Olympics: Time for athletes to restore sport's good name

4.00pm - By MIKE ROWBOTTOM

Among the promotional posters which loom over the heat-hazed Olympic road system here is one featuring the now absent Greek sprinter Ekaterini Thanou, bearing the message: "Impossible is temporary."

There is an unspoken coda to that hubristic assertion, as someone here remarked the other day: "Shame is permanent."

The Greeks have arrived at the centrepiece of the Games - the athletics programme which gets fully under way today - with only a numbed gap where Thanou and her training partner Konstadinos Kederis should be.

But in the wake of a doping case which has seen the two most celebrated home athletes shuffle out of the spotlight, they will be hoping fervently that the rest of the world's athletes can provide these Olympics with permanent memories of a less troubling kind.

In tonight's 10,000 metres final, for instance, there will be an opportunity for the athletics world to say hail and farewell to the man who has dominated endurance running in the past 10 years, Haile Gebrselassie.

In what will be his last major track final, the little Ethiopian with the dazzling smile and deadening pace will attempt to stall the awesome progress of his protege Kenenisa Bekele, who has already taken over his world 5,000m and 10,000m records this season.

Elsewhere, great deeds are expected from the endlessly effervescent Swede Carolina Kluft, who appears ready at 21 to add the Olympic heptathlon gold medal to the world title she won in Paris last year.

And expected from Asafa Powell, the 21-year-old Jamaican who has established his pre-eminence in the 100m event with consecutive wins over the defending champion, Maurice Greene, of the United States.

And of course from Paula Radcliffe, who is desperate to transmute the pre-eminence she has established in the marathon into gold. For what seems like years, but is probably only months, Radcliffe has been spoken of as Britain's only realistic contender for an athletics gold medal.

The suspicion persists, however, that for all the denials of team officials, she may be carrying what it has become fashionable to describe as a "niggle" in her calf - the definition of a niggle being something which is unlikely to prevent an athlete from performing.

Should the athlete fail, of course, the niggle switches status and becomes an injury.

Cliff Temple, the late lamented Sunday Times athletics correspondent, once observed that there is one question you should never ask any athlete: "How are you feeling?"

The protagonists of track and field are notorious for their dedicated hypochondria, and Radcliffe is no exception.

As her husband and manager, Gary Lough, has said: "If Paula has a headache, she thinks it must be meningitis."

Until she sets off for the marathon finish at the Panathinaikon on Sunday evening, the exact status of any niggle will remain unclear.

But the fact that she has arrived in the Olympic Village has to be seen as an encouragement to believe that she has come here to compete in earnest.

- INDEPENDENT