THE most easily, perhaps conveniently, overlooked aspect of the British sprint relay team’s gold medal in Athens last week was that it was achieved without the country’s leading sprinter.
The absence of Dwain Chambers, the European 100m champion caught last year in the BALCO scandal with a positive test for the designer steroid THG, was emblematic of much of the Athens Games.
Unlike a dozen other top American athletes ensnared by
BALCO, Marion Jones made it on to the US team, although apparently it was not the same Marion Jones who so dominated in Sydney four years earlier. A fifth place in the long jump and a "DNF" in the relay saw Jones back with the mere mortals.
And there, almost bringing up the rear of Kelly Holmes’s fabulously thrilling 1,500m final last Saturday, was the athlete formerly known as Olga Yegorova.
The Russian won the 5,000m world title in 2001, the same year that French officials bungled the procedure on a dope test involving Yegorova so that the discovery of the endurance boosting drug EPO could not be enforced. Since then, oddly, Yegorova, has not been the force she once was.
In Athens, the Russian was tailed off from the early stages of the final. Her loss of form is inexplicable. Neither did the Kenyans nor runners from the country some Europeans refer to as EPOpia have the stranglehold on the distance events that they once enjoyed.
Then there was also the Russian woman javelin thrower, Ekaterina Ivakina, who bowled up for her first throw of the qualifying round carrying the spear underarm, and ran straight through the line, before sitting out her next two attempts. Odd, or what?
It was not just at the track that Athens, for all its thrilling competition, saw a downshift in performance and a downturn in some teams’ medal counts. Take away the phenomenon of Michael Phelps’ six golds, and the usually dominant US men’s swimming team delivered just four golds between the rest of them. Australia’s men, without Ian Thorpe and Grant Hackett, was entirely gold-less.
In the war against drugs, some bellicose language from an earlier age might be appropriate: this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.
Jacques Rogge, the IOC president, would not say so in so many words. But his satisfaction was evident in capturing a record 22 positive tests (did all those weightlifters really think they would get away with it?), including six medals stripped from cheats. "The more we find, the better our credibility and the credibility of sport," Rogge said.
"When you write the history of doping someday, this will be the Games where the line was drawn pretty firmly in the sand," said Dick Pound, the head of the World Anti-Doping Agency.
