IN A TOUGH PLACE
Clean athletes frustrated
CALGARY Jessica Zelinka can sympathize with athletes from developing nations who resort to doping in a bid to escape hardships most Canadians can’t begin to imagine.
“I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if I made those kinds of decisions,” the two-time Olympic heptathlete says of cheating by using banned substances. “But in some countries, you get big handouts for winning medals and there’s more incentive to take the risk. It’s like, ‘Do you want to live in poverty for the rest of your life or do you want your whole family taken care of by winning a medal?’ I used to question athletes’ morals. But now, I see there’s a flaw in the system.”
A report out of Europe on the weekend suggested one-third of medals handed out in endurance events at the Olympics and world championships between 2001 and 2012 went to athletes with suspicious drug-test results. The majority of those medallists represent Russia and Kenya.
The International Association of Athletics Federations data, leaked to the Sunday Times and German broadcaster ARD, indicates more than 800 athletes tested during that period recorded blood tests highly suggestive of doping.
On Tuesday, the IAAF sharply denied allegations it had failed to follow up on suspicious tests and labelled the reports “false, disappointing and misinformed journalism.”
The news has cast a shadow over the World Championships in Athletics, which run Aug. 22 to 30 at the Bird’s Nest in Beijing. Canada’s top athletes are set to fly to South Korea on Friday to begin preparations for the competition.
Athletics Canada head coach Peter Eriksson says he is “not surprised” by the report.
“I think we’re just skimming the tip of the iceberg,” he sighs.
Eriksson sees a pressing need for a change in procedure, given the astronomical number of abnormal test results. He fears, if the reports out of Europe are true, the authorities are simply looking the other way.
“If it’s through the way it works with IAAF,” he says, “it’s obviously somebody putting it in a drawer.”
But racewalker Inaki Gomez cautions against getting caught up in the headlines, when at least 20 Russians — all from the same training centre in Saransk — have been banned for doping, in his sport, in recent years.
In his mind, the IAAF has been at the forefront of the fight against drug cheats.
A recent graduate of the University of Calgary law school, Gomez wants to know whether the number of abnormal tests has declined, particularly given improvements to testing implemented five years ago, such as the creation of biological passports.
“The biological passport means they take our blood at every major championship,” he says. “They compare year to year and can find irregularities. That’s how they’ve started catching a ton of people.
“Ultimately, my job is to do my part as an athlete and compete within the rules. You can’t really control what other people are doing. You just have to trust the system works. Otherwise, there’s no point going forward with it.”
More disturbing than the number of abnormal tests, to racewalker Evan Dunfee, is the leaking of internal IAAF documents.
The Canadian racewalker fears the reputations of clean athletes could be destroyed by suspicious results that, in isolation, mean nothing.
“The way the bio passport works, you can’t prove doping through a single test,” Dunfee says. “If someone were to decide to publish the names of these people, that would be catastrophic to the sport. Even if 99 per cent of them are doping, when you have 800 suspicious samples, that’s a handful of people you would be accusing of doping who aren’t actually doping.”
But Zelinka, who will miss the world championships with an Achilles tendon injury, wants to see an independent examination of the leaked data.
“The stereotype is that to compete at the international level, you need to be taking drugs,” she says. “I don’t believe that. But I also don’t trust the system is doing everything they can do to keep it clean. They might be doing everything they can to protect the sport and protect their sponsors.”
If someone is exposed for doping, she says, the offending athlete isn’t the only one who suffers.
“If a superstar gets caught, just like Ben Johnson did (at the 1988 Seoul Games), then it taints the entire sport. No sponsor wants to be associated with it.”
At the 2008 Beijing Olympics, Zelinka finished fifth in the heptathlon. Days afterward, Ukrainian Lyudmila Blonska was stripped of her silver medal for a doping infraction.
“There’s a flaw in the system,” Zelinka says. “There needs to be a third party going in to investigate all of this. Athletes need to trust in the system. If (the IAAF) is hiding something like this, who can you trust?”
There needs to be a third party going in to investigate all of this. Athletes need to trust in the system.