THG were three letters that blighted athletics in 2003. The ”designer steroid” was unknown to testers at the start of the year but by the end, it was obliterating memories of the world championships three months earlier.
The drug, tetrahydrogestrinone to give its full name, had been deliberately modified to make it undetectable by conventional testing methods.
The fact that only a handful of athletes have so far tested positive for it — most notably Britain’s European 100m champion Dwain Chambers — is perhaps less significant than how the drug came to the attention of the testers.
The United States Anti-Doping Agency said a ”high-profile coach” whose identity has never been revealed sent a sample of the drug to Professor Don Catlin at the University of California, Los Angeles, who developed a test.
The haphazard manner in which THG was discovered suggests that other specially engineered drugs are being used, unknown to the authorities.
Equipped with the new test, the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) ordered more than 400 samples from the Paris World Championships to be re-analysed. Only two showed the presence of THG and they were believed to be from Chambers and US shot-putter Kevin Toth.
Chambers, who is still awaiting his fate, said his US-based coach, Remi Korchemny, had advised him to use nutritionist Victor Conte, a former jazz musician whose San Francisco-based Balco Laboratories were blamed for supplying THG.
Balco is the subject of an ongoing grand jury investigation in the US, to which a host of top-level athletes have given evidence.
Although the THG scandal did not emerge until later, the World Championships in Paris in August were overshadowed by a different drugs scandal.
However, the controversy began on the track.
When veteran US sprinter Jon Drummond fell foul of the unpopular new false start rule and was disqualified from the quarterfinals of the 100m, he lay on the Stade de France track and refused to leave until he was reinstated.
It was fully 30 minutes before Drummond left the arena, in tears.
He withdrew from the championships two days later before being officially disqualified, but the man known as the Clown Prince of Track has prompted the IAAF to rethink the rule, which makes any athlete guilty of a false start liable for disqualification, regardless of whether they committed the original offence.
After the farce, the 100m title turned up a surprise winner in Kim Collins, the lightly built Commonwealth champion in long black socks from the tiny Caribbean islands of St Kitts and Nevis.
Some observers equated the slowish time of 10,07 seconds with a freak win, but history is on Collins’s side — on four occasions the winner of the world title has gone on to take the Olympic gold.
With Marion Jones taking a year off to have a baby boy, Kelli White easily completed a sprint double. Then news leaked out from the testing laboratory that the American had tested positive for the stimulant modafinil.
White said she took the drug to counter narcolepsy, a condition that causes extreme tiredness, but she is almost certain to be stripped of her titles.
Continuing a public relations nightmare for the US, the day after winning the 400m Jerome Young was revealed as the US athlete who tested positive for the steroid nandrolone before he competed in the 2000 Sydney Olympics.
Amid the gloom, the championships were lit up by some superb races, none better than the men’s 5 000m. Having won his fourth title at 1 500m, Hicham El Guerrouj attempted an audacious double, but was pipped at the post by the 18-year-old Kenyan Eliud Kipchoge.
El Guerrouj is promising to try for the double again next year in Athens.
In the 10 000m, the torch passed from two-time Olympic champion Haile Gebrselassie to his protégé Kenenisa Bekele.
The highlight for the home crowd was a memorable 10 minutes when Eunice Barber grabbed the long-jump gold with her final effort before the French women beat a US quartet hindered by White’s absence to the sprint relay title.
South Africa took a rare high-jump double through Jacques Freitag and eventual women’s World Athlete of the Year Hestrie Cloete.
Qatar controversially bought a gold medal in the steeplechase after Stephen Cherono was recruited from Kenya and renamed Said Saeed Shaheen.
The biggest winner financially of 2003 was Maria Mutola, who collected the $1-million Golden League jackpot for winning the 800m at all six meetings.
Away from the track, Britain’s Paula Radcliffe took women’s marathon running into yet another dimension with a world best of two hours, 15 minutes and 25 seconds in London, while Paul Tergat of Kenya improved the men’s mark to 2:04,55.
And so the Olympics beckon — will they be remembered for sport alone? — Sapa-AFP