POSTED: July 6th 2010

NewsUpdate

JOHN GOODBODY: When a record is not a record worth recording

THE JOHN GOODBODY COLUMN / An authoritative, exclusive series only fromSports Features Communications

LONDON, Jul 06: Europe's elite athletes and swimmers are starting their final preparations for the continental championships  in the two leading individual sports on the Olympic programme.

But, as the European countries gather at the stadium in Barcelona on July 27 and in the pool in Budapest on August 4, one wonders how many world records will be broken, given the distorted nature of the current global marks.

In track and field, many current records were set in the 1980s by from the former East Germany, where the widespread doping regime was only revealed with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

The 100 and 200 metre performances of the late Florence Griffith-Joyner  have never been exceeded, despite the belief that the American was on hormone drugs in 1988, when she won both Olympic sprint titles and set the world records. It has always been significant that she retired just when she could have cashed in on her fame after the Seoul Olympics.

However, the seismic effect of Ben Johnson’s positive doping test at the 1988 Games was followed early next year by the implementation of out-of-competition testing. And Flo-Jo may well have realised her time was up and she had to retire with her reputation ostensibly untarnished.

Although there is no evidence that Flo-Jo took drugs (and she was never indeed found positive), this is not true of many East Germans in a variety of sports as the files opened in the early 1990s demonstrably show.

The question to the world and European athletics authorities is whether these marks should still be standing. And, if so, why?

The answer from them and also from the International Olympic Committee is that once you start going down that road, there is no end to the issues that are thrown up.

Anabolic steroids

If you stripped every East German, who was named in the files of taking anabolic steroids, of their records, chaos would ensue with huge gaps in the results while competitors from other countries, who were never tested because they were too far down the rankings, might be moved up into the medals, possibly unjustifiably if they themselves had been taking drugs.

The question with swimming is different. The return to textile-only apparel  from the shiny suits, which flourished in 2008 and 2009, will mean that many competitors’marks will be much slower this year at the European Championships.

On January 1, the all-time top 25 times across all Olympic events were flooded with between 15 and 23 marks made in the shiny suit era. Many times in textile-only suits  will now take some years to catch up with those world records, which were achieved in equipment aiding speed, buoyancy or endurance. 

For instance, the women’s 200 metres medley mark of American Ariana Kukors was set in a shiny suit and is 2 minutes 06.15 seconds. Only one other female has gone faster than 2 minutes 10 seconds that was the Chinese Wu Yanyan who was later banned for taking hormone drugs.

So far the International Swimming Federation (FINA) has been reluctant to issue separate world records for the two types of suit. Perhaps the results in Budapest will be further evidence that it should change its mind.

Both athletics and swimming need world records to generate interest in the sport. And these may well be few and far between in the immediate future.

** JOHN GOODBODY covered the 2008 Olympics for The Sunday Times, his 11th successive Summer Games and is the author of the audio book A History of the Olympics, read by Barry Davies, the BBC commentator. He was Sports News Correspondent of The Times 1986-2007, for whom he received journalistic awards in all three decades on the paper, including Sports Reporter of The Year in 2001.

Keywords · Goodbody · world records · swimming · atletic · griffiths-joyner · ben johnson

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