DRUG CHEATS CAUGHT BY THE DOZEN.

Tyson Gay, Asafa Powell, Sherone Simpson and 3 other Jamaican athletes have been caught using banned substances. A few weeks ago, another Jamaican, Olympic champion Veronica Campbell-Brown, was caught.

 

As usual, there will be protestations of innocence or ignorance; there will be suggestions that "it weren't me, guv, I was let down". As usual, the athletes will be banned for a period of time, probably 2 years, and the ones who are young enough will be back in competition in time for the next Olympic games.

 

How many athletes have to be caught cheating in this way before there is some real action ? Marion Jones, one of the greatest of all female athletes, was a cheat as was her onetime husband, C J Hunter; so were 1988 Olympic 100 metre winner Ben Johnson, our own Dwain Chambers, the 2012 women's shot putt winner, Ostapchuk, our shot putter Carl Myerscough, and dozens, if not hundreds or even thousands, of others. Of course, athletics is not alone and competitors in other sports have been found cheating, notably cycling which has produced the most appalling cheat in sporting history, Lance Armstrong. The testing conducted in football, cricket, rugby, tennis and so on seems to be limited or even non-existent, so how many of the 'great' players in these and other sports are also cheats is unknown; the odds must be that many are.

 

Ever since sport became big business, with competitors being able to accrue vast fortunes from their participation, cheating has prospered. Those who pay stupid amounts of money to watch sporting events are regularly let down by their idols, but they never get their money back; instead, the cheats receive a slap on the wrist and a brief ban from competition before returning to carry on where they left off.

 

Gay, Powell and the others who've been caught recently have disgraced themselves and brought their sport into disrepute. Ban them for good, strip them of all of their medals and awards and erase their performances from the record books; that's the only way to deal with them.