Although caught with his steroids down, de Villiers is no cheat
PIETER de Villiers was sick as a small hospital that night and when he woke up the next day he could barely remember what had happened.
What happened was that he and his Stade Francais team mates went out for a feed of drink after beating Harlequins last December and somewhere along the line he ended up with a cocktail of cocaine and ecstasy coursing through his bloodstream.
A random test on December 18 picked up traces of the drugs and the South African-born French rugby player is now facing a mandatory two-year ban.
"I might have fallen into a trap," he said last week, "but I have never knowingly taken cocaine or ecstasy."
Ah yes, "knowingly." No statement by any athlete caught with his or her steroids down is complete without the knowingly protocol. And these days it is met only with knowing nods of disbelief from all but the incurably innocent.
De Villiers would have played against England next weekend but at 30, his international career may be over.
If he was playing for Australia he might have had a better chance of getting away with it. In March 2001 the Australian wing Ben Tune took the banned drug Probenecid. Tune claimed he used it for a gash on his knee that was not responding to antibiotics.
Probenecid has powerful healing properties when used in conjunction with antibiotics. It is primarily used by power athletes as a masking agent for anabolic steroids. His medical advisers claim to have prescribed it and subsequently informed the Australian Sport Drug Agency. He played two Super 12 games before ASDA contacted the Australian Rugby Union.
Under agreed rules the ARU should have informed the International Rugby Board within 14 days. They remained silent until a Brisbane newspaper broke the story 17 months later, in August 2002. The ARU hastily set up a tribunal to investigate the matter - Tune was cleared. There were, they stated, "exceptional circumstances." He had not used the drug for the purpose of enhancing sporting performance.
It is a fundamental rule of modern sport that every athlete is personally responsible for every substance found in his or her body.
Unless of course your beer is spiked, as de Villiers seemed to be claiming last Wednesday. He had his back turned, or he had just popped out to the jacks, when some bad person with money to burn on coke and E dropped it into his glass. One assumes this would have produced some class of a chemical reaction, or at least a different taste, but he didn't seem to notice. Maybe it just put a good head on his pint.
Anyway, that excuse won't stand up. Perhaps he'd be better off putting up no excuse at all. As in, 'Yes, I took cocaine and ecstasy, so what? These are not performance-enhancing drugs - if anything they are performance-disabling drugs. I used them socially and what I do in my private life is none of your business.'
In 1998 Ronnie O'Sullivan was stripped of the Irish Masters title he had won in March of that year and forced to hand back his prize money. He had tested positive for cannabis in a random test conducted during the tournament. Naturally no one argued that he had taken it to enhance his performance at the table.
There is a clear distinction between drugs designed for social use and the bewildering array of steroids, blood-boosters and masking agents that are currently pandemic in global sport.
Those who take the latter are cheats, those who take the former are not. They should not be punished by governing bodies in the same way. In fact the likes of de Villiers and O'Sullivan should not be punished at all. It is nobody's business what they do, or what they consume, in their private lives.
The IRB, the World Snooker Association and other sporting organisations might argue that they cannot tolerate their members using substances deemed illegal under common law. But what if O'Sullivan had smoked a few joints while playing a tournament in Amsterdam? In that city he would have been legally entitled to do so.
And if it's a matter of a player being punished for breaking the law, will he also be suspended if he is convicted of breaking other laws, for example drink-driving? Or assault or larceny or domestic violence?
Last week also the governing body for world athletics, the IAAF, offered one of its most notorious drugs cheats a reprieve. If Charlie Francis, former coach to the outlawed Ben Johnson, made a statement renouncing all chemical enhancers, he would be allowed coach athletes again. Francis has openly and repeatedly campaigned for the use of go-faster drugs since Johnson was famously exposed at the Seoul Olympics in 1988.
Suitably unembarrassed he duly stated that he had never "encouraged nor condoned the taking of banned performance-enhancing substances" - and with one leap he was back. In the meantime anyway he had been clandestinely coaching Marion Jones and Tim Montgomery, the fastest man and woman in the world.
Athletics is a sport in disgrace, cycling too. Performance-enhancers are by all accounts becoming widespread in rugby and football. This is a problem specific to sport. The cheats are in the changing rooms - not in the night clubs where de Villiers was no more guilty than much of the rest of modern society.
