British athletics has the Dwain Chambers saga making it squirm over the past few weeks. Now Ireland could have a self-confessed doper leading its team at a world championships.
No-one could have predicted the scenario at last Saturday’s Woodie’s DIY National Cross-Country Championships, where Cathal Lombard not only competed but sensationally beat pre-race favourite Alistair Cragg. That means he was entitled to an automatic place at the World Cross-Country Championships in Edinburgh next month. Probably to Athletics Ireland’s relief, Lombard has opted out of the Edinburgh event but he is planning to have a crack at the Rotterdam Marathon on April 13.
If he betters 2 hours 15 minutes in Rotterdam, he will present the Olympic Council of Ireland with one hell of a headache selection, since unlike in the UK, Irish drugs cheats aren’t automatically banned from Irish Olympic teams.
Lombard was caught pumped up with EPO in 2004, a year when he had made sensational improvements in his times in an effort to qualify for the Athens Olympics. He had to do it, he said, in order to keep up with the Africans, implying that any athlete in his position would have done the same.
Like so many other cheaters before and since, it was his complete inability to understand how the ordinary club athlete thinks that was both striking and horrifying in its stupidity and cynicism. Even when dopers have “done their time”, can this mindset be changed?
Anyone observing Dwain Chambers when he was competing at the British Indoors a few weeks ago could only be struck by his pumped-up physique. Some claim that he is still reaping the benefits of his years as a chemistry experiment, and that technically he is clean. Maybe so – but a lot of people need a lot of convincing.
News that all traces of EPO can literally be washed from the system with the help of soap powder underlines yet again that the war against cheating in sport is far from over. An effective test for the use of human growth hormone has yet to be developed and athletes from smaller nations in the poorer continents are rarely tested out of competition because it costs too much. Unscrupulous agents are well aware of this fact.
Some of the biggest names in athletics are the subject of constant rumour; if any of these rumours were to be substantiated, athletics would go the way of the Tour de France; a freak show enjoyed by the wilfully perverse with about as much relevance to sport as WWF wrestling (as Seb Coe has already pointed out).
So no – I don’t welcome Cathal Lombard’s victory and I truly can’t understand why the Leevale club would accept him back as a member.
When he sent away to that laboratory to buy EPO, Lombard made a decision. He decided to cheat, knowing that his action would affect other athletes, some of them his friends. Because Cathal Lombard is a cheat, those other athletes were robbed – not just of medals they should have won, but of their moment of glory.
If the man had a shred of decency in him, he would have stayed away from Belfast. That he didn’t tells us everything we need to know.
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