David Powell responds to your remarks on his top 50 Olympic athletes

To compile my list of the top 50 track and field athletes in Olympic history, first I needed to set guidelines. There would be no place, I decided, for athletes with proven or strong circumstantial links to doping and there would be little sympathy for those who, no matter how many silver or bronze medals they had won, had not been winners.

So, on the first count, out went Ben Johnson, Marion Jones, Florence Griffith-Joyner, Heike Drechsler and Renate Stecher. Johnson and Jones because they were proven cheats, Griffith-Joyner because of circumstantial evidence, Stecher and Drechsler because they competed for East Germany in the age of that country’s systematic state doping.

To my banned list I added Irina and Tamara Press, the Soviet sisters who won five Olympic gold medals between them, but whose careers came to an abrupt halt upon the introduction of sex tests.

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My ‘gold medallists only’ rule I took down as far as No 48 before giving sympathetic votes to Frankie Fredericks and Merlene Ottey. While it is true that Ottey failed a drugs test in 1999, her ban was lifted when the Swiss laboratory that handled her sample was found to have tested it improperly.

But out completely are Raelene Boyle, the Australian who won three individual sprint medals, but no gold, and Herb McKenley, the Jamaican who won three individual medals at 200 metres and 400 metres with gold only in a relay.

The worth of relay medals compared with individual ones, whether to include results from the 1906 interim Games, and whether to give credence to discontinued events were all factors taken into consideration. I chose to load heavily on individual events, lightly on relays, but included 1906 results and discontinued events.

I have, however, taken the view that early Olympic medals are worth less than more recent ones, largely because of numbers taking part and, therefore, the depth of competition. From 1900 to 1906, when many of those athletes featured in this list won a profusion of medals, fewer than 20 countries participated. By Emil Zatopek’s day, in 1948 and 1952, it was over 50 and, through the Carl Lewis era, it rose from 124 in 1984 to191 in 1996. The number of competitors quadrupled from the years 1912 to 2000.

While I have also placed a value on world records set in the Olympic arena, a list of this nature should consider emotion and impact as well as statistics. So I have permitted myself a strong instinctive input which is why, subjectivity being what it is, you would probably choose a different order.

Knowing where to put Bob Beamon and Dick Fosbury was the hardest part. I have no rational explanation for placing them 11th and 26th, other than to say that it just felt right.

David Powell was The Times Athletics Correspondent for 18 years before becoming a freelance writer, consultant, and lecturer. He reported on the last five Olympics and ten World Championships and attended his first major championships, the Commonwealth Games, 38 years ago.

50. Merlene Ottey (Jamaica)