AH, THIS sporting year! And what a year it has been! Just like last year, but ever so slightly different.

I suppose if there is a special theme running through sporting activities during 1994, it has been the emergence of drugs and money as intrinsic elements in the great sporting circus. Symbiotic twins, really: Drugs and money.

In normal situations, people make money in order to buy drugs. In sport, people buy drugs in order to make money.

This subtle twist to the proceedings is due to the fact that sport is supposed to aspire to certain ideals of a fair contest, and the best person winning, and all that shit.

However, with the widespread breakdown of Western civilisation, sport is far too financially and politically important to be trusted to innocents who just want a fair fight. Hence drugs, hence money, hence mayhem.

Let us take the Chinese athletes and swimmers, for example. When those three daughters of Satan whizzed past Sonia O’Sullivan a couple of years ago as though she were a rather elderly woman on her way to the shops, there was much innuendo about the fact that they might have been on drugs.

Of course they were on fucking drugs! China is trying to brush up its world image as something other than a totally disgusting shithole whose Government responds to civil disobedience by sending tanks out against children. Such things cannot be left to chance, and Ma Baker’s turtle soup or buffalo blood or whale’s testicle syrup is all my bollocks.

They were on fucking drugs because China is the greatest blossoming bear-pit of capitalism in the universe, the last undiscovered honey-pot for people with an eye on the main chance. The last fucking El Dorado.

That old fascist skunk who runs the International Olympics Committee, Mr. Samaranch, responded to the fact that a dozen Chinese swimmers were found to have been doped up to the eyeballs during the Asian Games by saying that he thought Chinese sport was “clean”. Now there is a sick, twisted, fuck.

But sport needs China, because it needs money, and China needs drugs to have sport, to make money.

Here in the free world, even mediocre British athletes have been found with alarming quantities of narcotics floating around their persons. Well, what a surprise that is! And Linford is still taking the old ginseng, clean as a whistle.

Athletes, boxing, cycling, swimming, have all become a farce in the eyes of Foul Play due to various combinations of chicanery that all add up to one thing: incredible levels of greed.

Television is the great paymaster of this nonsense, the dominating influence. Television means advertising, and the advertising industry is not known for its sense of scruples. In fact you could argue that it is specifically designed to tell lies of absurd proportions.

Dodginess abounds.

In rugby, ridiculous old jossers with public school “educations” are still trying to pretend that theirs is not a professional sport. There is nothing wrong with an amateur ethos as long as there is some semblance of amateurism abroad. Otherwise, it is just bullshit.

Baseball, the quintessential American activity, has more or less ceased to exist, due to a prolonged war between players and their owners over money. Both parties want more of it.

The English Premier League has incredible amounts of money, television money, advertising money, coursing through it, and players who would find it hard to get a game with the Inter Milan Under-16 outfit are taking home five grand a week.

Thus, sacrificial victims must be identified to give the impression that everything is really above board. And so in 1994 they were . . .

Bruce Grobbelaar is accused by the benighted Sun, of all organs, of taking bribes to throw games in which he demonstrably made some world-class saves.

Terry Venables becomes Mr. Wide Boy, investigated for raising money out of pubs that never existed, in streets that never existed, in towns that never were.

Tottenham Hotspur are screwed to the wall, and then reluctantly unscrewed, for practices which have been de rigeur for fifty years or more.

Experienced and intelligent managers are turfed out like juvenile delinquents from a Boy Scouts disco by sick, twisted, fucks, who style themselves “Chairman”.

The lifestyle of Paul Manson is made into a morality tale for our times. One more time with feeling: money and drugs, drugs and money.

Except “Merse” wasn’t spending money on drugs in order to improve his performance or cheat the general public, he was just trying to have a good time. Get well soon, Merse . . .

The Republic’s adventures in international football are fast becoming indistinguishable from a prolonged advertising campaign for all sorts of ludicrous and highly dubious products. But we still love them.

The straightest and noblest sport you will probably find as 1994 crawls into 1995 is horse-racing, notorious for its unsavoury image, but remarkable for its continued capacity to produce the best man and the best horse in the right place, at the winning post, for the most part without the assistance of prohibited substances, or bolloxology in general.

It was also nice, at year’s end, to see Catherina McKiernan matching Sonya O’Sullivan’s achievement earlier in the year by battling through the muck to become the European Cross-Country Champion.

That woman is not taking drugs, and can’t be making too much money.

Perhaps she should be. Roll on 1995 . . .