Like the war on drugs, the battle against doping can't be won

We take it for granted that many of the world’s finest athletes use illegal methods, which is why the sport died out long ago as a mainstream passion

The IAAF president, Lamine Diack, front left, after presenting medals to junior athletes at the World Race Walking Cup in Russia in 2008 (Getty)

A friend and I, as befits emotionally stunted middle-aged men, spent the other night channel-hopping in the search for televised sport. Eventually, we settled on an unimaginably dull snooker match from Riga, played in sullen silence before an audience of five snoozing Latvians. Then we spent 30 bemused minutes failing to understand the point-scoring system of an Australian Rules football match in Melbourne.

But before succumbing to that high-octane riot, we had already rejected a sport both of us once adored. Within three seconds of landing on a high-class athletics meeting, a harmonised “Naah, not this” went up, and we flipped to the sepulchral snooker.

When we were kids, some 40 years ago, athletics was something you watched every summer Saturday on Grandstand. This particular friend regularly saw it live at the Crystal Palace stadium near his home. Now, schlubs like us would rather watch almost anything else, which includes the shinty over on Sky Sports 294.

The primary explanation for this lack of enthusiasm is doping. A couple of days after our nocturnal ramble through sporting esoterica, The Sunday Times reported that the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) has suppressed swathes of dodgy blood test results involving Olympic gold medallists and world record holders in endurance events going back to 2001.

This scoop acted as midwife to an even more recherché sport than shinty. If and when this new competition is adopted by the IOC, expect to hear this announcement as a retired athletics administrator mounts the podium. “Olympic Sepp Blatter Impersonation, gold medal, medal d’or ... Lamine Diack, Senegal.”

Mr Diack, who leaves his post as IAAF president later this month, responded to the allegations in the new lingua franca of the embarrassed sporting overlord. In fluent Blatterese, he dismissed them as a “joke”, apparently sourcing them to a cunning plan by one of the two candidates to succeed him (Lord Coe or the Ukrainian pole-vault legend Sergey Bubka), hatched to boost their credentials. “They are playing with a redistribution of the medals,” he gnomically claimed. By Tuesday afternoon, the IAAF had described the allegations as “sensationalist and confusing”.

In this one sense, I sympathise with Mr Diack. The war against doping he has been evidently losing is as futile and unwinnable as its mirror image, the “war on drugs”. Rewatching The West Wing as part of my training regime for the forthcoming US election, I came across an episode in which a presidential adviser delineates with crystal clarity the pointlessness of the war on drugs; how, within weeks of taking out one Colombian cocaine lord, another will have replaced him.

With doping in athletics, you cannot estimate its extent by extrapolating from poundage seized, as you can with recreational drugs. But you can and should assume that for every positive blood test, scores of negative ones were negative only because the drug was undetectable or had left the athlete’s system. We take it for granted that many of the world’s finest athletes use illegal methods (enriching their own blood, if not injecting human growth hormone), which is why the sport died out long ago as a mainstream passion.

Its integrity, which was on life support in the mid-1970s when the steroidal Warsaw Pact shot-putter became a lazy joke, died in 1988. A grave Des Lynam announced its death, with the news that the credit for Canadian Ben Johnson’s startling 100m win in Seoul belonged to a syringe. Efforts since then to resurrect that integrity via more draconian testing regimes and sophisticated laboratory analysis have done nothing to shift the presumption that the best chemists will always be a pace ahead of the most rigorous testers.

In the realm of fantasy where logic defeats cant, it would be accepted that doping is less a moral issue than an inevitability. People who devote themselves from childhood to rising in the cold and dark to train, to punishing their bodies until they live in constant pain, and to denying themselves the pleasures the rest of us take for granted, do so to win. If they feel that they cannot win without cheating, as they will when they think any of their rivals is cheating, they will rationalise cheating as the justified equalisation of an unfair disadvantage.

There are only two ways in which athletics could come to be regarded as honest. One is persuading the public that no one is doping. This is impossible. The other is informing the public that everyone is doping, which is perfectly possible.

The only way athletics could recover its integrity, in other words, is by going further than legalising the use of drugs, blood-enrichment and other currently illegal methods. It is by making them mandatory. What kills it as a sport isn’t the assumption that some athletes have had lab assistance. It is the nagging fear that some of them haven’t, and that their efforts and talent are therefore being betrayed.

Only if the IAAF took control of the chemistry and financed production of the most effective and safest drugs could an uneven playing field be levelled. If that requires giving a lifetime ban to any athlete who tests negative, integrity comes at a price. Without this change of policy – and quite frankly, it may take a while – athletics will only escape irrelevance during the Olympics and World Championships, when the grandeur of the stage tempts us to hush the little voice in the head that whispers about doping in return for a chance to revel in its beauty again.

At all other times, snooker from Latvia will have the edge over even a stellar athletics field, largely because the only drug the bored-looking green baize boys could have taken is the same narcotic as the five Latvians dozing in the crowd.