Paul Lewis: Fraudster athletes must be hit hard

Maybe it's time to take a leaf from the Italians' book and press criminal charges against the drugs cheats.

Justin Gatlin's testing positive for testosterone highlights, once again, just how far drugs have penetrated US and international sport, coming hard on the heels of the Floyd Landis/Tour de France affair and the Barry Bonds/baseball schemozzle. American football pioneered the use of amphetamines and steroids in the 60s and stays ahead of the drugs detectives, even now.

US track & field is such a woeful and long-running story that it is impossible to think of the US as anything other than the new East Germany, although drugs are endemic in many other sporting nations.

In the 100m, three of the five men who have broken 9.8s have tested positive for drugs. There are endless other comparisons and endless famous names involved. Think Ben Johnson, Tim Montgomery and even anti-drugs spokesman Carl Lewis, severely embarrassed a few years ago when it was revealed he tested positive three times for banned stimulants during the 1988 Olympic trials. Lewis went on to glory at the 1988 Seoul Olympics which was where the Ben Johnson drugs scandal erupted.

If the letter of the law had been applied, Lewis would have been banned and out of the Olympics but the US Olympic Committee ruled that his misuse of the stimulants was inadvertent. Later decisions saw the permissible level of stimulants in the human body raised to a level where, now, Lewis would not have returned a positive test.

Gatlin and Landis are maintaining their innocence. Gatlin's coach, Trevor Graham, quickly flew the kite that Gatlin had been set up by a masseur who rubbed cream containing testosterone into his body. Even Gatlin has distanced himself from this theory which immediately drew comparisons with Dieter Baumann, the German athlete who claimed his toothpaste had been spiked but who could provide no evidence of same and was banned from the 2000 Sydney Olympics.

The Desperate Dance of the Druggies has tended to disguise the fact that drug use in sport has become systemic. It is commonplace to do it and commonplace to lie about it. The prizes - riches, fame and immortality - have proved too much. Top athletes take drugs because the competition does. Their motivation is financial and, in many cases, if they are stripped of their medals, it doesn't matter. They already have financial security. There is no deterrent, other than morality. And who cares about that?

They care more about the masking agents and the schedules that allow the drugs to drop from the system, beating the testers.

Many national and international sporting bodies have tended to look the other way, even as they make bold statements about catching the cheats. The problem of drugs is a big ugly bear that some sports bodies hope will go away if they do not disturb it while it is rooting through their rubbish bins.

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) even tried to dissuade Italy from applying criminal charges to competitors found to have doped in this year's Turin Winter Olympics. Italian laws carry jail terms of up to two years. While an arrest is quite a different matter from what might happen at the end of a tortuous journey through a legal system, maybe it's time for sport to act.

It is a kind of fraud, when all is said and done. A professional athlete on drugs defrauds his or her country, employers, sponsors, endorsers, fans and certainly the greats who have gone before and did not do it on drugs. It would take a huge international effort to criminalise doping offences and, for that reason, will probably not happen. Or not until track & field becomes so marginalised that the money men feel they have to act.

The 2008 Beijing Olympics will mark 20 years since the Seoul games. At those games, I marvelled at Johnson's huge musculature and blistering starts. All from drugs. I interviewed Florence Griffiths Joyner, the darling of US athletics who died at 38, face down on her bed. This was one good-looking and personable woman, let me tell you, whose rippling muscles did not detract from her femininity at all. She never produced a positive drugs test - not even in death, which was ruled to be from suffocation brought on by an epileptic fit.

But the suspicion lives on. Few who saw Flo Jo will ever believe she was not drug assisted. Her weightlifting programme and starting technique was developed with Johnson. Her world 100m and 200m records still stand.

And then there's Lewis. He should have been stripped of his medals from Seoul, just as Johnson was.

The IOC said his medals would stand because they have a three-year statute of limitations on drugs. What? Why?

The authorities are still too keen to preserve the heroes. Until that changes and an effective deterrent is found, track & field and many other sports will continue to be drug-ridden jokes, increasingly bereft of credibility and followers.