Our drugs cheat

Do you want to see Paula Radcliffe’s blood? If so, you’re not alone. Radcliffe, three-time winner of the London Marathon has been outed as a drugs cheat by the Tory MP Jesse Norman. No proof, but proof is for wimps. Radcliffe’s name will now always have a certain stink.

Norman used parliamentary privilege to talk about ‘the winners or medallists at the London Marathon, potentially British athletes… under suspicion for very high levels of blood doping.’ That was enough to tar Radcliffe as a possible druggie. It’s like accusing a public figure of paedophilia: the softest whisper will do for them.

Pressure has been brought on Radcliffe to go public with her ‘blood values’ — complex medical data — but she has refused, on the legitimate grounds that no one bar a few experts has the slightest idea what they mean.

Radcliffe is the second major British athletics love-object to get the treatment this year. Earlier it was Mo Farah, double Olympic gold-medal winner in London in 2012. A Panorama programme claimed that his coach, Alberto Salazar, had done some dodgy stuff. Nothing that involves Farah, but the whisper is enough. Farah is now forever tainted. Both have denied any wrongdoing; fat lot of good that will do.

The problem of drugs in sport is that it’s two issues in one. The public and, by extension, the journalistic view is that either you take drugs and you’re evil, or you don’t take drugs and you’re a good guy — at least until you get caught. It’s a straightforward business, one that permits no doubt or ambiguity.

The truth is complex and difficult — and routinely avoided. Many top-level sports-people use drugs every day. They couldn’t perform without them. They often take these drugs knowing that their use could compromise their future health.