Cynical PR charade that will do nothing but punish the innocent
THE man behind the ill-conceived idea to erase any athletics world record set before 2005 is Svein Arne Hansen.
The president of the European Athletics Association is perhaps best known as the meet director of the Bislett Games in Oslo.
That is the same Bislett Games that has long prided itself on staging so many world records. Indeed it was set up year after year, with big financial incentives, to create the perfect environment for runners such as Seb Coe, Steve Ovett and Steve Cram to raise the bar of human performance.
But now such records no longer have any value. Now we are being told by Hansen and his colleagues that denying Jonathan Edwards the right to call himself the world record holder in the triple jump is a small price to pay if it restores some credibility to his sport.
This is not just utter nonsense when adequate drug testing for Jamaican sprinters ahead of the 2012 London Olympics would have done more to protect the integrity of modern athletics than striking Edwards’ phenomenal leap from the record books.
It is outrageously unfair if the performance of a clean athlete is now wiped from history, and not something those who feel most aggrieved are going to allow to happen without a fight, judging by the reaction of Edwards and Paula Radcliffe. Presumably it could impact on their livelihood as well as their professional reputation.
And what possible good will it do when we watch the World Championships in London this summer? Will we believe everything we are seeing simply because Jarmila Kratochvilova no longer holds the 800 metres record she set in 1983?
When the former president of the IAAF and the head of anti-doping, among others, are now at the centre of arguably the most serious corruption scandal in the history of sport, a set of records are the least of athletics’ problems.
When Russia have had a staterun doping programme and the Kenyan female winner of last summer’s Olympic marathon has just been caught taking EPO, is erasing any record set prior to 2005 going to change anything?
As Radcliffe said: ‘Do we believe a record set in 2015 is totally clean and one in 1995 is not?’ To borrow another line from Radcliffe, this is ‘a slapdash attempt for good PR’ by administrators who know their sport remains in the darkest depths of a crisis.
But where were these calls for change before the discovery that athletes were allegedly being extorted for vast amounts of cash to conceal their positive tests?
Marita Koch ran the 400m in 47.6 seconds in 1985 and it remains a time no woman has even come close to matching. To this day Koch denies cheating but in their book, Doping Dokumente, Professor Werner Franke and his wife, Brigitte Berendonk, reproduced a letter from Koch complaining that her rival, Barbel Wockel, was being given stronger doses of steroids because her uncle was president of the pharmaceutical company that provided drugs to the East German athletics authorities.
To mark the millennium, the German Athletics Federation wanted to erase some of their records if the IAAF agreed to do the same. But today those records stand. To review them is a worthwhile exercise and it makes sense only to ratify a world record set by an athlete who has been subjected to a stringent testing programme in the months leading up to their performance. But what the EAA taskforce called the ‘radical surgery option’, examining the records one by oneand removing those clearly achieved by unfair means, was disregarded as impractical even though it is the only option they should consider. Look for the evidence. Examine the reasons, for instance, for Florence Griffith Joyner’s sudden retirement so soon after she rewrote the female sprinting record books in 1988. Look again at a time in the early
Nineties when China suddenly emerged as the dominant force in women’s distance-running, setting world records from 1500m to the 10,000m under the guidance of Ma Junren. Shortly before the 2000 Olympics, China withdrew 27 athletes from their team, including six runners trained by Ma who had tested positive for EPO. And yet Wang Junxia’s 3,000m world record still stands.
That time of 8.06.11 is now in jeopardy but so too is Edwards’ triple jump and the European records held by Cram and Coe from those glorious nights in Oslo. Their performances are no longer trusted either, making Lord Coe’s verdict in his role as IAAF president that this is ‘a step in the right direction’ all the more remarkable.
This ‘revolutionary proposal’ is nothing more than an arbitrary attempt to address serious issues when there is actually only one solution to restoring the credibility not just in athletics but every sport affected by doping and other forms of corruption.
As Dick Pound, the founding president of the World AntiDoping Agency, has long argued, sport is merely pretending to fight the war against doping, so inadequate is the funding.
These proposals are nothing more than the latest charade, another attempt to be seen to be doing the right thing. And one, as always, where the innocent end up paying the heaviest price.