RUNNING SCARED
Athletics was crying out for a saviour... instead it is dealing with its worst scandal in years
JUST when athletics most needed a successor to Usain Bolt, it has crashed head on into the full-blown glare of scandal courtesy of Alberto Salazar.
The World Championships had already been dubbed a ‘disaster’ in Doha because of extreme weather and next to nobody turning up to watch.
The last thing they needed was to be visited by a doping controversy that overshadowed what good there has been.
Sir Mo Farah spoke of his “relief” that the investigation into his former coach had been completed after the man who guided him to 10 global titles was handed a fouryear ban for multiple doping violations.
But it is a further blow to the already battered reputation of a sport in desperate need of salvation.
Track-and-field chiefs had hoped these championships would reconnect athletics with a public grown disillusioned by a narrative of drug abuse, cheating and corruption.
And for the British supporters, Dina Asher-Smith is single-handedly doing her bit to win back legions of lost fans.
But even she can only do so much against a backdrop of athletes dropping like flies and being rushed to a makeshift hospital – some on stretchers, all in distress – after a midnight marathon in furnace heat and humidity on opening night.
Kevin Mayer,
France’s decathlon world champion, said:
“We can all see
(coming here) it’s a disaster”.
Then the men’s 100metres was won by Christian Coleman, competing only by virtue of escaping a ban on a technicality after one missed test and two filing failures.
Rather than show any contrition, he raged at those “hating on a young black kid living on his dream” and appeared to fail to grasp the importance of athletics’ anti-doping protocol.The feelgood story of Asher-Smith’s 100m silver medal achievement was eclipsed by the almost total absence of spectators to witness it.
Denise Lewis, a former golden girl of athletics, accused the sport’s governing body of “massively” letting down its competitors. Tennis coach Judy Murray waded in as she watched Asher-Smith carry her Union flag around the track looking for someone to wave it at after her silver medal run. “The consequence of putting a global event in a small country (three million) with no track record in the sport.All about the (money),” she tweeted.
IAAF president Seb Coe has courageously stood up to Russia for the past four years, banning their athletes from competition after a report
commissioned by the World Anti Doping Agency found evidence of widespread doping.
But any credit for that in the court of public opinion has been negated by fresh disillusionment over the Salazar case. Athletics is now widely regarded as a once-infour-years sport, one that does not exist in the public’s consciousness outside the Olympics.
In its purest form, it still has broad appeal. You only have to look at the Parkrun movement to see that.
But the divide between those who do and those that watch has rarely, if ever, been greater.