The 100m final: Millions will see it... but how many will believe it?
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World Rugby’s criticism of its own had World Cup referees at come from Eddie Jones would have Japan 2019 he been facing disciplinary action. So perhaps World Rugby should
TOMORROW NIGHT, millions of eyes around the planet – and maybe even a few hundred or so at the Khalifa Stadium in Doha – will be fixed upon the men’s 100metres final at the World Athletics Championships.
It is the first such global showdown in the post-Usain Bolt era.
In his absence, a new superman is needed to wear the cape embroidered with the awe-inspiring inscription of ‘fastest human on earth’.
This is sporting competition distilled down to its simplest and most raw – 10 seconds of gripping action to determine who carries the mantle.
The problem lies in believing in whoever wins and in what we have just seen.
The two main contenders are the defending champion Justin Gatlin, who triumphed in London two years ago, and the fastest man in the world this year Christian Coleman, who took silver in 2017 when Bolt was third in his final race.
Coleman is the favourite. But he is only in Qatar on a technicality. Last month it emerged he had missed three dbruegntejsotshin period and so was staring at a twoyear ban. The American has good lawyers. They managed to find a loophole to allow him to backdate his first failure so it fell outside the 12-month window. So he is in Doha.
Gatlin, his fellow American, has twice served drug suspensions and is again working with controversial sprint coach Dennis Mitchell, who was banned in his own career and caught on tape two years ago offering to get hold of human growth hormone for an undercover reporter.
Gatlin is 37 but is getting quicker. He ran his fastest time for three years in June.
On Monday it will be 30 years to the day since Ben Johnson was stripped of his gold medal from the 1987 world championships in Rome by the IAAF after admitting to steroid abuse over a sevenyear period. This was the high water mark of cheating in athletics, the era of the socalled dirtiest race in history, the 1988 Seoul Olympic 100m final, when six out of the eight men involved went on to test positive or be involved in the use or supply of performanceenhancing drugs.
It would be wonderful if that dark time was behind athletics but have things really improved since then?
At the end of the London Olympics in 2012, the Games were proclaimed as clean. There were just nine failures from 6250 tests.
We now know, thanks to subsequent re-testing, there were a depressing 132 failures in London, which is more than Beijing and Athens combined. Twenty-four medals have been reassigned because of doping, seven of them gold.
More still may come to light before the window to net them closes next August.
Not all of these were in athletics of course but those numbers plus scandals since mean the cloud of suspicion hovers over its greatest events.
Coleman and Gatlin both maintain their innocence. Coleman has never failed a drug test and Gatlin has not done so for 13 years.You want to believe in them.
But a voice in your head advises caution. And that is no way to enjoy what should be one of the most thrilling sights in sport. Gatlin has served two drugs suspensions and, inset, left, Ben Johnson, who was stripped of his Olympic crown