A thrilling world athletics championships in Beijing failed to silence growing questions about doping, giving the sport’s new boss Sebastian Coe much to ponder as he heads towards an Olympic year.
While sprinter Usain Bolt led a barrage of superstar performances at the Bird’s Nest stadium, scepticism was also not hard to find following allegations of widespread drug abuse by elite athletes.
Britain’s Coe won a narrow vote to succeed 82-year-old Lamine Diack as president of world body the IAAF, and improving the besmirched image of athletics will be his top priority.
“We are more than a discussion about test tubes, blood and urine,” Coe told reporters on Sunday. “It is ostensibly a clean sport, we have our challenges... and no one would deny that.”
However, after thousands of test results were leaked to media before the championships, the issue of doping was never far away and many of the positive headlines were accompanied by darker questions.
Kenya finished top of the medals table, but they were also the only team to fail doping tests after two of their athletes were caught out by pre-competition controls.
Bolt’s brilliant sprint treble after overcoming injury came at the expense of twice-banned American Justin Gatlin—one of four former doping offenders in the 100m final.
When the Netherlands’ Dafne Schippers ran the fourth fastest 200m in history, adding gold to her 100m silver, she immediately had to deny using chemical enhancement.
And Briton Mo Farah’s unprecedented second straight world distance double came against the backdrop of doping allegations fired at his coach, Alberto Salazar.
Admittedly, doping is a very complex problem but it is up to the authorities to put in systems that would help them stay ahead of the cheating pack.
New headache for Modi
Until a few weeks ago nobody had heard about Hardik Patel, but the 22-year-old is proving to be a headache for none other than Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Patel is at the forefront of a movement pressing for job quotas for members of his “Patidar” community, which he feels has been left behind because of the government’s caste based reservation policy.
Last week, Patel organised a massive protest rally in Ahmedabad, the capital of Modi’s home state of Gujarat, where almost 500,000 members of his community brought the city to a standstill. Nine people died during the rally, most of them shot by the police. Public and private property worth millions was destroyed in the clashes.
Patel is now taking his agitation to the national capital New Delhi where he hopes to rally other communities hit by the reservation policy.
Various governments have struggled to deal with the issue of job quotas, but the fact of the matter is that the sooner Indian gets rid of this system the better it would be. Reservations, if any, should be on the basis of economic status alone, irrespective of what caste someone belongs to.
