London – The stadium announcer at the Stade Louis II in Monaco must have a sense of humour. Louis Armstrong’s What A Wonderful World was the song chosen to bring down the curtain on Friday’s Diamond League meeting. It was the first sight of track and field’s elite travelling circus since two of the world’s fastest men, Tyson Gay and Asafa Powell, had failed drugs tests. A ‘wonderful world’ it most certainly is not.
Athletics, and sprinting in particular, is facing a crisis of credibility three weeks from the World Championships in Moscow. Stunning performances too often result in suspicion, not celebration, because the deterrents are not strong enough.
The way the world and Olympic 100 metres champions, Carmelita Jeter and Shelley-Ann Fraser-Pryce, were allowed to bypass all questions about doping in Monte Carlo on Thursday was shameful, but too many athletes sign up to this precarious code of silence.
The raft of recent positive tests is overwhelmingly a good thing for athletics because it shows no-one is above the law, but refusing to talk about it will only help the cheats.
It shows what a sorry state we are in when Gay was roundly applauded for admitting his guilt and taking his punishment ‘like a man’. Gay owned up to testing positive but will still have his ‘B’ sample checked, did not reveal the substance and said he had been “let down” by someone he trusted. There was no gallantry about his statement, only a fervent desire to shirk responsibility.
Powell did the same, protesting his innocence and highlighting the inconsistencies of a system in which the line between beneficial, legal supplements and banned stimulants is often blurred. I remember feeling alarmed when Oscar Pistorius breezily popped “perfectly legal” caffeine pills like sweets in an interview.
But then it’s always somebody else’s fault, isn’t it? As an athlete, you are responsible for what goes into your body, no matter how trusted your inner circle of confidantes. They are not the ones who stand on the podium, after all.
We are going down a murky road if we make all supplements legal, as some have argued, and only draw the line at syringes full of steroids or sophisticated blood doping. It may seem arbitrary to say vitamin C tablets are OK but a non-invasive testosterone massage cream is not, but the rules must be as strict as possible. We want to see honest athletes pushing their bodies to the limit of human possibility, not chemically-engineered Frankenstein monsters settling down in their blocks. The temptation for athletes to take a calculated risk, though, is still too great.
Veronica Campbell-Brown, the double Olympic 200m champion who tested positive for a banned diuretic, is likely to get only a backdated six-month suspension. Gay and Powell could be looking at a similarly meagre punishments and a maximum of two years if they can successfully argue they took illegal supplements negligently rather than with intent. Such short bans will hurt careers and reputations, but ruin neither.
Athletes are still being encouraged to gamble. Four-year bans would not have the same impact as a lifetime suspension, but missing an entire Olympic cycle would surely prove a more effective deterrent.
Instead, athletics limps on, battered by every positive test and increasingly reliant on a small pool of sparkling stars. For every paltry punishment there will be a world record to inspire hope again; to make us think it is, in fact, a wonderful world. This is not just cheating the clean athletes, though, it is unfair to the people watching them run, jump and throw, too. – Daily Mail