Michael O’Reilly: Fighting to fight on at Rio 2016

Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean you’re not going to miss your bus. There is a standard preliminary test of Olympic efficiency, and it’s measured by the length of the queues through security at the entrance to the main press centre and the speed with which the connecting buses can spill you out to the various venues.

It's early days, but when that preliminary test leaves you short of air and your T-shirt plastered to your back, the signs aren't great. Every city that hosts the Olympic Games takes a few days to find its feet, and Rio de Janeiro is no exception. Although perhaps more than any other host city it also seems there are parts of Rio that aren't even along for the ride.

In City of God, the 2002 film directed by Fernando Meirelles, one of the men behind last night's opening ceremony at the Maracanã Stadium, the transformation of the Cidade de Deus suburb of Rio from newly built housing project to urban slum (known as a favela) is depicted in all its violent and gruesome glory.

Wealthy suburb

The final confrontation between drug dealer Li’l Zé and vigilante-criminal Knockout Ned is played out over the local proverb: “If you run the beast catches you; if you stay the beast eats you.” Which, of course, equates to our own expression: “Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.”

That may well become a sort of motto of these Games. The Rio organisers, it seems, have gone to considerable lengths to keep these Games as far away from the favelas as possible, at least in locating the main Olympic Park in the wealthy suburb of Barra.

In some ways that has only heightened the interest in where the favelas are and how they function. Talk to local volunteers and one of the first pieces of advice they will give you is to take a trip up there, which is what many of us here now intend on doing.

Because hiding things away like that is rarely the best way of dealing with the truth. Perhaps there’s a lesson here for the IABA in the way they handled the positive doping test of middleweight boxer Michael O’Reilly since Thursday morning.

That the news first broke via a tip-off to a journalist is nothing new: trace the trial of all such Irish doping stories in and around the Olympics and they've all arrived in similar circumstances, or at least with little or no respect for so-called due process. The problem therefore was not that the story was broken, but the way in which it has been subsequently handled, starting with the bizarre tweet from fellow boxer Paddy Barnes effectively calling for the guilty party to come out and reveal himself.

O’Reilly’s own since deleted tweet that he was looking forward to fighting on Friday week suggested a further breakdown in what should been a straightforward process: that the IABA had already confirmed a positive test at that stage only added to the sense of mismanagement.

Now it seems O’Reilly is about to contest the positive finding, request his B-sample be analysed as soon as possible, and with that present a case of inadvertent use of a banned performance-enhancing substance, most likely by way of a contaminated supplement.

That’s unlikely to get him off the hook in the short term, given the strict liability code now familiar to anyone with even a passing acquaintance with any anti-doping programme.

There was a time when inadvertent use carried weight: along with the storm surrounding Michelle de Bruin’s performances at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, Irish distance runner Marie Davenport (nee McMahon) found herself at the centre of some controversy after reports of a positive test some 48 hours after running in her heats of the 5,000m

Then only 21 and still a student at Providence College, she had taken a cold remedy a few days before running the 5,000m, where she finished 13th. Within 48 hours, the Irish newspapers were running a story that she had failed a drugs test and was facing a four-year ban.

Cold medicine

As it turned out, Davenport had tested for an anti-inflammatory contained in the cold medicine, which was not on the banned list, but did require a declaration. She was reprimanded by the

International Olympic Committee

, but never banned, although those were still the early days of the growing list of banned substances.

In 2003, Irish distance runner Geraldine Hendricken also tested positive for a banned substance, in her case for traces of the banned substance nandrolone. Although she went to great expense to present evidence that her positive test was the result of a contaminated supplement, she still served a two-year ban.

In two further instances where Irish distance runners tested positive for the banned blood-boasting product EPO, both put their hands up more or less straightaway. Cathal Lombard, on the eve of the Athens Olympics in 2004, was notified of his positive test for EPO during his final training camp in Italy, the week before joining his Irish teams in Athens. He declined the testing of the B-sample, was withdrawn from the Irish team and served a two-year ban.

Likewise with Martin Fagan, who also admitted to using EPO in his efforts to qualify for the London Olympics in 2012, and who also accepted a two-year ban, without requesting the testing of the B-sample.

For O’Reilly then, the testing of his B-sample may well buy him some time to prepare his appeal against any ban – or more importantly to keep alive his chances of competing in Rio – but it’s more likely a case of damned if he does, damned if he doesn’t. Because the damage is already done and there’s no limiting it now, only accepting it and moving on.