Drugs And Sport Stars: A Different Approach

It would be easy to assume that the only drugs sportsmen take these days are performance-enhancing ones. Just look at Lance Armstrong, you may say.

The tragic case of Tom Maynard shows how wrong this assumption can be.

Wrong, yet understandable. In this era of highly-regimented, professional sport, one can sometimes form the impression that all sportsmen are automatons, programmed to go from gym to training ground to playing field and back round again, with only one thought in mind: to win at all costs.

Which right-minded competitors would risk this by putting recreational drugs into their body?

But these are people, not robots, many of them very young, too, prone to exactly the same temptations as anyone else.

Maynard, it turns out - despite the promise of a brilliant England career in the offing - had found the lure of the shadier side of London life too much to resist. The coroner suggested he had been taking cocaine and ecstasy, perhaps on a regular basis, for some time.

His death was a dreadful loss for everyone - family, friends, teammates and all those who love English cricket.

So the Professional Cricketers' Association is to be commended for its enlightened reaction.

The PCA is recommending that any player found to have taken a recreational drug would be offered counselling and support in the first instance, with suspensions only applied to repeat offenders. This must surely be the right approach.

"The critical thing," said Angus Porter, the PCAs chief executive, "is that the use of recreational drugs out of competition needs to be thought of very differently from performance-enhancing. The purpose of the taker is different - they are not cheating and it is too easy for people to confuse this."

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Drugs And Sport Stars: A Different Approach