What's wrong with sportsmen smoking pot?

So what if Michael Phelps smokes marijuana?

Last year, the 23-year-old winner of 14 Olympic gold medals, with seven world records in swimming, was at a party where he used a bong -- a pipe typically used for smoking marijuana -- and someone took a photo. Months later, British tabloid News of the World slammed Michael's photo on its pages (“the astonishing picture which could destroy the career of the greatest competitor in Olympic history”) and now, Phelps has been banned for three months by USA Swimming and Kellogg’s has announced to stop its endorsement contract.

While I’m not a huge fan of smoking pot (the one time I tried it, my face turned pale and I had to throw up, after falling off the stairs, which didn’t make much of an impression on the girl I had a crush on) I can’t seem to grasp what the fuss is all about. Considering that marijuana is not exactly a performance-enhancing drug, Phelps was just trying to have some fun with his friends, at a time when he didn’t have to perform at a swimming competition.

“Welcome to the guilt-inducing, paranoia-fostering reality that faces elite professional sportsmen and women across the world today,” writes Tim Black, a senior writer at Spiked. Black wasn’t writing about Phelps, but about the introduction by the World Anti-Doping Association of its so-called “whereabouts” system, that dictates that a selection of high-level athletes, soccer players, tennis players and any other sportspeople “make themselves available to drug testers for one hour every day between 6am and 11pm, three months in advance. This includes any holiday periods.”

So far, tennis star Rafael Nadal has become an outspoken critic of the new WADA’s rules. And a group of 65 Belgian cyclists, footballers and volleyball players have even asked the Belgian Council of State High Court to rule on the “whereabouts” system on the basis that it is in breach of the European Union’s privacy law.

I applaud these attempts as they describe, in Black’s words, "a resistance to being treated as public property, to having your life permanently subject to the potential scrutiny of officialdom."

On the Ode site, I wrote before about what using drugs in sport says about society. “In modern society, athletes have become heroes. Sports stars aren’t so much role models for society as reflections of it, albeit reflections with exceptional talent. [...] Ultimately they are part of the same achievement-oriented society we are, in which the use of stimulants has become normal. The appropriate response is not moral outrage, but a relaxing of the enormous pressure we put on them: Just do your best, kid. That’s all you can do.”

In the meantime, Michael Phelps was quick to come with a public statement to limit the damage of the photo. He said: “I acted in a youthful and inappropriate way, not in a manner that people have come to expect from me. For this, I am sorry. I promise my fans and the public -- it will not happen again.”

We get it, Michael, thanks, but I wish for him there was no need to make such promises. Who do his “fans and the public” -- and the sports authorities -- think they are for prohibiting him to smoke some marijuana in a slack time? Give the guy a bong -- er, a break.