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“We’ve got armadillos in our trousers. It’s really quite frightening.”
Audience numbers for the men’s ski jumping at the Winter Olympics are set to zing like the metal detector on Derek Smalls’s foil-wrapped cucumber in This Is Spinal Tap after reports that jumpers may be injecting something called hyaluronic acid to enlarge their penises.
There are reports of skiers undergoing penis enlargements to give them a boost in the air.Credit: Simon Letch
Rock and roll! Milan-Cortina, on the other hand, would rather not be known as the Enhanced Games.
No joke. Germany’s Bild newspaper has reported the possibility of penis enlargements, which would benefit jumpers by allowing them bigger suits. A cheating scandal had already enveloped ski jumping, with Norway, an alpha country in the sport, found guilty of enlarging its jumpers’ suits in the crotch area. The more fabric, the more the suit can act like a spinnaker, enabling the jumper to float further. A study in the journal Frontiers has calculated that a two-centimetre addition to the size of a ski suit can mean nearly six extra metres in the jump distance. A bigger crotch can mean a gold medal, and the suit sizes are individually tailored to the size of a competitor’s dimensions.
The World Anti-Doping Authority’s director-general Olivier Niggli said, “We don’t do other means of enhancing performance, but our list committee would certainly look into whether this would fall into this category.” Mathias Hafele, from the International Ski and Snowboard Federation (FIS), told Bild, “We are already working behind the scenes on methods to improve this complex issue.” WADA’s president, Witold Banka, said, “I’m certainly going to look at it.”
So are millions of viewers around the world, Witold.
World Anti-Doping Agency president Witold Banka.Credit: Getty Images
Men’s ski jumping events can be seen exclusively on Monday, Tuesday, Friday, Saturday and Monday week on the Nine Network, owner of this masthead.
An armadillo in the trousers would not be the first thing that comes to mind in the pursuit of Olympic glory, but then it’s hard to un-see the slow motion of the 1988 Summer Olympics 100 men’s metres final when Linford Christie, Calvin Smith and others appeared to have taken hyaluronic acid injections. If the fastest men in the world shared a common characteristic, there had to be something in it, as counter-instinctual as it seemed. You would think it would be a disadvantage, as with the unfortunate French pole vaulter Anthony Ammirati at the 2024 Paris Olympics with his eye-catching “too much pole, not enough vault” moment. But ski jumping has its own logic.
The Norwegian scandal was serious and verified. Coaching staff were filmed adding extra stitches to the crotches of their men’s suits. The coaches were sanctioned, though the skiers, who could not be proved to have knowledge of the shenanigans, were unpunished. There is a bad look around ski jumping generally right now, and not just as a fashion statement.
How harmful is hyaluronic acid if injected into the penis? There has been little research on the issue, but it raises the question of how much pain an Olympic athlete is prepared to undergo, and how far they will push the rules of ethics and the natural order. The prospect of injections of a natural sponge-like substance that can hold up to 1000 times its weight in water is, however, a reminder of how far athletes will go to cheat their way to an Olympic medal.
Some of my personal favourites include the Spanish intellectual disability team who won gold at the Sydney 2000 Paralympics, only for 10 of the 12 team members to be found faking their disabilities. There was the American marathon runner Fred Lorz, who, in the 1904 St Louis Olympics, crossed the line in first place and claimed the gold medal until it was discovered he had hitched a ride in a car for the middle 11 miles of the race. The first-ever Olympic doping disqualification was for the Swedish pentathlete Hans-Gunnar Liljenwall, who in 1968 drank two beers to calm himself down for the shooting event.
The USSR invented multiple ways of cheating, none more blatant than pentathlete Boris Onischenko’s epee in the fencing segment in the 1976 Montreal Games, when he could register fake hits by pushing a button that closed an electrical circuit whether he touched his target or not. There was Tonya Harding taking out her rival Nancy Kerrigan via her ex-husband Jeff Gillooly and a baton to the kneecap before the 1994 Games in Lillehammer. There have been the systematic state doping programs and organised corruption among boxing judges.
The history of the modern Olympics has a shadow history of cheating, and cynicism is so deeply entrenched that it has given birth to the depressing spectre of an Enhanced Games. Presumably doping is the only sanctioned form of cheating in that miserable spectacle, and hopping a ride for the marathon is still outside the rules.
But for all the research I have done on this issue, there has never been a proven case of penis enlargement to obtain a competitive advantage.
Reassuringly, the Bild report had not found that any of the ski jumpers who are set to compete in Milan-Cortina had actually injected the hyaluronic acid or inserted any cucumbers. It remains a matter of speculation and suspicion. Officials – and now unprecedented numbers of spectators – will be watching very, very closely.
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Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: www.smh.com.au
