Such was the Irish efficiency on the global athletics stage when I was growing up that seeing the likes of Sonia O’Sullivan or Catherina McKiernan or Rob Heffernan or Derval O’Rourke feature prominently at major televised events was almost nonchalantly taken as a given. That’s not arrogance, just faith and confidence.
Until that one occasion it all went horribly wrong for the second most famous sportsperson to graduate to the world stage via Cobh. No, not at the Olympic Games during which diarrhoea prevented her from doing herself justice. Well before that, when Sonia was cheated out of what was rightfully hers by Chinese athletes who were more souped up than any Subaru Impreza ever was.
You would have liked to think that there would be no way such nefarious practices wouldn’t be even thought about nowadays, never mind tolerated. But then, such aspirations would be predicated on the belief that the advent of the World Anti Doping Federation (WADA) would signal the end of such dodgy dealings.
Bad sadly as we now know, WADA have proven as useful in the discharge of their duties as a chocolate fireguard. Examples of their ineptitude and complicitness in sordid sporting practices are so vast a voluminous encyclopaedia could be constructed from same. On Lance Armstrong alone!
The thing is though, you’d think after all the shame Armstrong perpetrated on world sport – not only his own discipline – and well beyond sport indeed, that there would at least be an appetite not to let the same dross happen again.
Evidence doesn’t back that up though. Whether it be the case of Russian whistle blowers Juliya and Vitaly Stepanova or the latest round of Chinese whispers which prompted 23-time Olympic medalist Michael Phelps to articulate what anyone with an ounce of a fair mind would be thinking.
That WADA stink every bit as bit as much as if not more than those they are supposed to be policing. The latest Chinese State-sponsored doping being brushed under the carpet prompting the king of Olympic water to comment:
“As athletes, we can no longer blindly place our faith in an organisation that is either incapable of or unwilling to enforce its own regulations consistently around the world”.
So say all of us Michael. The great tragedy will be the pondering of how much of what we see next month in Paris will be believable?