POSTED: August 17th 2011
SpeakingUp
NEIL WILSON: Suspension is not enough just imprison the dopers
THE NEIL WILSON COLUMN / An exclusive, authoritative series from Sports Features Communications
LONDON: If the drug testers at the Jamaican national athletics championships in June had been allowed to target only one athlete, they would have been foolish not to head directly to Steve Mullings.
Natural justice demands that we give the sprinter the benefit of the doubt until his B sample is tested and a disciplinary process completed but can there be much doubt?
Mullings celebrated his 28th birthday without ever breaking 10 seconds for 100 metres. In little more than half of his 29th year he has broken 10 seconds five times and 9.90sec twice.
Random testing has always been wasteful. Target testing has far more chance of success, and those who should be targeted are well known to any sport’s statisticians. They stand out for their dramatic improvements, as Mullings did.
What is more worrying for track and field is that something as pertinent stands out at present. Mullings is not alone in his dramatic improvement. Sprinters world-wide have suddenly improved, if the statistics are to be believed.
In 2009, the last year in which there was a world championships, only 12 sprinters managed to break 10 seconds in the entire year. In 2007, another world championship year, only six did. Yet this year, even before they have reached their seasonal peak at the world championships, 19 sprinters have broken ten.
Are we to believe that more than three times as many sprinters have become sub-10 sprinters naturally in just five years? It stretches credibility.
Mullings may not be the last to be named and shamed this month. It took six weeks for him to be informed of his result, and the results of scores of sprinters’ tests in the last month have yet to be revealed. The fields in Daegu may yet be thinned a little more.
The IAAF’s announcement last week that it will introduced blood tests for all in Daegu may have a similar effect of culling the sprinting scene. A sudden withdrawal of sprinters claiming minor injuries would be no surprise. Some believe the excuses have started appearing already.
My credibility when it comes to sprinting entered a state of suspension in 1988 when I saw the women’s 100 metres record broken at the US Olympic Trials and Ben Johnson break the men’s at the Olympics.
Sadly, in spite of the wonderful performances of Usain Bolt, my credibility remains in that state. I agree wholeheartedly with IAAF vice president Sebastian Coe who advocates four year suspensions for first offenders but I would go further.
Let us make doping a criminal offence internationally punishable by incarceration. It should be written into the statutes as fraud. That is what cheating amounts to.
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 · Athletics · doping · Neil Wilson ·
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