Funny how failing a drugs test makes even the most innocent of actions look suspicious. When Mamadou Sakho scored for Liverpool in the Merseyside derby on Wednesday the first thing the defender did was make a beeline for Kolo Touré on the Anfield bench.
The pair appear to be good friends, so Sakho must know all about Touré’s six-month ban for taking what he claimed were his wife’s slimming pills while with Manchester City five years ago. The unconfirmed suggestion at the moment is that Uefa’s drug-testing unit has found traces of something similar in Sakho’s system, which while not amounting to a performance-enhancing doping crime, is still viewed as a serious matter by the football authorities and could lead to a lengthy ban.
It may be that Sakho, like Touré before him, has been more of a silly boy than an out-and-out cheat, but even if football does not have the dark side of many other sports with reputations tainted by drugs, the game is right to police performers as strictly as possible and enforce meaningful penalties for anyone caught using proscribed substances or medications.
Football generally gets an easier ride than most sports over drugs because it is neither a power nor an endurance sport. It is not readily apparent what sort of preparation would enhance performance without being easy to detect.
Footballers have no need of extra muscle mass like rugby players or weightlifters, nor do they need to keep going for hours like cyclists. That does not diminish the need for vigilance, however, and though Arsène Wenger’s warnings about doping within the game a few months ago stopped short of pointing the finger at anyone in particular, no sport can afford to be complacent when advances in medicine and technology often allow athletes to stay one step ahead of the testers.
Even if footballers only test positive for slimming pills and the occasional steroid‑based medication they should have checked before using, it is better for any sport to have some participants falling foul of the procedures than none. The sport that never throws up any positive drugs tests does not have nothing to worry about, it probably has more than most.
At least the cases of Touré and Sakho show the authorities are on their guard and willing to test and report leading figures in the game. It does not appear football has the sort of guilty secret or murky underworld beneath its surface that leads to such uncomfortable questions for other sports, but it is as well not to take anything for granted.
Right now one of Liverpool’s most popular players has some explaining to do, which is exactly as it should be.
