Death on the Roman road

Let me try to explain, because I cannot condemn him outright. As an athlete, I understand how easy it is for distorted thinking to take you to a place of no return.

This man was a Danish cyclist, who was certainly not alone in believing his only chance of winning, of performing well, was to enhance the effort with drugs. The autopsy on Knud Enemark Jensen's body discovered amphetamines in his system, as well as a drug called Roniacol, a flushing drug that could lower blood pressure. Eventually, it came to light that he had also taken eight pills of another drug, phenylisopropylamine, and 15 pills that combined caffeine with amphetamines. On that cocktail of drugs, he was an accident waiting to happen.

The doctors subsequently agreed that the direct cause of his crash was the heat, not the drugs, but it makes you wonder whether the chemicals inside him exerted their own influence on his body and mind.

Why would an Olympian risk such a thing?
Here is why. Only one in 10,000 individuals in this country is good enough to become an Olympic athlete. Of that élite corps, only a small percentage become the ultimate - a gold medallist.

And yet those individuals have worked 10, 20 years, unceasingly, devotedly, devouringly, for that tantalising prize.

When I rowed at the Olympics, I wanted to win. That six minutes of my life seemed so crucial, it developed an importance beyond reason. It would either be my crowning moment or a moment of despair. I didn't look beyond it. Every second of all four years that had gone before was going to be vindicated, or not, by what happened next. It shouldn't be like that but in the grip of competitive desire that is how an athlete feels.

If they felt less committed, I don't think they'd stand a chance.

I remember my rowing team-mate Matt Pinsent saying to me once that if someone gave him the option of trading in all his world championship victories and all the Olympic medals he had already won, just to guarantee the next Olympic gold, he'd do it. That is how much the next one always matters in the mind of an athlete.

I was one of the lucky ones. I have failed at many things but I never did feel the despair of Olympic failure, nor a sense of hopelessness in competition. But for those people who did, the temptation to seek help by whatever means possible is completely explicable.

As for sport in 1960, there was no drugs ban. Jensen was able, and maybe felt entitled, to seek help where he could, and history suggests that performance enhancers were common in his sport. At least his terrible death helped prompt the debate about athletes taking drugs, and the bans came in within a decade.

A good thing, too. While my understanding of drug cheats is real, I hate what it does to sport. If we didn't try to put the brakes on the cheats, there is no limit to the freaks we could be chemically producing. I assume some athletes are taking drugs now. Perhaps, with modern technology, they think the risks are vastly reduced. Perhaps they are. But there is still the fact that they are destroying, if not their own bodies, the whole concept of sport.

I am grateful for the sake of sport that drug bans exist and there is no free-for-all, whatever some of the libertarians may say. We can see in this picture where free-for-alls may get you - dying by a roadside at the age of 23. I can see now that no sporting moment, however great, is worth this destruction. I could see in my prime that drug abuse was not an option. But if I had been a nearly man, tantalised by a prize I couldn't reach by natural means, and surrounded by a drug-taking culture, would I have been so brave?

I like to think I would, but who knows themselves that well? I certainly don't blame Jensen. I feel very, very sorry for him.

Great Olympic Moments by Steve Redgrave is published by Headline, £20.