The IAAF (International Association of Athletics Federations), the world governing body for athletics kicked off its 2017 international season with the first meet in the Diamond League in Doha, Qatar last Friday, but the main topic of conversation was not this season’s centre piece, the 16th edition of the IAAF World Champion-ships scheduled for London, England in August. Rather it was a statement from European Athletics released on the previous Monday, proposing that all athletic records achieved before 2005 be erased from the record books.
European Athletics had set up a task force in January of this year to examine world records in athletics following the release of the McLaren report last year which had uncovered widespread doping in sport, particularly athletics. Richard McLaren, the Canadian lawyer, in a major discovery had found that the Russian government, security services and sport authorities had colluded to cover up widespread doping by Russian athletes prior to the 2012 Olympics in London, at the 2013 World championships in Moscow and the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi. This eventually led to the banning of Russian athletes from the 2016 Rio Games.
How serious is the doping problem in sport, and in particular athletics? Since the Inter-national Olympic Committee (IOC) began retesting old samples, more than 100 athletes who participated in the 2008 and 2012 Olympics have tested positive for some form of Performance Enhancing Drug (PED). How did the world of athletics descend into this quagmire?
The ugly façade of doping began surfacing during the 1970s with the rise of Eastern Bloc countries in athletics at the Munich Olympics in 1972 and at the Montreal Games in 1976, most notably among the East German team. The sudden arrival at the top was viewed with some skepticism by observers, but there was no way at the time of proving their doubts. By the early 1980s, the current IAAF President Britain’s Lord Sebastian Coe, then a world class middle distance runner and his American friend, Edwin Moses, then the world 400 meter hurdles record holder, were pleading at the IOC Congress for stepping up of the testing for doping in the fast becoming circus of world athletics, even volunteering to be tested first.
As the world of athletics moved from amateurism to professionalism in the 1980s, and athletes no longer had to suffer the ignominy of receiving “under the counter payments” and gifts for participating in race meets, but could openly receive appearance fees and collect bonus payments for setting world records, and the prize pools got larger, as more sponsors came on board the temptation of the mighty dollar, particularly in the area of endorsements, just became too much.
The scandal of doping stole the world headlines when the Jamaican- born Ben Johnson, running for Canada tested positive for the steroid stanozolol three days after winning the 100 metres gold medal in a then world record time of 9.79 seconds at the Seoul Olympics in 1988, from a field, later described as the greatest field of sprinters ever assembled. A disgraced Johnson had to return his prized medal and was later suspended. The race is thoroughly examined in the book, The Dirtiest Race in History, by Richard Moore, who noted that only two of the starters in that race would remain clean throughout their sprinting careers.
Johnson’s coach, Charlie Francis, a former sprinter himself, made several telling observations in his book Speed Trap, including, that he himself had competed against the dopers at the Munich Olympics, Johnson could not have tested positive for stanozolol because he had been given another steroid, and several American positive test results from the last day of athletic competition of the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics had been swept under the carpet. Johnson had been a victim of a conspiracy by well-connected persons to discredit him, he theorized.
Yet, with the scandal all over the front pages of the world’s newspapers, it took the IOC twelve years to form the World Anti Doping Agency (WADA). The world governing appeared to have no interest in fighting the cheating in the sport at the time. Why? Juan Antonio Samaranch, IOC president at the time, had no interest in seeing track and field come under the microscope, it was felt in some circles, as its popularity was increasing worldwide.
WADA has always been playing the catch up game with the drug cheats, as the scientists in the two camps battle each other. In 2005, WADA began keeping blood and urine samples, and as the gap has gotten closer, the re-testing of earlier samples has been very revealing. Last month, the 2016 Olympic Women’s Marathon winner, Kenyan Jemima Sumgong, tested positive in an out of competition test for the blood booster EPO. It was a massive blow to the credibility to Kenya’s famous distance running programme.
Doping has now reached unprecedented heights. Which brings us to the rather drastic proposals from European Athletics to the IAAF for their consideration. The following three criteria will now have to be met for a world record to be recognized: It was achieved at a competition on a list of approved international events where the highest standards of officiating and the technical equipment can be guaranteed, the athlete had been subject to an agreed number of control tests in the months leading up to it, and the doping control sample taken after the record was stored and available for re-testing for 10 years. Lofty standards indeed.
The initial response has been a justifiable huge hue and cry from the athletes whose records have been in existence before 2005. England’s Paula Radcliffe who stands to lose her 2003 world marathon record called the proposal “cowardly”, and questioned the timing of the proposed reset button on the records. She added that clean athletes who had competed against the cheats had been deprived of championships and medals, and the authorities had done nothing then to protect the honest competitors.
Where does the moral compass on this issue come to a stop? Does the IAAF have the right to impose a new timeline on athletic achievements? How will we know for certain that WADA is actually keeping up with the other guys? Can they ever get ahead? Will all the athletes ever want to play it straight? The questions are infinite in number, the debate will rage on and on.
The IAAF, under Coe’s watch should be admired for making a concerted effort for trying to clean up the sport, but wiping the slate clean in one go, as if the past does not exist cannot be viewed as a balanced and pragmatic approach. History is littered with all kinds of misfits, and we haven’t erased them from the history books.
When the IAAF council meets in August to consider the European Athletics proposal let’s hope level heads prevail. We await their verdict.
