HOW MUCH OF GOLDEN ERA CAN WE STILL BELIEVE?

THE fight against doping in sport feels like an unequal struggle, even at the best of times. There is, sadly, a pervasive sense that the cheats are always a few metres further down the track than the people trying to catch them. There is a sense that the cheats are hidden from us by medical technology, by the omnipresent obfuscation that is a feature of much modern sport and by walls of lies.

But in the struggle against the cheats, the one thing we have to believe in is the impartiality and rigour of the drugs-busters. We have to believe that they are The Untouchables. We have to believe that they’d never collude in any way with a cover-up. We have to believe they’d never look away if they found something wrong.

If we do not believe that, if we even doubt it, then all is lost. If we believe that a drugs-testing agency or another body fears the damage done to the sport by exposing an athlete more than it fears the corruption of events, then all is lost. If we believe that sometimes governing bodies look the other way when they deem it commercially expedient to do so, then all is lost.

It is not as if it has never happened before. It was revealed in 2003, for instance, that the all-conquering US sprinter, Carl Lewis, had failed three drugs tests for stimulants during the 1988 US Olympic trials. He should have been banned from the Seoul Olympics that year but the results were covered up by the US Olympic Committee after it accepted his plea that he had innocently taken a herbal supplement.

That is what happens when a testing agency or a governing body fears the damage a drugs bust will wreak more than it fears the cheating itself. Lewis is one example that came to light. Who knows how many heroes across other sports and other countries have gained the same illicit benefits from organisations too scared to expose them?

Organisations such as UK Anti-Doping (UKAD), the US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) and the Russian Anti-Doping Agency (RUSADA) have to be the last bastions of defence in the war against the corruption of drug-takers and cheats. They are sport’s policemen. We have to believe they’re doing everything they can to catch the cheats. They have to be above suspicion.

If they are not, then it throws everything into doubt. It makes it even harder for us to believe in what we are seeing on the track or in the velodrome or in the pool. That is why the idea of a drugs-buster tipping off a sport’s governing body about an anomalous finding is anathema to us and to everyone engaged in the quest for clean sport.

And that is why the revelations in today’s expose of UKAD and British Cycling in this newspaper are so disturbing and why they have prompted an immediate response from the World AntiDoping Agency (WADA), which has announced its own probe into UKAD by its independent Intelligence and Investigations Department.

The idea that UKAD tipped off British Cycling about an anomalous finding, where a British rider’s urine sample from an out-of-competition (OOC) test in late 2010 contained irregular levels of nandrolone, a banned anabolic steroid, rather than prosecute the matter themselves raises more difficult questions, sadly, about the legitimacy of our Olympic achievements in the velodrome going back more than a decade.

Those achievements had already come under suspicion earlier this month when Richard Freeman, British Cycling’s chief team doctor between 2009 and 2017, was found guilty at a Medical Practitioners Tribunal Service hearing of ordering banned testosterone ‘knowing or believing’ it was for an unnamed rider to improve performance. These new revelations of cosy co-operation between UKAD and British Cycling casts an even darker shadow over UK achievements in the velodrome which became a source of national pride at the Beijing, London and Rio de Janeiro Games.

The investigation’s findings also pose more questions about the ‘win-at-all-costs’ mentality that dominated Olympic sport in those years and which has since been widely criticised.

Once again, British Cycling has more questions to answer. As does UKAD. No one wants to see British achievements tarnished. But simply looking the other way would be far worse.