It is 14 years since Paula Radcliffe sat in the stands at the World Athletics Championships in Edmonton, Canada, and held up a sign protesting against the decision to allow Olga Yegorova to take part in the 5,000m.
A drug test on the Russian runner had indicated the presence of EPO, a banned blood-boosting substance, but a technicality allowed her to compete in the event – and to take the gold medal. Now we know, thanks to the findings handed by a whistleblower to the media, that Yegorova was just the tip of a very large iceberg.
Not that there was ever much doubt. Dismay, but not surprise, will greet the revelation of the apparent cover-up of widespread cheating among medal-winning track athletes in recent years. Only the terminally naive now imagine that any professional sport relying on physical development is free from the presence of illegal performance-boosting methods, or that governing bodies are invariably enthusiastic in their investigations.
Athletics and cycling are the two sports with the worst reputation for doping. But wherever money and sport are connected, and where physical fitness can make a significant contribution to success, it would be unwise to discount its presence to some degree.
In football, blood-spinning and the muscle-building substance creatine – the latter not actually banned by the World Anti-Doping Agency – were in regular use at certain top Premier League clubs comparatively recently.
Some sports, such as golf, have been slow to recognise the potential danger.
To its credit, cycling – in which doping was long accepted as part of the game – has made considerable efforts to deal with the problem, prompted by the trauma of Lance Armstrong’s downfall. Riders are regularly caught and suspended, indicating the success of the measures but also encouraging a suspicion that other, cleverer competitors are getting away with the use of banned substances via craftier methods, such as micro-dosing.
By comparison, athletics has dragged its heels in the fight against doping. Its task is harder, given the lack of resources and organisation among national federations charged with testing for illegal practices in places such as Kenya and Jamaica, which produced the current stars of distance running and sprinting. But the leak of the IAAF’s cache of concealed blood-test data appears to provide prima facie evidence of a lack of high-level interest in confronting a deep-rooted problem.
The positive side is, at least now, thanks to the whistleblower with access to the IAAF’s records, we have a clearer idea of the scale of the problem as it existed between 2001 to 2012, the years to which the leaked data pertain.
Given the rewards available to successful cheats, the position is unlikely to have improved in the meantime. And the seemingly endless race goes on…
