Commonwealth advisers seek to stamp out drug taking in sport

Before running out on to a dry and dusty football pitch in Nampula, Mozambique’s third largest city, Aquimo Rachide and his teammates were regularly given a pill from their elderly masseur.

All they were ever told about this pill, which swiftly became a natural part of their preparation for matches, was that it would “invigorate them while they were playing”.

Mr Rachide, now 52, recalls that during games when he took this drug, called lipo, he had much more energy than usual. Yet during the days which followed these matches extreme tiredness crept in as his body felt increasingly weak.

“As soon as I had taken the pill I felt like Superman, but a few hours after the game finished I felt drastically different to the point where I could hardly move.

“Looking back it seems obvious, but at the time I didn’t link the drugs to how I was feeling.”

During the four years which Mr Rachide took the drug, between the ages of 23 to 28, his body grew more and more frail as his reliance on these pills failed to replace a lack of food in his diet.

Dangers of drugs

Twenty years later, Mr Rachide is a physical education teacher in Maputo, which involves acting as a role model, advising young people on the dangers of drugs. He also works with Joel Libombo, a Commonwealth adviser on anti-doping in Southern Africa.

Previously Mozambique’s Minister of Sport, Mr Libombo is one of four Commonwealth experts that have been placed in the Caribbean, East Africa, the Pacific, and Southern Africa to provide leadership and guidance in the development of anti-doping programmes.

Mr Libombo, who is based in Mozambique and covers ten Southern African countries, works with the Regional Anti-Doping Organization (RADO), set up two years ago.

“The establishment of Regional Anti-Doping Organizations in under-served areas of the world is one of the key strategies for ridding sport of doping and for levelling the playing field for all athletes worldwide,” said David Howman, Director-General of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA).

RADOs’ objectives include developing and implementing an Education Strategy for the region as well as establishing anti-doping rules and regulations. With both of these goals they are also providing assistance to individual countries, in order to ensure these plans are implemented.

Winning at any price

“The spirit of wanting to win at any price and the spirit wanting to sell products at any cost forces athletes, officials and coaches to find illegal ways to develop results,” observes Mr Libombo. “It is through education that these attitudes can be stamped out and the bad effects of drugs can be understood.”

Alongside promoting an anti-doping code across Southern Africa, Mr Libombo is also working with role models, like Mr Rachide, to explain the negative impact of drugs to athletes.

“These role models are present at the youth games and other sporting events to show young people why they should not use drugs, using personal and emotive examples of their experiences or those of other athletes.”

Each of the Commonwealth’s regional advisers has adopted a number of different approaches to addressing drugs in sports in their respective regions.

In the Caribbean, information on drugs is passed on to athletes at major sporting events including CARIFTA – the annual regional Under-19 track and field games - and the Cricket World Cup. Computer quiz games that ask true or false questions to athletes as well as easily accessible literature are among the methods used to effectively disseminate information.

Throughout East Africa, drama, poetry and music in schools are all used to dispel ignorance of many young people. One such drama focuses on a school athletics relay team where one of the athletes takes legal drugs to help an ailment without knowing it is prohibited. The play then explores the effect of this drug-taking on the individual as well as his teammates. After the drama has been acted out by the students, the floor is opened up to questions so any lack of awareness is quashed.

Peer education is also seen as a positive move, as they tend to “talk at their level and communicate better than older generations,” explains Valerie Onyango, the Commonwealth’s East Africa regional adviser.

As the world’s greatest athletes gather in Beijing this month to compete at the Olympic Games, Professor Andrew Pipe, Director of the Prevention and Rehabilitation Centre at the University of Ottawa’s Heart Institute, in Canada, reflects that much progress has been made in the past decade regarding a more consistent global approach towards drug taking in sport.

"Many of us see sport as an important cultural, educational and social force," adds Professor Pipe, who has served on WADA's 'List committee' - which determines prohibited drugs - over the past 15 years. "We need to ensure that sport remains a competition between humans, and not between laboratory scientists and pharmacologists. We need to maintain the public’s trust in the integrity of sport.

"It is through continued education of athletes, which can be just as powerful a deterrent as drug testing, that doping in sport will be successfully addressed."

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