How fast do you have to go if you want to outrun your past? A lot faster than the 49.61 seconds it took Christine Ohuruogu to run 400 metres yesterday and win gold at the athletics World Championships. Perhaps you can bend space-time at the speed of light, but Ohuruogu still has a bit to find to make 186,000 miles per second.

It was a great victory. It was the more wonderful for the adversity of the past; the adversity she was, it seemed, trying to outrun. Her victory, stunning though it was, does not mean that the adversity and the past are now cancelled. Life and sport and human minds don’t work like that.

But let’s celebrate her: a very fast woman with seriously deficient organisational skills. The athletics World Championships were first held in 1983 and Ohuruogu is only the fifth British woman to win gold. Salute her, celebrate her, for she now stands alongside Fatima Whitbread, Liz McColgan, Sally Gunnell and Paula Radcliffe. That puts her in the company of four seriously redoubtable ladies.

It was a great run, part of a British one-two, and it has saved the championships so far as us Brits are concerned. Great, terrific, wonderful: hope she can do it again in Beijing next year and that I’ll be there to tell the tale. If the point needs reinforcing, then let me add: hurrah for Ohuruogu!

It was a wonderful bit of sport; and it utterly fails to let her off a mention of the three missed drugs tests. For this crime she was banned for a year and is still banned from the Olympic Games. She has an appeal pending and the indications are that the ban will be overturned. Which would, on the whole, be a good thing.

But alas, she cannot celebrate yesterday’s gold medal without everyone pointing out that she was banned until this very month. This makes it an even more extraordinary achievement, but she may well feel dismayed that the tale of yesterday’s triumph cannot be told without a mention of those missed tests and that ban.

Ohuruogu has not made a clean break with the past. She can’t. None of us ever can. That is the way life works. You may seek to make a fresh start with a new job, a new town, a new partner, but you still can’t rub out the things that happened before.

The past is not something you escape. It is something you learn from, something that inspires you, something that you ignore at your peril, something that can drag you down, something that can destroy you. We are all of us as much a product of our disasters as of our triumphs.

And Ohuruogu did indeed have a disaster. Missing three drugs tests is, at the very least, seriously bloody sloppy. The buzz around athletics is generally sympathetic to her. The belief is that she made a mess of her personal arrangements, not that she was too high on steroids to face the tester. But if you want a drug-free sport –– and all the indications are that we do –– then a missed test is blood-brother to a failed test. You can’t just say, “Sorry, I’m a loveable dope and it won’t happen again.” Not three times, anyway.

So Ohuruogu missed her tests, got her ban. Perhaps she should give thanks for the inflexible nature of the rules. For it seemed that she was inspired yesterday. The loss of a full year is a colossal chunk of an athletics lifetime, but she used it to train and to work up a fierce desire to set things aright.

Not that she has done anything of the kind; not that she ever could. What she has done is to show that she is a superb athlete, perhaps a better one than we thought a year ago. But all the same, no matter what she achieves in the future, every piece ever written about her will include some such line as “comma who was banned for a year for missing three drugs tests comma”.

That’s not unfair. That’s not witch-hunting. That’s not calling her a cheat. That’s not questioning her abilities or her achievements. It’s just placing her in the context of her past. David Beckham will never escape his sending-off in the World Cup finals of 1998; Andrew Flintoff will never outlive the night of the Fredalo; Sven-Göran Eriksson will never outrun the “fake sheikh”, Ulrika and Faria Alam, not even if he learns to break 50 for the 400.

Disasters become a part of you, as do triumphs. You can’t escape either of them: it’s what you do with them that makes the difference. Ohuruogu alchemised her triple disaster into gold: good on her, I wish I could do the same with all mine.

The numbers game

Great Britain’s athletes have been set a target of three medals and 14 top-eight finishes. So far they have 3 Medals – one gold (Christine Ohuruogu), one silver (Nicola Sanders) and one bronze (Kelly Sotherton) 7 Top-eight finishes

Today’s finals

11.30am Women’s hammer
12.25pm Women’s 400 metres hurdles
12.40pm Men’s long jump
2.20pm Men’s 200 metres

TV: BBC Two 11.30am-2.45pm; 7-7.30pm (highlights)