IN TRACK WE ARE BECOMING OUR OWN WORST EMEMY

I remember back in the 1980s and 1990s, when American athletes like Carl Lewis, Edwin Moses, Evelyn Ashford, Valrie Briscoe-Hookes, Jackie Joyner Kersee and Florence Griffith-Joyner as well as others, dominated the sport of athletics, many Jamaicans were annoyed by what we perceived to be their arrogance. I guess it’s because the athletes we revered, the Merlene Otteys, Grace Jacksons and Raymond Stewarts, were always coming up short against them but soon we began accusing the Americans of being drug cheats.

Our accusations were based mainly on the fact that the Americans were good, very good and they always seemed that much better than our athletes and that caused our frustrations to build like a water behind a dam. Then in 2003 along came Dr. Wade Exum. Dr Exum in over 30,000 pages of evidence released to Sports Illustrated and to several US newspapers that 19 Olympic medalists including Lewis as well as hundreds of other athletes had failed drug tests but were allowed to compete at major championships between 1988 and 2000. Suddenly there was validation to what many Jamaicans had ‘believed’.

The BALCo scandal a few years later further exposed what by then the world had come to know; Americans were systematic cheaters. Athletes like Regina Jacobs, Calvin and Alvin Harrison, Marion Jones, Tim Montgomery, Jerome Young,  C.J. Hunter and others either made hasty exits or were forced into permanent retirement from the sport once it was discovered that they were on doping programmes under the supervision of one Victor Conte, who ran the Bay Are Laboratories in California.

Fast forward to the present and it is Jamaica that has the best sprinters in the world. It is Jamaica that has dominated the last two major international events – the 2008 Olympics and the 2009 World Championships. It is Jamaica that has two of the three fastest men in history and three of the fastest women of all time. It is Jamaica that holds the coveted world records in the 100 metres, 200 metres and sprint relay for men. Our women created history at the Olympics by getting a gold and two silvers in the women’s 100 metres. Veronica Campbell Brown became only the second woman in history to defend the Olympic 200-metre title. In short, we have in many ways become to the Americans what they were to us two decades ago.

But along with that success has come something that Jamaicans are refusing to accept but which we are no longer able to hide from. Steve Mullings positive test for a masking agent just two weeks before the start of the IAAF World Athletic Championships in Daegu, South Korea, is the latest in a growing list of doping test failures for Jamaican athletes – Julien Dunkley in 2008, Yohan Blake, Allodin Fothergill, Lansford Spence, Marvin Anderson and Sherri-Ann Brooks in 2009; Bobby Gay Wilkins and Shelly Ann Fraser in 2010 and now Mullings. No longer can it be said that Jamaican athletes don’t cheat. And even if you throw in the fact that Blake et al and Fraser were minor bans, suggesting that there was clearly no intention on their part to cheat, it is the perception that weighs more heavily on the reputation of Jamaica’s elite athletes.

So now we have the Americans, the British and the rest of the world now calling us cheats and what can we say? That we’re not cheats? That Mullings trains overseas with Tyson Gay? That local based athletes dont take drugs?  For a while the latter argument was a valid one but it no longer holds water given what happened with Blake and company prior to the start of the Berlin championships.

Our doping troubles have even given credence to people like Victor Conte who despite never having been to Jamaica, has the gall to turn his nose up at our systems here in Jamaica despite the fact that the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) praised us highly last year for the efforts that have been put in place to ensure the integrity of the local drug testing programme. That, and the fact that it was the Jamaica Anti-Doping Commission that caught Mullings, Blake and company as well as Dunkley.

The athletes, too, and their handlers have to take much of the blame. Blake and company tested positive for a mild stimulant that was contained in a supplement they were taking because while they claimed they checked the list of ingredients listed on the bottle, their diligence should have taken them beyond that, given that under the WADA Code they are responsible for whatever is found inside their bodies. Shelly Ann Fraser, too, after failing to notify testers in Shanghai that she had ingested Oxycodone in a desperate attempt to fight off intense pain she was experiencing following a denture procedure, admitted that she was not familiar with the list of banned substances. Now, as World and Olympic champion, how can that be? The titles she holds puts her under even greater scrutiny than most female athletes so how then could she not do what is absolutely necessary to ensure that her record remains spotless. Now, one more ‘mistake’ like that and her career could be over for good.

The best we can hope for now is that there are no further embarrassing results for our athletes in the years to come. Because of our size and the talent that exists across the Caribbean, it is not inconceivable that this dominance we now enjoy in the short sprints, wont last for more than a few more years, it is imperative that in that time that we have remaining at the top, our athletes and our administrators do what is absolutely necessary to ensure that Jamaica’s great legacy in the sport is not sullied any further.