Boos for Justin Gatlin are a message that athletics will die if we fail to tackle cheats

EPA
Simon Barnes7 August 2017

Most sporting careers — even the greatest — end in failure. That’s just the way it is. But when we’re cheated of one last night of glory by a drugs cheat who has already been banned twice we begin to feel that it’s not Usain Bolt that has failed. It’s sport.

That’s why the crowd booed Justin Gatlin’s victory in the 100 metres at the London Stadium at the weekend. Those who run athletics, those who run sport, would do well to listen to those boos.

They mean that something has gone badly wrong. Well, truth is, it’s been badly wrong for years, it just seemed that Bolt had kissed it better. Sport has carried a stink ever since Ben Johnson won the men’s 100 metres at the Olympic Games in Seoul in 1988 and then failed a drugs test.

For 20 years, running fast was prima facie evidence of cheating. The 100 metres became the dirtiest event in sport — and then came the fabulous, impossible and glorious Usain Bolt. He arrived at the Beijing Olympic Games of 2008: funny and dashing and charming and the fastest ever — by a considerable margin.

In Beijing he danced to victory and still set a world record. He made athletics fun again. Suddenly the 100 metres was the greatest sporting event ever invented and sport was once again a world of wonders.

Most athletes find failure at the end because they stay on too long. The last opponent is always Time. And had Bolt been beaten by a brilliant new boy, that would have been fine.

Well, he was. Christian Coleman, aged 21, finished ahead of Bolt, and that’s the natural order of things: most champions are gobbled up by the last dragon. That’s sport, that’s life, that’s the way time works on us all.

But Bolt and Coleman were both beaten by a 35-year-old cheat, and that doesn’t feel like the natural order of things. The era of Bolt was over, but it wasn’t followed by a glorious new age. It was a forced repatriation to the bad old days.

Gatlin was banned for two years in 2001 for amphetamines, later reduced to one. He won the 100 metres and the 200 metres at the world championships in 2005. Next year he was banned for life for testosterone. This was reduced to eight years for cooperating with the authorities, and then on appeal reduced to four. Damned if I can work that out, either.

In Pictures | World Athletics Championships 2017

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It would be different, at least to a degree, if Gatlin had ever expressed a scrap of remorse. His message in victory? “I wanted [young athletes] to know that mistakes happen but you can come back.”

He didn’t say: “I did wrong, which I deeply regret.” He didn’t say that athletes who go astray should seek forgiveness. He didn’t say, “I’m profoundly grateful for my third chance”. He said “mistakes happen” — as if an outside agency was responsible for “mistakes”. You cheat, you suffer the inconvenience of getting caught — twice, you’re banned, you come back — twice, you’re a world champion, and that makes everything all right, no?

Well, no. And, while we’re on the subject — boooo!

All those who run sport across the world should be forced to listen to that deafening and totally unsporting outbreak of booing that echoed across Stratford on Saturday night. It was a rejection, not just of Gatlin but of sport itself.

If we are to be denied a night of glory by a two-time drugs cheat, what the hell’s the point of watching? The public — the people who watch sport because we’re stupid enough to love the bloody stuff — hates, loathes, despises and even fears the drugs cheat.

So if you happen to be a sporting administrator and you want your sport to be cheered all over the world, then you’d better do something about drugs.

“It’s not the perfect script,” said Lord Coe, president of the IAAF, world’s governing body of athletics, no fence-straddler on this issue.

Gatlin’s victory can take us either of two ways. It can be the busted dam that at last provokes a tsunami of rejection of drugs in sport. Or it can be the crisis of credibility that leads to the death of athletics, taking other vulnerable sports with it.

The fence-straddlers and the politicians have had their way for too long, refusing to listen to their public. The IAAF have done sport a great service by banning the Russian team for its (unrepentant) state-sponsored doping system. Other sports, cravenly — or politically, same thing — have failed to follow suit.

Doping in sport is like Whac-a-Mole game: smack one and two more leap up in your face. What London 2017 has made clear is that we won’t stand it anymore.

In Stratford the paying public had a chance to express a view about drugs. You people who run sport: did you hear that?

Because if you failed to listen to the lesson of the London boos, sport will die a lingering death. Especially the Olympic sports: the sports that every four years make up the most fabulous fortnight in sport.

The boos carry a message to every sporting administrator in the planet: it’s not about you, it’s not about money, it’s not about power, it’s not about sporting and global politics, it’s not about showing off in the lobbies of nice hotels: it’s about sport. Fail to look after your sport and you’ll lose everything else.

If we can’t believe in the sport we’re offered, we’ll boo.

And then we’ll walk away.

Just Gatlin has taught sport a great lesson. You who run sport: heed that lesson or die.

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