves: these quasi-sacred spaces remind us that unbranded space is still possible."

Finger of suspicion pointed at past sporting achievements

Last Thursday, celebrations were held marking the 50th anniversary of Roger Bannister's achievement of running the mile for the first time under four minutes.

The Oxford College student and future neurosurgeon succeeded where so many thought it was impossible. Indeed many scientists believed the human body could not withstand the type of pressure and exertion entailed in running the mile in less than four minutes.

But, now, in light of the clouds of doubt overhanging modern sport in the context of drug taking, it has been revealed that a Dr Herbert Berger, an expert on drug addiction, had told a medical conference in New York in 1957 that an amphetamine, then known as Benzedrine, might have been helping athletes succeed where many thought it was impossible.

In the time between Bannister's record and Berger's speech, the sub-four-minute mile was achieved another 17 times by runners from 12 countries. Predictably, Berger's claims were rubbished as "ridiculous", "silly", "absurd" and "crazy".

However, our notions of sport being a drug-free culture back then with only true sportsmanship and competitiveness giving athletes the edge, are being cast into doubt. It has emerged amphetamines were, in fact, being used by athletes in the United States, Canada and Australia.

Major Canadian football teams were supposedly using "pep pills" and the Journal of the American Medical Association reported in October 1958: "The controversy over pep pills is not confined to the United States. It is keeping doctors and athletes talking in Japan, Germany, Mexico, Sweden and other nations."

There were also reports that used hypodermic needles and empty ampoules had turned up in locker-rooms during the 1952 Winter Olympics in Oslo and even some European track meets of the 1920s and 1930s had been awash with drugs of various kinds.

With the BALCO trial continuing apace and WADA's war on drugs in sport an ongoing battle, John Hoberman, author of Testosterone Dreams: Rejuvenation, Aphrodisia, Doping reminds us this has not just been a recent phenomenon driven by money and greed: "We would do well to recognise that our current doping crisis in sport is at bottom a thinly disguised referendum on the future of the human enhancements - operations, hormones and more - that are proliferating all around us."