Cheats on the run or lying low

On Athletics: Until quite recently any athlete caught taking drugs needed to be incredibly stupid. Testing was far more random and far less reliable than now, and often the testers did not know what they were testing for. The cheats were often one step ahead.

Nowadays, an athlete would be exceptionally stupid to even think of taking drugs. The insanity of the goings-on in the French countryside this week, and the latest collapse of that beautiful cycle race, has surely underlined that.

The battle, in other words, has turned, and the war on drug cheats is now there to be won. This may sound naïvely optimistic, but all that happened in the Tour de France this week has been a kick in the teeth for anyone who thought drug use in sport was not a crime, not unless you got caught.

It seems, finally, there is nowhere left to hide, and that definitely represents a massive change.

Perhaps blood transfusions, EPO, and good, old-fashioned testosterone are still being used in the peloton, and perhaps in track and field too - but look out! You're not going to get away with it for long.

How things have changed! In Speed Trap, the 1990 autobiography of Charlie Francis, the picture was so different that an athlete on reading it might be tempted to try his luck and indulge in known performance-enhancing substances such as stanozolol or furazabol.

Francis, lest anyone forget, was the man who transformed Ben Johnson from a skinny, awkward kid of 93 pounds, who looked slow and ran slow, to the highly explosive, highly charged bullet who ran 9.79 seconds to win the Olympic 100 metres in Seoul.

Totally illegally, of course.

"The steroid ban," wrote Francis, "was essentially unenforceable . . . a technicality, an arbitrary rule that no one followed. Every steroid has a clearance time, measured from the last dose, after which its metabolites can no longer be detected. Officials often took pains to warn athletes about any potential risk, and there were widespread cover-ups and trade-offs at international meets, which led athletes to shave clearance times ever closer to the meets."

Testing, in other words, was a joke, and no one was surprised, added Francis, when throughout two decades of acknowledged doping in East Germany, only one of their athletes failed a drugs test at an international competition.

Cycling's drug problem has always been more embedded than that of athletics, but no one can deny the Tour de France is trying hard to clean up its act. Expelling riders like Alexandr Vinokourov and Michael Rasmussen, bearer of the revered maillot jaune, is proof that tolerance is now at zero, and the feeling is these were the last of the old chaudières - cycling slang for riders who cannot stay off the drugs.

In athletics, there is some evidence that many of the drug cheats have already gone into hiding, hopefully never to return.

This is a world championship year, the start of the run-in to the Beijing Olympics, and usually in such a year standards rise accordingly. Instead, they seem to have levelled off or often declined - and it's no coincidence that this comes at a time when the level and effectiveness of drug testing has sown unprecedented fear among the cheats.

Take the men's 5,000 metres: four years ago there were 24 sub-13 minute times, while so far this year there have been none. And in the men's 1,500 metres, there were four sub-3:30 times in 2003, but again none so far this year. That could have nothing to do with improved testing for EPO, but it's worth noting nonetheless.

Still there are those prepared to risk it. Just this week, Jolanda Ceplak, Slovenia's former European champion and world indoor record holder over 800 metres, was announced as a positive for EPO. She was done at an out-of-competition test in Monaco - the home of the IAAF - which sounds almost comically reckless on her part.

And last week, Russia's world-record holder in the hammer, Tatyana Lysenko, tested positive for illegal hormones, also in an out-of-competition test, at a national training camp in Moscow. How brainless was that?

Naturally, suspicion still tends to fall on any athlete who comes out and breaks a world record these days, and especially if he or she is an American sprinter. The legacy of Justin Gatlin and Marion Jones lives on long after their scandalous exit into retirement.

This is what faces Tyson Gay, the latest American speed merchant and the man widely tipped to break the 100-metre world record of 9.77 seconds.

His credibility is hardly helped by the fact his coach, Lance Brauman, is serving a one-year sentence at Texarkana Federal Correctional Institute after being found guilty on five counts relating to fraudulent payment of athletes from student assistance funds.

"People are assuming, just because I'm running fast, I must be on drugs," Gay recently admitted.

"People are already thinking it's impossible, what I'm doing. I'm hoping people will understand the sport will get better.

"I'm hoping you can have a track meet without building up steroids. I'm going to focus on myself and stay clean."

Tyson comes across as a highly likeable guy, the kind of athlete you would like to trust. He was reportedly bullied by some older sprinters at the athletes' village at the last World championships in Helsinki, possibly because he was so against drug use.

But that's the real telltale sign that the war on drugs is being won. When athletes, like their cycling counterparts, are not prepared to stay quiet anymore. Or at least when they are prepared to tell the cheaters how incredibly stupid they are.