Athletics pool seems a lot cleaner this week

ON ATHLETICS:Just when you thought it was safe to get back in the water . . . Be afraid, very afraid.

No one said Australia didn’t have their share of sharks already, and now it seems they’re after infesting their sporting waters too, and it’s “only a matter of time” before they start coming to a shore near you.

David Howman says that, a man I know speaks from the heart, not just the head. Last summer, ahead of the London Olympics, Howman told me all about his fears for the future of sport – and it wasn’t pretty. If anyone thought good old-fashioned drugs was still a problem, wait until the organised criminals got involved. Well, turns out they already have – that Howman knew exactly what he was talking about.

“That criminal underworld are getting a grip into sport,” he reiterated yesterday, “not just in bribery and betting, but including doping.”

Howman, Wada’s director general, was responding to the truly frightening report released by the Australian Crime Commission (ACC) this week, which has uncovered the apparently epidemic use of banned growth hormones in rugby league and Australian Rules football (for starters), potentially in other major sports too, and all linked to major organised crime.

The ACC carried out a 12-month secret surveillance operation, involving telephone taps, coercive meetings, etc – and identified mostly team-based doping, linking the taking of the banned drugs to money-laundering and match-fixing, and specifically to certain gangs in Russia, and Italy. Now we all know what that means.

Be very, very afraid.

Codenamed Project Aperio – “to lay bare” – what the ACC report has also revealed is that this isn’t about the great white sharks, such as steroids, or EPO, and the other old reliable PEDS (as in performance enhancing drugs) but more about the PIEDS (as in performance and image enhancing drugs). It’s not just about being faster, higher, stronger anymore, but looking the part, too (at least if you’re working out in the gym), especially when many “image” enhancing products, mostly the anti-aging type, are hormone-based, as in one of the old PEDS of choice, human growth hormone.

Utterly pessimistic

Coming on the back of cycling’s recent revelations about its enduring doping culture, the court appearance of an infamous Spanish “blood” doctor, the latest baseball scandal linking players with a clinic in Miami that freely distributes vials of hormones (disguised as anti-aging products), and Dick Pound, the former head of Wada, saying he was now “sure” tennis had a doping problem, no wonder Howman remains so utterly pessimistic.

Indeed our own Olympic chief, Pat Hickey, said as much last summer, that the biggest threat to sport was now organised crime, and betting, and although he didn’t sound entirely convincing at the time, he certainly does now.

None of this comes as any surprise to those of us already living in the world of track and field. That’s not saying it isn’t a little frustrating, slightly annoying, because for years now track and field has been the soft target, easily mocked, primarily on the notion no one wins anything in athletics unless they’re consuming industrial amounts of anabolic steroids or repeatedly injecting small vials of EPO.

That may or may not be still true, but at times it seems athletics still gets the hard rap, when other sports get off lightly – namely the team sports such as soccer and rugby, but also tennis, golf and even cricket. Whatever about the hit and miss of drug testing, the single most effective method of detection is now the biological passport, which the IAAF have both managed and insisted on implementing, and is definitely catching out the cheats.

There is still no full or proper implementation of biological passports in soccer and rugby, nor indeed tennis, golf and cricket. Yet perhaps the biggest doping revelation this week didn’t come out of Australia, but out of America.

No one has a longer, more romantic love affair with sport than the Americans, or certainly their own big three – football, baseball and basketball. Yet here’s what Bill Simmons of ESPN wrote, on their popular Grantland site, after considering the performance of Ray Lewis of Raven’s fame in last Sunday’s Super Bowl – and his miraculous torn triceps muscle recovery, at age 37, in 10 weeks, an injury that usually takes six months minimum.

“I believe that Ray Lewis cheated. I believe that to be true based on circumstantial evidence, his age, his over-competitiveness, the history of that specific injury, and the fact that his ‘recovery’ made my shit detector start vibrating like a chainsaw.

“I believe in my right to write the previous paragraph because athletes pushed us to this point. We need better drug testing. We need blood testing. We need biological passports. We need that stuff now. Not in three years. Not in two years. Now. I don’t even know what I am watching anymore.”

Suddenly, for a change at least, athletics is looking a lot less shark infested this week, at least compared to other sports.