Gary Lemke

ARMCHAIR VIEW Retro testing makes a mockery of medals

AS MORE and more big sporting names are being mentioned in the same sentence as “doping violations”, it’s absurd that years later someone can be promoted from second to first, or fourth to third, and so on.

Professional cycling has had its fair share of skirmishes with drugs and it got so bad for the Tour de France that the results have been rubbed out of the record books from the years 1999 to 2005. Of course, that’s when Lance Armstrong dominated the most famous race in cycling, but he was subsequently found to have cheated on an industrial scale in those years.

And, instead of promoting those behind him to the No1 spot, such was the depth of cheating that you’d have to go a long way down the field to find the first clean rider. In fact, it was probably the L’equipe newspaper seller making his rounds on his own bicycle.

Armstrong later said that it was a level playing field because all the riders were at it, and he might have had a point. But, still, the decision by the Tour de France organisers to make the decision to not have a winner years later was the right one, in my opinion. Which brings us to 2017. Caster Semenya is likely to be upgraded to 2012 London Olympic 800m gold after the Russian Mariya Savinova-farnosova’s back-dated results show that she wasn’t “clean” in the years 2010-2013. So, the order would be to bump everyone who finished behind her up one position.

Obviously, it’s great news for Semenya who will now – barring any successful appeals – become a twotime Olympic gold medallist, after she followed up with gold in Rio last year. She might also become a two-time world champion, because she took silver behind the Russian in 2011 as well.

However, it all feels so wrong, that results can be changed five and six years after the event itself.

I was in the stadium on the night that Semenya finished second and it almost appeared as though she didn’t want to win. She placed herself right at the back of the field and was last at the bell, leaving herself too much ground to make up on Savinova-farnosova. Semenya passed six other athletes in the last 400m, but had to settle for second.

There were strong suggestions at the time that, at best, it was a poor tactical display from her, and, at worst, she didn’t want to win because of the media frenzy that accompanied her back in 2012; the picture was very different in 2016, when the South African dazzled both on and off the track, radiating new-found happiness.

Had Savinova-farnosova not bene in the race, would Semenya still have stuck at the back of the field and would the race have seen similar tactics? It’s bizarre changing the result of a race many years later.

Was the fourth-placed athlete that night in London tested for drugs, because she will now become an Olympic medallist and all medallists are “clean”, right?

Now we have suspicions creeping up on two of Britain’s superstars, Sir Mo Farah and Sir Bradley Wiggins as more “revelations” hit the world of athletics and cycling.

It might yet come to pass that, as unbelievable as it may seem, that both find themselves implicated and, who knows, could they also be stripped of Olympic medals and, also in the case of Wiggins, a Tour de France victory.

I believe that wherever a winner or gold medallist has been, years later, to be found guilty of doping in order to win, then there is no “winner” declared, just as the Tour de France decided in the Armstrong years.

It might just start sending a message through to the individuals sports to take an even sterner stance on drugs testing if one looks through the records and finds a slew of voided results. Sponsors won’t like that and the sporting code itself suffers in the public’s eye. The affected sport would be shamed into acting.

On a personal level, if Semenya is to be given gold from London 2012 then that’s a bonus for her and she’ll go down in history as South Africa’s greatest track Olympian – with Tokyo 2020 still to come. But, broadly speaking, I don’t believe it’s right to change results years after the fact.