Corinth and Olympia.
Journal: British Journal of Sports Medicine (1989)

Summer heat.Sip the iced drink.Shift the sunshade.Switch on.Cricket?Rugger?It's all the same Test Match defeat.Tennis?Where on earth is Britain's return on its enormous coaching investment?Is the eternal promise of comers, who never arrive, all we get for our £0.45strawberry at Wimbledon?Athletics?Fading heroes flail alike against clocks biological and electronic.Where's our depth in field events?How many women are world top ten ranked compared with a decade ago?Another coaching: fail- ure or what?Switch off and scan the journals.As we give up the unequal struggle against the small screen's glare, another midsummer nightmare flickers into the vacant mind -the Dubin Inquiry.The Ben Johnson revelations cut deeply into one event in one sport, but surely taint the rest in passing.Top athletes, coaches and sports doctors alike stand condemned.Any optimist pretending that his country is dopeless must surely now remove his blinkers, whatever the whitewash of other inquiries stifled by the fear of libel.There has been too much gov- erning body ambivalence, even in Britain, towards the support of doctors who speak out against doping.Administrators too often emulate the ostrich and hope drugs will disappear.The constant upping of Olympic entry standards to anabolic levels means that sport officials have defacto set the pace of doping.Is the Corinthian ideal an illusion in top sport?With the prostitution of the Olympic ideal and the spurious redefinition of 'amateur' -as, in effect, those whose unlimited earnings must be handled by their governing bodies so that they can also take their cut -commercialism may have made the final cut from Corinthian values.'Sports Medicine' is central to these considerations.We have to look at different levels of sports medicine services.Where do elite and mass provision overlap?Do we owe a common basic level of universal care upon which governing bodies must themselves commission their own specific extras and if so, at whose expense?A consequence of governmental non- recognition of sports medicine over the years is that there are simply not enough specialist resources available to satisfy the basic needs of every sport.Are there no medical responsibilities incumbent upon governments who sponsor a policy of 'Sport for All'?The dilemma in Britain is that we are years behind the rest of Europe in the recognition of, and hence provision for, sports medicine and there is yet another Health Service crisis.Distinction is made by today's hospital managers 'between sports medicine and NHS commitments' and criteria are laid down that services are to be 'financially viable'.Does this mean that our few sports clinics will be squeezed out of existence unless some 'spon- sor' supports them?This undermines the development of expertise which is accumulated by those few clinicians whose reputations attract a wide range of clinical and geographical referrals.Few would be confident, with even BASM's courses less than fifteen years old, that there is enough skill yet to delegate all sports medical care to each doctor or hospital unit - though that is surely an eventual aim.The need for a government recognized national centre for sports medicine is becoming desperate for several reasons, which include:(1) The burden of sports injuries to the NHS, sickness benefit payments and industry: any improvement in care would be economical.