Martin Gillingham was at a meeting where some extraordinary records were set
The banner read: “EPO cheats out.” A simple message and one that reflects sentiments shared by many fair-minded people in track and field.
The young woman holding the banner in the stands at the world championships in Edmonton, as the Russian runner Olga Yegorova was called to her marks in a heat of the women’s 5000m, was British athlete Paula Radcliffe. Radcliffe is a flawed but undeniably clean athlete who, days earlier, had missed out narrowly on a medal in the 10000m. Sadly, she is now a marked woman whose stance has been vilified by some within the sport. The boss of British athletics, the former world 5000m record holder David Moorcroft, says he even fears for her life.
That is a sign of the times. Yegorova, athletics’ first EPO (erythropoietin, a banned blood booster) cheat who was caught but then cleared on a technicality, has silent supporters within a sport which, because of its indifference to the problem in the past, is still struggling to be taken seriously. A week ago, at its board meeting in Estonia, the World Anti-Doping Agency recommended that all athletes competing at the 2004 Olympic Games should carry their own doping “passports” which will contain a complete history of the individual’s dope tests and suspensions.
As genuine as the gesture might be, it comes two decades too late. All of which recalls a personal experience at a low-key early season meeting in Chania on the Greek island of Crete. Low-key, it should be added, is what it was expected to be. But this unlikely venue on May 22 1988 provided two of the most outstanding athletic performances yet, leaving marks on the record books that will remain long after the memories of virtually anything that happened in Edmonton will have been forgotten.
It was an evening that opened my eyes bear in mind that by then I’d already competed at both an Olympic Games and a world championships to a shadier side of the track and field world and the motives of some of those who administer the sport. In hindsight, it also serves to illustrate just how easy, back then, it was for world record breakers to pass dope tests.
After winning the 400m hurdles in a modest field I hasten to add I was called to provide a urine sample in a room adjacent to the track. I was given a plastic cup surplus from the coffee machine no doubt and asked to disappear to the men’s room to fill it. This was the impromptu doping control room. At internationally recognised meetings this year, entry to such rooms can only be gained by fully accredited officials and the athletes themselves. Plastic cups have also been replaced by standard vessels with standard seals. Chania, you’ll gather, was a good deal less formal.
When I returned cup in hand, I found myself in a queue sandwiched between, and towered over by, a couple of real bruisers. They were broad-shouldered with the sort of muscle definition not even five nights a week at Virgin Active could achieve. My feelings of inadequacy were only increased by the fact they were both women.
The whole scenario was disorderly and confused. Athletes milled around, each carrying their plastic cups, and exchanging conversation and who knows what else? with coaches, fellow athletes and many hangers-on.
The queue was heading for a table where a doctor if that’s what he was sat working his way through the scores of athletes waiting to be relieved of their plastic cups. The women either side of me were, in turn, flanked by their coaches. They wore the distinctive blue tracksuits of East Germany whose athletes’ performances have since been discredited by evidence of widescale state- administered doping programmes.
When the athlete in front of me was asked the standard question, “Are you taking any routine medicine at the moment?”the coach pulled out a list as long as a R500 grocery slip.
What should follow, according to International Olympic Committee and International Association of Athletics Federations regulations, is that quite apart from the fact the athletes should have been accompanied by an official from the moment they stepped into doping control the sample should have been divided into two and sealed into separate containers.
These are the so-called A and B samples. Both should then be sent to an accredited laboratory and the A sample tested. The B sample only comes under scrutiny as a second opinion if the A sample tests positive.
It was all done more swiftly and with less pain in Chania. The “doctor” dunked a piece of what looked like litmus paper in the plastic cup, waited to see what colour it turned, and then lobbed it along with the contents of the plastic cup into a waste bin. There was certainly none of the sophistication of the tests designed to detect hundreds of substances that trapped several athletes in and around the time of Edmonton.
In Chania, Ulf Timmerman of East Germany set a world shot put record of 23,06m. Just one man, Randy Barnes of the United States, has putted further since. But he has been discredited following two positive dope tests and is now banned for life.
On the same night Timmerman’s teammate, Petra Felke, threw the javelin 76,80m. It remains the eighth-longest throw yet with six of the seven further than that having been thrown by Felke herself. Four months later, Timmerman and Felke won Olympic gold in their respective events but with distances considerably down on those achieved on that ll balmy night on Crete.
An interesting footnote to Felke’s achievements is that the specifications for the women’s javelin have recently been changed, in part to avoid the embarrassment of direct comparisons between the likes of Felke and today’s best who would struggle to get within 10m of the East German’s throw in Chania.
All the marks from Chania remain in the record books and no positive tests were reported. Looking back with the wealth of 13 years of acquired knowledge since, I can be sure there were never meant to be any.