They bent the rules here last night to avoid the scandal of having to disqualify the Commonwealth 100 metres champion. Anywhere else in athletics, Kim Collins would have had his gold medal snatched back: not for cheating, but for failing to observe the procedures by which every other sprinter at these Games was bound.
So much for the new and supposedly rigidly-enforced 'liability principle.' Zero tolerance was supposed to mean that an athlete who failed to seek medical clearance before an event and then tested positive would be demoted, however good the excuse. The Commonwealth authorities undermined that principle yesterday and opened the gates to all sorts of retrospective pleading by athletes who fail doping tests.
Collins took asthma medicine containing the anabolic steroid Salbutamol. The Commonwealth medical commission found that the new champion is a genuine asthma sufferer who gave a sample which was "consistent with normal therapeutic use and was not considered to be performance enhancing".
Fine. But here's the problem: Collins, a world and Olympic finalist who ought to understand the intricacies of doping policies, waited until he was called in for testing before declaring that he was taking anti-asthma medicine. Under the rules, "use of this medication must be declared prior to competition and verified by a doctor". Collins, who won the race in a blistering 9.98sec, was "admonished" by a court of inquiry but allowed to keep his gong.
Forgetfulness and naivety were, evidently, his only mis- demeanours. But one wonders how that will play with, say, Andrea Raducan, the brilliant Romanian gymnast who was stripped of her medal at the Sydney Olympics after taking Neurofen for a cold. Again, there was no suggestion that Raducan was trying to cheat, but her failure to mention the Neurofen dose before the event cost her an Olympic title.
Pushing the point still harder, there was rightly no ambiguity about the decision to disqualify the Scottish skier, Alain Baxter, after he returned a positive sample at the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics. Baxter blamed the result on a contaminated Vick's inhaler, but the authorities stuck rigidly to the liability principle and so rejected his appeal.
They had no choice. Before the party line was stiffened, sport was disappearing down a mudslide of litigation and deliberate obfus- cation by athletes and their lawyers. To allow sportsmen and women the right to produce convincing excuses for why banned substances were found in their systems opens the way to legal chaos. It emasculates the accuser (the governing body) and builds into the system an escape route for the accused.
On the evidence, Collins's sin is simply one of omission. Nobody, though, disputes that he was in breach of rules that are meant to protect sport from manipulation by cheats. For that reason, the gold should have been transferred to Nigeria's Uchenna Emedolu, the silver medallist who has most reason to feel aggrieved. Real cheats in track and field have been given a glimmer of hope.
Easy to see why the so-called 'Friendly Games' should be more lenient, but it's not for easy-going sports administrators to bend the rules to suit the spirit of their particular events. 'Image' can go to hell. The Games have shown weakness when they needed to assert their strength.