Durban - KwaZulu-Natal Athletics president Sello Mokoena has supported a call for the scrapping of records of athletes who are under suspicion for doping, or are known to have cheated.
The call was made by UK Athletics in the wake of the doping crisis that is gripping Russian athletics.
The Russian team has been banned from this year’s Olympics amid widespread allegations that its athletes were using illegal performance-enhancing substances.
The governing body for British athletics has published “A Manifesto for Clean Athletics”, calling for tough measures to clean up the sport.
UK Athletics chairman, Ed Warner, said: “Greater transparency, tougher sanctions, longer bans – and even resetting the clock on world records for a new era – we should be open to do whatever it takes to restore credibility in the sport.”
Mokoena, in a statement last week, welcomed the UK Athletics call for action, but insisted it must be “done scientifically, using algorithms and experienced statisticians”.
He also said more should be done to educate athletes so they were more careful when taking supplements and medicines, and so that they fully understood the consequences should they be caught doping.
He said this would require commitment from everyone involved in athletics, including administrative bodies, sponsors, event organisers and the athletes themselves.
He said athletics was losing credibility in the public eye, and the average person who now watched athletics was 55-years-old, which was indicative of a sport in decline.
He stressed doping was an international problem and South Africa was not immune to it.
“One positive test is one too many. All athletes cite mitigating factors, chief amongst them being ignorance. This points to the need for education for both coaches and athletes,” Mokoena said.
Former chief executive of the South African Institute for Drug Free Sport, Daphne Bradbury, believes few sports have not been tainted by doping.
“It is doubtful doping will ever be completely eradicated. Although it takes place to a much greater extent in certain sports, there are very few sports codes that can boast none of its athletes has ever taken a performance-enhancing substance, whether to improve performance, eradicate pain or speed up healing.”
Bradbury, who was the chief executive of the institute from 2000-07, said the doping industry was evolving and finding new ways to beat drug tests.
“But setting the bar lower with the scrapping of dubious world records would probably go some way to incentivise clean athletes and deter some of the dopers.”
She said the high cost of laboratory testing was a hurdle to stamping out the problem.
Olympic 800m silver medalist, Hezekiél Sepeng, is perhaps the most famous South African athlete to be banned for doping.
He was barred from competition from May 2005 to May 2007 after a positive test for nandrolone.
And last month, mountain-biker Rourke Croeser was provisionally suspended by Cycling South Africa after his first sample tested positive for a performance-enhancing substance.
Daily News