Keith Duggan/Sideline Cut: The most encouraging news to emerge from a week that has brought athletics to its knees came from Dick Pound of the World Anti-Doping Agency, who has said it is time to go after the coaches and agents.
Why those concerned with saving the poisoned soul of athletics are only arriving at this conclusion now is the mystery. Above all sports, the relationship between track and field athletes and their coaches is based on faith and trust and an almost childlike dependency. Athletics is such a solitary grind of a pursuit that it often seems to stunt the ability of its stars to establish fully rounded relationships with those who live beyond the pale of athletics obsession. And so we have become accustomed to athletes leaning on coaches not just for guidance towards excellence but for reassurance and kind words and love; for normal human needs that tend to get waylaid in the quest for faster times and greater distances.
As Dwain Chambers comes to terms with his infamous and imperishable role in the radical exposure, the fact that he is not alone is cold comfort for the extinguished light of British athletics. Because his name was spun into orbit first, it will always be most readily associated with tetrahydrogestrinone, the drug that is certainly more easily absorbed than spoken by the tongue. Chambers will become to THG what poor old Ben Johnson became to plain old steroids. Every day, more names have followed - among them Regina Jacobs, two-time world champion and the first woman to run the sub-four-minute metric mile indoors. Yesterday, the Chicago Tribune announced that John McEwen, a US hammer thrower of national renown, had also tested positive.
They will fall under the cold and damning label of "cheat". But it has to be asked: could Dwain Chambers have risen as far as he did without being persuaded to at least try some nourishing supplements by figures that the culture of athletics taught him to learn from and respect and listen to? The fear, of course, is that Chambers and company is just the first on a long list of infamy. The slew of frozen fluid samples taken from the World Championship in Paris last August could implicate an entire tournament of track and field stars, enough, in fact, to establish an alternative sports carnival that openly espouses the use of chemical substances.
The details behind the discovery of this latest Machiavellian agent for better athletic achievement are truly fantastic. Victor Conte and Balco are names that suggest an old James Bond movie. That Victor was an accomplished bass player who strummed under the pseudonym Walkin' Fish just rinses the whole episode in bathos.
The story has also served to illustrate the tightness of the world of athletics. When you talk to people involved in athletics, no matter what the level, it seems everybody knows everybody. Hence the labyrinthine plot involving the super-slick Conte and Chambers's coach, Remi Khorchemny, the inevitable hoary old Soviet shadow who was coaching Olympic champion sprinters back in the early 1970s and is now involved with Chambers. And Conte was the nutritionist to big bad CJ Hunter, who embarrassed an entire auditorium at the Sydney Olympics by putting on the biggest televised tear-fest since Sally Field won an Oscar.
CJ went home in disgrace after his sample was found to be toxic and thereby tainted the Olympian feats of his soon-to-be-ex-wife, Marion Jones, the fastest woman alive. And Jones, of course, was yesterday expected to put in an appearance in San Francisco, along with her husband, Tim Montgomery, the fastest man alive, under subpoena to answer questions about Balco and tax fraud. The whole thing seems scandalous in the Twenties sense of the word; far from further demoralising the tired world of athletics, the arena seems to have become electrified with the sense that the whole dirty house is about to come tumbling down.
No matter how low athletics sank in recent years, with summer meetings that were in previous decades drawing packed houses played out in front of empty seats, never before was the potential attraction of the Olympics called into question. But now there are queries regarding sponsors' waning hunger for a slice of the games and doubts as to whether people will want to pay upwards of $70 and $80 to see the athletic endeavours of souped-up heroes. The answer is, of course, yes. Unless the broadcast giants take an unprecedented step and elect to black out the Olympics on sheer principle, it will always thrive as an event.
It has been with some trepidation that the US authorities have confided that they cannot yet ascertain how deep-rooted the THG corruption is - as if they had inadvertently stumbled on a truth too great for their own understanding: that athletics is truly ruined; that it is nothing more than a pharmaceutical freak-show with maybe, just maybe, the odd lone conscience floating in a sea of skulduggery and narcissism.
At some level, this is disturbing. But shocking? Sport and the world in general have changed a lot since we tuned in to watch Johnson v Lewis in Seoul. Since then, we have become accustomed to extreme sights on television. Wars are beamed into our living rooms; killings and executions are filmed and broadcast; mass graves are unearthed; starving children are filmed. All of us who live in more privileged and fortunate societies can see and absorb these things without being too upset to sit down for our next meal or meet friends for drinks. So how genuinely moved or indignant can we be to learn that Johnson, granddaddy of modern athletics cheats, was probably the rule as opposed to the exception?
Reality television became a global phenomenon because we sit down in the hope of watching actual personalities do something stupid or say something silly or somehow demean themselves for general delectation. And the world's MTV generation adores Jackass, a grimly unfunny show where the protagonists set out to cause minor harm to themselves through a series of tired stunts and japes. So it is a bit much to assume that athletics and what it represents will bring out the hidden nobility in us all and that we will, quivering with moral outrage, just switch off.
No, we will watch, en masse, in idle curiosity and the stadium in Athens will be full and if the new 100 metres Olympic champion is discovered to be a fraud, well, hey, the moment will be captured for posterity on camcorder. And of course it is the athlete that will be branded and stripped of dignity, like the sorry Johnson, who had to race against horses to turn a buck. No sporting misdemeanour deserves that.
The coaches and laboratory geeks will just step into the shadows until they find another hard body to tinker with. If they start shooting the scientists instead of the guinea pigs, then maybe athletics could be made great by the next generation of athletes who are running egg-and-spoon races now.
Until then, top-class athletics will remain a funny, funny farm.
