POSTED: January 11th 2011

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NEIL WILSON: Dope cheats under sharper scrutiny than they may think

THE NEIL WILSON COLUMN / An exclusive, authoritative series from Sports Features Communications

LONDON, Jan 11: Whatever else comes out of the present inquiry into systemic doping in Spain, foremost must be the revelation that the IAAF has a black list of athletes who have raised their suspicions. Those who think they can cheat the system have been warned.

Since Marion Jones passed every drug test with a negative result before being undone by a criminal investigation, the suspicion has existed that there were athletes, coaches and doctors who know how to slalom around the testing system.

Now we have become aware that there is more to being declared a clean athlete than a negative result to any number of tests.

Spain’s world champion steeplechaser Marta Dominguez, it transpires, had been under suspicion apparently for more than a year before police wire taps tied her into an operation entitled Operation Greyhound which led to the arrests of 13 others.

Dominguez, suspended currently as vice-president of the Spanish athletics federation, had given what a Spanish newspaper described as a “too perfect blood profile”. The IAAF does not use ‘blood passports’ yet, a system for recording every aspect of the analysis of tests which is being urged upon them by many athletes including Briton Paula Radcliffe.

They are, however, constantly looking for idiosyncrasies in the results and watching those detected more carefully.

No variation

They had noticed that Dominguez’s blood samples showed an uncommon lack of variations and so were targeting her.  Indeed, according to Madrid’s respected sports daily Marca, she was target-tested just before her finest hour at the world championships in Berlin where she won her world title.

Dominguez protests her innocence. So does Jones, continually. Indeed, she protests too much to whoever will give her air-time, and fewer than ever who listen find those protests credible. Good that wool is not pulled over the IAAF’s eyes now by a negative test.

What should concern the sports world is that it is not the millions of dollars it spends every year on testing according to the World Anti Doping Agency’s protocols that brings down most of the big names. Instead it is the intervention of federal authorities in countries such as the United States, France and Spain.

The Spanish athlete Jesus Espana said, after the arrest of Dominguez and her cohorts: “This (doping ring) has been a well known secret.” Unfortunately, WADA and sports federations do not have the power to act on such knowledge. Only law enforcement agencies do.

Perhaps the governments who endorsed the formation of WADA would be better coming together to enact laws that making doping a criminal offence. Meanwhile the revelation that the IAAF is acting covertly to catch the cheats is good news, at least for their rivals.

NEIL WILSON reported his first Olympic Games in Munich in 1972. He has since covered another nine summer and nine winter Olympics for various newspapers, including The Independent and the Daily Mail with whom he has worked for the last 19 years as Athletics and Olympic correspondent. He was Britain's Sports Journalist of the Year in 1984 and is the author of seven books  

Keywords · Neil Wilson · doping · WADA · Dominguez

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