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.