Athletics in new claims of cover-up over drugs
SVEIN Arne Hansen, the head of European Athletics who has proposed that all world records prior to 2005 be erased, has been accused of doping coverups in the 1980s and 1990s.
Between 1985 and 2007 Hansen was the director of the Bislett Games in Olso, where dozens of world records were set, including 800m and 1,000m marks by Sebastian Coe in 1979 and 1981, the mile records by Steve Ovett in 1980 and Steve Cram in 1985 and the 5,000m world mark by David Moorcroft in 1982. There is no suggestion any of those were involved.
An investigation by the VG newspaper in Norway alleges it was common for the organisers to switch clean urine for the samples from athletes who had been using drugs and risked failing tests.
Swedish high jumper Patrik Sjoberg has alleged Hansen knew of clean athletes, himself included, providing clean urine. Hansen, 71, said those claims are ‘insane.’
The paper alleges that Hansen used to boast about producing urine himself for some athletes. Former Bislett communications chief, AnneLise Hammer, who worked closely with Hansen, said: ‘Everything was up for negotiation. The most important thing was the fewest possible scandals, most records, greatest possible names and full stands.’
IF you wished to be kind about the ill- conceived, ill- judged, misguided, offensive, simplistic, complacent proposal to rewrite athletics’ world records, which was detonated last week on a sport that’s already in a world of trouble, you would call it a dog’s dinner.
The truth, sadly, is that ‘dog’s dinner’ doesn’t really get close.
Why? Well, a measure of thought and preparation goes into a dog’s dinner and that puts it on a higher plane than the slop the European Athletics brains trust served up last week.
By suggesting that all records set before 2005 should be reset, recalibrated, reformed or whatever other pointless euphemism they try to use, all that European Athletics did was turn a mess into a farce.
Athletics has problems, sure, but they won’t be solved by pretending its greatest names never existed.
The proposal was an insult, not just to athletes whose acheivements would be wiped from the record books and whose names would be for ever more lumped in with the cheats and charlatans who have disfigured the sport for much of the last 40 years, but to lovers of athletics and its history, too.
No wonder Paula Radcliffe was so upset. No wonder Mike Powell, the long-jump record holder, was so irate that he immediately threatened legal action. No wonder Steve Cram scorned the proposal as a ‘publicity exercise’. I am not always a fan of Cram’s pronouncements but on this, he was absolutely right.
The axiom about not throwing the baby out with the bath water could have been made for this. Nobody wants cheats to gain immortality but this way the reputations of athletes such as Cram and Radcliffe get casually besmirched by men in suits brandishing a moronic marketing gimmick.
This is an organisation led by a stamp dealer so maybe it shouldn’t be a surprise it appears to know more about Penny Black than Roger Black. Their taskforce chair, Pierce O’Callaghan, called athletes like Radcliffe ‘collateral damage’, which didn’t seem to provide her with an awful lot of comfort.
Sure, athletics is in decline but this is not the way to clean it up.
This is too easy and it is too lazy. It is tantamount to rearranging deckchairs on a sinking ship. It is a cosmetic exercise that does not get anywhere near the root of the problem and it ruins the life’s work of athletes in the process.
The flaw at its core is that it assumes there will be no more cheats. Or, more accurately, it assumes t hat si nce t he I AAF started storing blood and urine samples in 2005, the testers are now somehow ahead of the cheats.
That assumption is naive and smug. The assumption of most intelligent analysts is that it is the other way around: the cheats are still ahead of the testers. Way ahead. And so starting again from 2005 is utterly meaningless.
It is random. It is arbitrary. It is cruel and it risks looking deeply cynical.
The idea that we should suddenly start regarding all world records set since 2005 as sacrosanct is ridiculous. Some of those records are suspect. So what happens whey they get exposed, as some of them will? Do we recalibrate the records again? That way, anarchy and confusion lie. ‘ It does not attack the central issue of people cheating in sport and does not achieve anything,’ said Cram. ‘It’s a publicity exercise. All sports have to evolve with the time they’re in. ‘You can’t apply today’s standards to the past. ‘ It’s not the fault of people who were clean that the authorities were not doing enough at the time.’ Absolutely right. If no one can get close to Marita Koch’s women’s 400m world record, then athletics will just have to live with it and try to make a virtue of clean athletes
NO spectators, no journalists, artificial conditions, an event controlled and organised by Nike to market a new running shoe — I’m sorry but the Breaking2 project to run a marathon in under two hours, which Olympic champion Eliud Kipchoge missed by 26 seconds in Monza yesterday, feels like a vision of athletics’ dystopian future if the worst happens.
attempting to get closer to it and eventually breaking it. In an era when we demand instant gratification, the plan simply to wipe all the pre-2005 records from the books fits the mood.
It is an attempt to create a Year Zero for athletics. It is an attempt to persuade us that the sport’s history does not exist.
That’s why it wasn’t a surprise when O’Callaghan likened the European Athletics proposal to English football creating t he Premier League in 1992. Sometimes you could be forgiven for thinking that football was invented in 1992. History can be inconvenient when the past competes with the present.
There was much fuss, for instance, when Romelu Lukaku became the first Everton player to score more than 20 goals in a season in the Premier League last month. It is commendable, of course, but few mentioned t hat Gary Lineker scored 30 for the club in 1985-86. Fewer still mentioned that Dixie Dean scored 60 league goals for the Merseyside club in 1927-28.
Why should that suddenly be less worthy of note than Lukaku’s record? You can’t erase history just by creating something new, however hard you try.
Everybody wants to believe that what they are seeing now is the best. It helps the brand.
Starting football again in 1992 means it is easier to set new records. It is as if pre- Premier League footballers have been turned into non-persons.
And that is what it would be like in athletics if European Athletics gets its way. Shiny, happy people — all clean, clean, clean — will be breaking world records at practically every meeting and a new breed of hero and heroine will be established overnight, unencumbered by the idea that Cram or Radcliffe or Colin Jackson or Jonathan Edwards might have been legitimately better.
What European Athletics, and the IAAF, should be concentrating on is redoubling their anti-doping efforts, increasing funding for it, halting the protection of athletes who miss tests and introducing more sanctions on countries with recidivist tendencies in doping.
That wouldn’t get as much publicity as what the self-important fools at European Athletics call their ‘revolution’. History tells us that after revolution comes purge.
So Cram, Radcliffe, Jackson, Edwards and there st better enjoy their glories while they can because if anyone at the IAAF is stupid enough to give this nonsense legitimacy, the heroes of yesteryear will become the non-persons of tomorrow.