Paula’s ordeal is proof high-profile athletics is now being destroyed
THE ORDEAL that Paula Radcliffe faced this week was not evidence of a media witch-hunt. Nor was it the product of the hard-to-believe unworldliness of a disingenuous parliamentary select committee. The reality is that what Radcliffe went through was the clearest sign yet that, at this point in athletics’s history, the cheats are winning.
They’re winning on the track and they’re winning off it. The cheats have made us think differently about everything and everyone.
They have corrupted us just as they have corrupted themselves. They have warped our minds and robbed us of our innocence so that everywhere we look, we see cause for suspicion.
The hard truth is that no one knows whether Radcliffe is clean or not, except Radcliffe herself. That does not make her unusual. No one knows whether any athlete is clean any more. There has been too much disillusion and too much betrayal to trust anyone now. That is why the sport is on its knees.
It is still a wonderful, inspiring sport in many ways. This morning, some of us will take part in the Morrisons Great North Run and revel in the joy of being part of a human tide of 57,000 runners all pushing ourselves to set the best time possible in an event that never fails to make the spirit soar.
For many, though, there is no joy left in the professional side of the sport which has been riven by the battle against drugs. Everyone is at each other’s throats and few come out of it looking good.
Steve Cram and IAAF president Lord Coe, bright men who surely want the best for their sport, have made themselves look foolish and defensive by screaming ‘witch-hunt’ whenever an allegation is made.
Those of us who are more cynical have gained little credit when someone like Radcliffe, a universally popular runner whose name has always been a byword for courage and integrity, is implicitly linked to strongly denied accusations that soon descend into confusion and contradiction.
Somewhere in the middle, the high-profile end of the sport is dying and the cheats are laughing all the way to the finishing line. And the bank. They are killing athletics and, to its everlasting shame, athletics is helping them do it.
The sport has not got the stomach to take them on and so it ends up encouraging them and defending them. Instead of inviting investigation, it circles the wagons. Dare to criticise an athlete for missing a drugs test, for instance, and you are treated like an apostate.
The cheats were everywhere at the World Championships in Beijing, like a contagion. There was an infestation of them. They were a suppurating presence in what seemed like every heat of the men’s 100m.
And yet Nike, the most powerful organisation in the sport, rewards cheats. It legitimises them. It tries to make them cool. It pays Justin Gatlin handsomely even though he has twice been banned for drugs offences. Many in athletics, including Lord Coe, the man who runs the sport and is also paid by Nike, appear to see nothing wrong with this.
The sport has not yet found the appetite to cleanse itself. It treats attempts at investigation with suspi- cion and hostility. It treats people who want to help rid it of cheats as the enemy. It treats those who point out shortcomings as traitors.
When the BBC, for instance, found evidence that at the very least raised worrying questions about coach Alberto Salazar and the ethos of the Nike Oregon Project, the sport closed ranks around it and sought to discredit the investigation. The same happened when the Sunday Times published allegations about widespread cheating.
The defensiveness and the culture of denial will only prolong the problem. It means the sport has not yet reached rock-bottom. That was evident in the tenor of the debate over Radcliffe. Her defenders launched their counter-attack with emotional blackmail for spears.
‘Paula’s a love,’ was just about the level of their argument, ‘so lay off her’. If a judge had slammed his gavel down on the bench and asked ‘Is she not fragrant?’, it would have fitted the tone perfectly.
Cram, the face of the BBC’s athletics coverage and a man who appears to regard objectivity with towering disdain, gave a composed and lucid performance on the BBC’s Newsnight programme when the story broke before ending his interview by suggesting the authorities would be better served trying to ‘catch more cheats instead of chasing Paula Radcliffe’.
It was an insult, he was saying, to think that Radcliffe was anything other than clean. Well, Radcliffe is a heroine to many of us but why should she be beyond suspicion in this sporting dystopia?
Every athlete is now viewed through the prism of the potential disillusionment that each new allegation of cheating brings. How sad that excellence is no longer celebrated, merely doubted. Take Radcliffe’s women’s marathon world record that she set in 2003, obliterating the fastest time by any other runner by more than three minutes and hailed as one of the great athletics performances of modern times.
That world record, which no one has got close to for 12 years, is no longer a source of pure wonder. Long before this week, it was a source of cynicism.
If an Eastern European athlete or an African athlete had set that time, it would be a matter for knowing nods and raging innuendo.
We want to believe that Radcliffe’s time was a result of her remarkable physiology and her relentless capacity for hard work but, worn down by the betrayals of others, the fear of naivety crowds in.
Radcliffe is not the only victim. It is desperately dispiriting but no one believes in much any more when they watch athletics. Athletes pass drug test after drug test. Yeah, so what?
Marion Jones never tested positive and she was cheating all along. The great fear, one backed up by the sport’s poacher-turned-gamekeeper, Victor Conte, is that the cheats are still way, way ahead of the testers.
When Usain Bolt beat Gatlin in the men’s 100m in Beijing, Cram said the Jamaican might just have rescued his sport. It was painfully glib.
Until the sport shuns cheats, until it stops rewarding them, until it stops treating attempts to expose the crisis it is facing as declarations of war, it will run further and further towards oblivion.