Globe Runner blog

A 21^st birthday or anniversary is usually a cause for celebration. But the publication yesterday of extracts from Dwain Chambers’ forthcoming book on the same day as the announcement from the IAAF of another major revision of the athletics programme is an untimely reminder that the sport - a runaway success with the broader public 20 years ago - hit the buffers along with Ben Johnson, when the Jamaican-born Canadian was finally busted for drugs at the Olympic Games in Seoul 1988.

Track and Field Athletics had been the success story of the decade prior to that. From the late 1970s through the early and middle part of the 1980s, athletes like Sebastian Coe, Evelyn Ashford, Carl Lewis, Marita Koch, Steve Ovett, Tatyana Kazankina, Ed Moses, Yordanka Donkova, Sergei Bubka, Heike Drechsler, Said Aouita, Ruth Fuchs and, of course, Big Bad Ben had enticed fans into stadia around the world. Money poured into the sport from television and sponsors, a Grand Prix circuit was instituted, and a professional structure put in place.

But the malaise was hidden deep, because anyone who thought that BenJo was clean prior to that fateful Games had to be out of their minds. And as for FloJo…! But the governing bodies, national and international had buried their heads in the sand for so long after suspicions that athletes had started using drugs systematically as early as the late 1950s (and maybe even earlier) that by the 1970s, when anti-drugs legislation was being mooted and introduced, it was of course far too late to make any sort of impact on the experts in usage that many coaches and athletes had become, which headstart in turn would make them equally agile in avoiding detection.

Of course, it was fashionable back then for most of us in the West to blame the Soviet bloc athletes for starting and perpetuating drug use, forcing their rivals to do the same, the equivalent of the political Cold War on the playing fields of the world. But the reality was that the Muscle Beach culture in California was as much an inspiration as the East German laboratories.

And officials weren’t exactly sprinting to ensure the sport was cleaned up. Indeed, there were those on both the IAAF and the IOC in Seoul who wanted to cover up the BenJo positive, as FloJo’s almost inevitable positives may have been covered up. The US administration, Olympic and athletic, at the time was accused by its own medical staff of complicity in drug-taking and covering up.

Robert Voy’s Drugs, Sport, and Politics, published in 1991, is a seminal work in this regard. Voy claims he left his post as Chief Medical Officer of the USOC in 1989, the year after BenJo’s bust, in frustration at the lack of support for his anti-doping efforts, exemplified by the cuts in his budget post-Seoul. He writes, diplomatically, “…… many people in the USOC were in their business for one reason: to bring home the gold. Just how athletes accomplished that - well, few really cared.”

Regular drugs busts post-Seoul, and the suspicion that many other athletes were ‘using’ led to a crisis of public confidence, and despite the Grand Prix mutating into the Golden League, the major car crash of the BALCO affair, personified by Marion Jones, and to a lesser extent Chambers, saw the premier Olympic sport’s steady decline became precipitous, to the point where, in recent years, it had virtually disappeared from our television screens, apart from during major championships.

Now the IAAF has awaken from its torpor, and announced a relaunch of the sport, in the shape of something called the Diamond League, which will begin in 2010. A dozen major meetings worldwide, including the USA and China, with a further three probable meetings will offer the whole range of individual events (32) during the year, something that the Golden League singularly failed to do. And the winners of each discipline will win a four-carat diamond worth $80,000.

Of course, superstars like Usain Bolt and Yelena Isinbayeva (and that’s about it for superstars) will get far more than that in appearance money for a single meet, and I for one don’t begrudge them that. But what’s better is that the athletes in less attractive events will get the rewards their excellence deserves.

Speaking of Bolt, it was inevitable, following Beijing that the IAAF should announce that the young Jamaican would be the focus of the sport this coming summer season. But I’m sure I wasn’t the only one to feel uncomfortable about this blatant one-trick pony set-up. Should Bolt get badly injured or worse (and I don’t need to spell this one out), where would we be then?

And so to Chambers. I’ve written previously about my distaste at his scapegoating by the UK administration (see archive), so I’m glad to see that new national coach Charles van Commenee has publicly welcomed Chambers to the squad, for whom he will be favourite for sprint gold at this weekend’s European Indoor Championships in Torino. But his high public profile will continue to be an uncomfortable reminder of the unsavoury side of our sport.

I’ll review Chambers’ book when it appears next week. But the serialisation in the British newspaper, Daily Mail, which began on Monday, has already caused a furore in one quarter, that of his one-time manager, John Regis. The former world indoor 200 metres champion is reported to be furious that Chambers has written that Regis warned him to, “be very careful” about getting mixed up with Victor Conte. Regis has threatened legal action at the implication that he would in any way condone doping.

Since lawyers have been evoked, I’ll keep quiet on this one, except to wonder who told Regis it was a slur on his character, because he’d have been hard put to figure it out for himself?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 3rd, 2009 at 4:05 pm and is filed under Archive. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.