Alcoholic indulgence was once part of the fabric of sport – no longer

Reports of 16 year-old South African boys taking steroids in order to bulk up and improve their chance of a career in professional rugby are depressing, indeed all the more so because they are not surprising.

We know from many sports, notably cycling, athletics and swimming, of the illegitimate lengths to which people will go to improve their performance, often urged to do so by coaches more concerned with success as represented by medals than with the long-term risk to their charges’ health. We know too that the rogue chemists are often a step or two ahead of the testers. Moreover we are not greatly surprised when we learn even of state-sponsored cheating.

At the same time our judgement of what is a permissible stimulant has become more severe. Jockeys for instance may now be breathalysed to check whether they are alcohol-free. This takes us some way from the days when a session in a Turkish bath in order to make the desired weight might be followed by a restorative snifter. As Jack Leach, then a long-retired jockey who wrote an always entertaining newspaper column in, as I remember, The Observer, remarked that the session in the bath made him feel a new man, and he would reward the new man with a glass or two of champagne.

Alcohol and sport still go together of course, but mostly only in sponsorship and advertising now. It’s a generation and more since even darts players and snooker players were forbidden alcoholic refreshment, if at first only in televised matches on the ground that seeing them take a nip of the hard stuff or a swig of beer was quite unsuitable when children might be watching.

Cricket and liquor used to go together like ham-and-eggs , even if some of the best tales are apocryphal. One such was the exchange between the magisterial Yorkshire captain, Lord Hawke and his talented but wayward slow left-hander, Bobby Peel, which went something like this: “Peel, you were disgracefully drunk on the field yesterday”, to which Peel, remarking that he had taken a bundle of wickets , replied “if I can bowl like that, happen your Lordship should get me drunk every match”.

There are other better attested stories, one of which has the England captain, Wally Hammond, downing a couple of large pink gins as England slumped to 30 something for 3 against Australia at Lord’s and then striding to the wicket to make a double century.

It is certainly true that Arthur Carr, the Nottinghamshire and (briefly) England captain, believed that fast bowlers needed beer if they were to give their best, arranging therefore that after a morning session in the field a bucket of beer should be waiting for Larwood and Voce to be downed during the lunch break. Carr himself, a rich man whose father was Chairman of the News of the World, was fond of a drink or several himself. Once when it was raining at Old Trafford, he told his senior pro that he was off to the Midland Hotel, adding, “ring me, Frank, if there’s going to be any play”. “Well,” Frank told me more than thirty years later, “the sun came out and the umpires said play would start at four o’clock. So I rang the Midland, but, soon as I heard his voice, Allan, I knew it was no good. So I just said, ‘no play today, skipper, and we fielded the twelfth man.” These days, I suppose, the tabloids would have got hold of the story: “Carr’s drunk shame” in banner headlines.

Football and rugby used to be awash in liquor. Everyone has, or used to have, a George Best story, but his case was only an extreme one. Back in the Sixties a barman in The Chelsea Potter in the King’s Road told me that Chelsea’s erratic home form could be explained by the hours the players had spent in that pub before a match and the number of pints they had downed. He may have been lying, but what he said was quite credible.

I suppose that the difference between such stories of alcoholic indulgence and today’s reports of drug or steroid abuse is that on the whole the drinkers weren’t seeking an unfair advantage, even if in some cases a glass or two might steady the nerves or hand. Booze was part of everyday life in sport, business and politics, and wasn’t frowned on as it is by today’s new Puritans.

What is so depressing about today’s drug-taking in sport is first the sneakiness, the illicit attempt to get one up on the competition. This is dishonest in itself and breeds further dishonesty, when it is denied and lies are told. Furthermore, the innocent are tainted by association, as the case of Mo Farah demonstrates. On the one hand he is a marvellous athlete whose performances, especially in the London Olympics delighted millions and made him a national hero. Today, even though he has never failed a drug-test, his association with his now disgraced coach Alberto Salazar, and his long-enduring loyalty to him, have cast a dark shadow over his marvellous career.

Drug-taking destroys people’s faith in the honesty of sports they love. When drugs are administered by team doctors or managers, one can only see this as contemptible corruption, while the thought of teenagers being so stupid as to seek to enhance their power by steroid abuse is as sad as it is deplorable .