David Powell, former Athletics Correspondent of The Times, blogging
from the athletics World Championships in Osaka: “Day Seven and, before we
start the evening competition, something to get off my chest. I pick up my Daily
Yomiuri newspaper here this morning and find an article headlined
‘British Press Split Over Ohuruogu’.
“It quotes some of the less favourable comments and, as I understand it, these
have been made largely by writers we never see at athletics, except at the
Olympics. They do, though, spend plenty of time at football.
“Football. This is the game which, in its record books, has West Ham United
listed as FA Cup runners-up two seasons ago. I remember wondering at the
time why a big fuss wasn’t made in the press at the fact that Shaun Newton
had played in the semi-final win over Middlesbrough, failed a drugs test
after the game, yet the result stood.
“Newton was banned for seven months but West Ham’s performance that day was
allowed to stand. I mentioned this to some colleagues here and they said
that it wouldn’t have been fair to punish the whole team. But they do in
athletics. Britain has lost relay medals as a result of the drug-taking
actions of Dwain Chambers.
“The East London girl gets hammered but the Hammers get away with it. The
difference between athletics and football? Athletics comes down harder on
its miscreants.”
Not if the athletics community had anything to do with it, though, David.
Indeed, next time your fellow correspondents, administrators and sponsors
are standing around at a largely empty stadium in Sheffield wondering why
half the press as well as most of the punters have not turned up, think back
to the mealy-mouthed apologist ramblings that were the currency in Osaka and
consider the damage it does to your sport. Athletics has been dwindling in
significance in the public mind for years because nobody believes its
authenticity and the high-handed outrage at the failure in some quarters to
erase Christine Ohuruogu’s three missed drugs tests from memory does the
sport further disservice.
The 2002 Commonwealth Games were made viable only by handing the keys to the
stadium to Manchester City at the end. London’s Olympic track? They have
been trying to knock it out as a ground-share with Leyton Orient. West Ham
United and Tottenham Hotspur were interested, but no Barclays Premier League
club could exist with the meagre capacity that is suitable for an
international athletics arena in Britain. It would go skint in a fortnight.
Still, it looks like we’ve all got a bit to get off our chests today.
Had a rule been in place at the FA that in the event of a player failing a
drugs test the corresponding match would be awarded to the opposition 3-0,
there would be no complaint here, or from just about any columnist or sports
writer.
Most want punitive penalties for drug cheats and do not think football goes
far enough. Yet the reason Britain lost relay medals because of Chambers,
while Newton’s involvement in West Ham’s victory over Middlesbrough on April
23, 2006, was largely overlooked in the wake of his positive test is easier
to understand when the individual cases are considered.
Chambers tested positive for the synthetic steroid tetrahydrogestrinone (THG)
on August 1, 2003, the same month that he anchored Britain’s 4 x 100 metres
team to the silver-medal position at the World Championships in Paris. THG
is an anabolic steroid modified by chemical engineers that duplicates the
effects of testosterone, the male sex hormone, allowing the athlete to train
harder and longer. It is fair to say, then, that Chambers’s drug-taking may
have had a substantial influence on the World Championship result.
At the hearing, he admitted taking THG as far back as 2002, erasing the gold
medal he had helped Great Britain to earn that year in Munich, when
anchoring the 4 x 100 metres relay team in the European Championships. As
tough as this was on his teammates, nobody could seriously argue that a
medal victory should stand when such an important member of the group was
running on rocket fuel.
Compare this with Newton. Yes, he did appear for West Ham in the FA Cup
semi-final victory over Middlesbrough, but as a substitute for Matthew
Etherington in the 89th minute. The Times report the next morning did
not mention his contribution, nor did any national newspaper or the BBC.
Ostensibly, he came on to shore up the left flank as West Ham defended a
single-goal lead. Most likely, he was introduced to wind the clock down. He
was a footnote, really, an inconsequential figure. When I asked the former
Middlesbrough manager, Steve McClaren, about Newton yesterday, he could
barely remember him taking part. Had Marlon Harewood, who scored West Ham’s
goal, tested positive for THG, the performance-enhancing steroid, and
admitted systematic use during the previous promotion season, there would
have been an outcry.
As it was, the substance for which Newton tested positive was not
performance-enhancing at all. It was cocaine, a recreational drug. This is
what the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) said about cocaine
in its 2002 report, Using sport for drug abuse prevention: “Cocaine
has very limited performance-enhancing potential and has greater potential
to reduce performance.”
It went on to list the numerous disadvantages of doing a line if running up
and down one, including a distorted sense of reality, impaired ability with
complex tasks such as judgment and decision-making, increased risk of
abnormal heart rhythms and heart attacks and hangover effects impacting on
mood, attention and psychomotor skills. So Newton was more likely to cost
his team the game than clinch it for them and as the majority of failed
drugs tests in football are linked to recreational abuse, this would be true
in most cases.
The UNODC report concludes that cannabis, inhalants and opiates have no
performance-enhancing potential, while amphetamine has as much chance of
reducing as increasing athletic excellence. That is why drugs issues are not
at the forefront of debate in football. If, however, the sport had a problem
with performance-enhancing drugs, if it had the trust issues that haunt
athletics, you can bet it would be one hell of a deal. Ask Rio Ferdinand.
When Ferdinand missed a drugs test at Manchester United’s training ground in
2003, he was dropped from England’s squad for a European Championship
qualifier with Turkey and subsequently banned for eight months. The most
self-serving rewriting of history that has followed Ohuruogu’s gold medal in
Osaka is that Ferdinand received an easy ride and a hero’s welcome on his
return, while poor little Christine is pilloried. Wrong. The mood around the
England camp at that time was that of a war zone and when Sven-Göran
Eriksson’s players threatened to strike over Ferdinand’s absence, the
arguments grew lastingly ferocious.
Some football writers lost good friends in the game over their hardline stance
and being a nice guy or a silly old scatterbrain – the preposterous
mitigation advanced on Ohuruogu’s behalf – counted for nothing in Rio’s
case. Just to be sure that memory served, I checked what I wrote about
Ferdinand that week. Here is a taste: “Nobody will ever prove whether
Ferdinand was being absent-minded, ignorant or cunning when he didn’t turn
up. Nobody will ever know what a drugs test on that day would have shown.
Ferdinand may be an innocent man who is paying a heavy price for a mental
off day. He may be a guilty one who will receive a far lighter punishment
than he deserves because he knew how to play the system. We will never know
and we shouldn’t care. There has been a very dangerous presumption in the
last 24 hours that Ferdinand’s only possible crime is forgetfulness. It
would appear to be beyond the imagination of many that there could be a
nefarious reason a footballer might wish to delay giving a urine sample for
two days.”
And that is exactly how I feel about Ohuruogu. I would never say she was at
it; but I wouldn’t say that she was not. I don’t know. This uncertainty is
what sets the hated sceptics apart from the cheerleaders of the athletics
community, toadying to the UK Athletics chief executive, Nils de Vos, on
Radio 5 Live and cluttering up the airwaves with their priggish outrage when
anyone dare suggest a gold medal-winning athlete that missed not one, not
two, but three drugs tests, and is now recording personal-best times after a
year out of the sport, is a long way short of a cause for celebration. They
want to establish as fact a statement that cannot possibly be verified.
Christine Ohuruogu would not have tested positive on any of the days on
which she missed a test.
Really? Prove it. It is unfortunate for Ohuruogu that her story has become the
battleground for the wider issue of whether athletics can continue with its
flag-waving culture and remain a credible sport in the eyes of the public.
Some would say the battle is already lost. Football, too, has had problems
with drugs and many are well-documented. Yet it conducts more drugs tests
than any sport in Britain – 1,645 in 2006, not including Uefa or Fifa tests,
compared with 730 by athletics, including International Association of
Athletics Federations events – and, by and large, comes up clean. So strike
West Ham from the record books by all means, give Middlesbrough a 3-0
semi-final win (for what it is worth now) or bring in a law that awards the
game to the other side in the event of a positive test. You’ll get no
argument from me. By contrast, what the athletics community cannot escape is
that for all its supposed hard line, the sport is now about as
well-supported as Leyton Orient. So it can’t just be cynical old football
hacks who have lost faith.
