Kate Maltby has a smart response to Simon Barnes’s article on doping:
Constant obsession about drugs takes the magic out of sport. The Tour de France, after all, was created precisely as a superhuman contest that no one was ever expected to endure without boosting their performance artificially – in the good old days, long before doping tests, the athletes were all known to be on cocaine, but people still wondered at and lauded them, because their achievements were so unnatural as to be miraculous. Once we accept that we can’t stop people doping, the less active 99.99% of us might just be content to sit back in our armchairs and watch the sheer spectacle of athletes transgressing the frail limitations of this too too solid flesh.
The Dish 