We may think we know the cheats but their records have to stand
THE problem with athletics records is that we all have very firm notions of the ones we think are bent. We just haven’t the proof to back it up. And it needs proof. Always proof. Individual failed tests, systematic state programmes, we can only act on what we know for sure — otherwise exceptional deeds can never occur.
Chris Froome beats cheats up mountains. That’s not the same as being one, though. Usain Bolt runs faster than Ben Johnson did at the 1988 Olympics. We must invest in his innocence, too.
The call by UK Athletics for all records to be scrapped and started afresh in what is termed ‘The Clean Era’ is well intended, but writes an ideological cheque the sport simply cannot cash.
If we erase all statistics now, Bolt would no longer hold a 100 metres record that could then be recalibrated by drug cheats Tyson Gay or Justin Gatlin. The clean era? Just because a few crooks are at last getting their collars felt does not mean athletics is pristine in 2016. And just because the 1980s were the equivalent of the Wild West doesn’t mean all achievements prior to the current IAAF meltdown can be discarded. We cannot rewrite the history we find unpleasant.
Paula Radcliffe makes a strong point. A single doping conviction should disqualify all achievements. She cited Linford Christie’s positive test in 1999 as being enough to erase all previous marks including, presumably, his Olympic gold and silver medals.
It is hard, however, to bring in a rule that purely governs retrospectively. Surely, if all past achievements are eradicated, then all future ones cannot be considered, either. A cheat is a cheat. It is hardly consistent that Gatlin’s positive tests would wipe out his 2004 Olympic gold, but not affect the medal he could win at Rio 2016.
A retired athlete could have an entire career erased, but a contemporary cheat could run with impunity. Yet to say a failed test makes all future times ineligible is the equivalent of imposing a life ban, and this thought terrifies the legal experts at the IAAF.
It is a mess. Not least because we think we know the identity of the villains, but not how to expunge them without a heap of collateral damage.
Take Florence Griffith- Joyner. We know what we think about improvement that comes from nowhere. In 1988, Griffith- Joyner shaved 0.47sec off her fastest 100m time, 0.62sec from her fastest 200m time, won two Olympic gold medals, set two world records that have never been touched, and retired. She never failed a test, and now she’s dead.
So what are we going to do with that? Her achievements are so wrapped in controversy that, 10 years after her last race, the coroner wanted her corpse tested for steroids. It was too late — she didn’t have enough urine in her bladder — and it is too late now.
If Griffith- Joyner was a cheat, she was too quick for us. But if we remove Flo- Jo from history, is it permissible to omit the four American girls who ran the fastest 4 x 100m relay at the 2012 Olympics and are considered clean?
Then there is Jarmila Kratochvilova, described by steroid expert and author John Hoberman as the ‘most masculinised female athlete I have ever seen’. In 1983, running the 800m for the first time, she recorded 1min 53.28sec — a standard so extraordinary that only once in the 32 years since has an athlete got within a second of it.
So we know what we think there, too, what we thought the first time her manly image was beamed into our living rooms. Yet looking masculine isn’t proof, either. We cannot retrospectively ban an athlete for being butch. Kratochvilova did not fail a test and when, in 2006, a Czech newspaper said it had uncovered evidence of systematic state doping under the Communist regime, her name was not in the files.
The record that is invariably cited when retrospective action is discussed belongs to Marita Koch: 47.60sec in the 400m. Although the times throughout her career are consistent — she was always among the fastest — so is the allegation of a systematic doping programme in East Germany that would have ensnared her from an early age.
Very specific Stasi files detailing her drug use between 1981 and 1984 have emerged, as has a letter from her complaining that a sprinting rival, Barbel Wockel, was receiving larger steroid doses, through a relative at the state pharmaceutical company Jenapharm.
Despite Koch’s denials, the evidence is damning. Yet the IAAF cannot act because the World Anti-Doping Agency has a 10-year statute of limitations. Koch would therefore have to admit to cheating, and she will not.
‘I never tested positive, and I never did anything which I should not have done at that time,’ she said in 2014, which is not the same as denying she took drugs, but enough to keep the IAAF’s lawyers at bay.
NOR
is Koch likely to take a witness stand any time soon. A book containing detailed charts of her steroid use came out in 1992. Koch threatened legal action, but did not pursue.
In 2014, the IAAF inducted her into its Hall of Fame — the same academy that finds room for Wang Junxia, who took 42 seconds off the record for the women’s 10,000m in 1993, working with Chinese coach Ma Junren and, if he is to be believed, nothing stronger than the occasional bowl of turtle blood.
And, encapsulated there, is the terrible confusion of it all. We can’t erase all records because that punishes the innocent, but we cannot arbitrarily consider certain individuals guilty because that is unfair without proof.
Yet if we presume innocence, some extremely dubious athletes and outlandish achievements are going to be placed on the IAAF’s pedestal to be adored. It is a horrid muddle and, whatever path is taken, it is plain the punishments for cheating must be made unpalatably harsh. This is a sport on the brink of ruination, one in which it is believed cheats do not just prosper, but can become untouchable, in time. UK Athletics are right to provoke debate, but their solution is misguided. We cannot alter history; simply ensure
it is not repeated.