A shadow over Sydney

Mark Richardson wins the 400m Olympic trial

BBC Sport's Rob Bonnet wants justice for athletes like Mark Richardson as the drugs row rumbles on before the Olympics.

It's almost bag-packing time for the BBC's sports commentators and reporters on their way to the Sydney Olympics.

Despite the additional weight of Andrew Jennings' recently published 400-odd pages on The Great Olympic Swindle, I recommend it to my colleagues for the flight.

Mr Jennings has been a thorn in the side of the Olympic movement in general, and IOC president Juan Antonio Samaranch in particular, for some years.

He's written a series of books on hypocrisy, malpractice, greed and corruption in the midst of an organisation which has consistently presented itself as the upholder of competitive and commercial purity in sport.

There have been two views of Mr Jennings, and not much in between.

Under fire: IOC president Juan Antonio Samaranch

The IOC marked him down as a maliciously eccentric conspiracy-theorist, obsessively pursuing a story with little truth.

Back in 1994, he received a short suspended prison sentence from a Swiss court for alleging corruption among IOC members.

Others reckon he's got the whole sordid tale just about right.

After the condemnation over Salt Lake City's successful bid for the 2002 Winter Olympics, I know which option I'm taking.

This is the context for the first summer games since the Salt Lake scandal. Watching in Sydney will take some tricky suspension of disbelief.

Even without The Great Olympic Swindle to hand, the fans will have some forgetting to do.

Forget the commercialism, corruption, drugs, officials who cover up the drugs, and now - it seems - forget the officials who support a doping control regime which continues to punish the innocent.

In 1994 it was Diane Modahl, now it's Britain's 400m runner Mark Richardson who feels most keenly the stubborn intransigence of the International Amateur Athletic Federation.

Richardson's positive drugs test was rejected as unsafe by UK Athletics because nandrolone positives can be produced by a combination of food supplements and sustained exercise.

Stubborn

This was demonstrated to their satisfaction by research at Aberdeen University, where further experiments continue to support the thesis.

But the IAAF loves its rule book, dislikes British athletics and the federation - once inconveniently based in London but now out of reach in Monaco - knows it's immune from the legal challenge.

I don't believe Mark Richardson took nandrolone to enhance his performance any more than I believe Andrew Jennings is a vendetta-inspired lunatic with a chip on his shoulder.

Richardson should be free to run in Sydney. If he is, he'll probably bring back a medal.

With or without Richardson, the Sydney Olympics will be a spectacular televisual success, no question.

And amid the forgetting, there'll be some remembering to do too - that many of the performances will have been of great skill, endeavour and courage, and most will have been honest.

Fans will take home memories of the unique atmosphere of the stadiums and of a beautiful Olympic city.

In the clear: Merlene Ottey

Much of what occurs will be truly inspiring, a celebration of the human spirit. The value of cynicism should be as an occasional tap on the shoulder, not as a general basis for disbelief.

After Ben Johnson, it was the athletes who lost our respect. Any exceptional performance was greeted with a rolling of the eyes and a shake of the head.

The truth, of course, was rather more prosaic - some were cheating but most weren't.

Following Salt Lake, it was the IOC members who got the credibility thumbs-down. Again, some were in the wrong, but most weren't.

Your problem, as you look up from your breakfast at BBC1's Olympic coverage during the second half of September, is in deciding whether you care about whether the IOC has cleaned up its act.

After all, as long as the action's good, what do you care if someone behind the scenes is on the take? That's the way of the business world after all.

But it does matter, of course, especially to men like Mark Richardson.

Powerful

What did the Salt Lake scandal do for his confidence in international sports administrators?

What does he make of a federation that clears Merlene Ottey for a nandrolone positive and yet condemns him, Christie, Walker and Cadogan?

Where's the integrity, honesty and sense of natural justice that should be allowing him to prepare for Sydney with confidence that he'll be able to take his place on the track.

Among the messages standing out from Andrew Jennings' book, there's one that demands consideration. The fat cat administrators have been riding on the backs of honest sportsmen for too long, and control of the games should be handed over to the athletes.

In Sydney, competitors will be tested to their limits, and I don't just mean in the laboratories of doping control.

But it's the IOC which will be under the strictest scrutiny as President Samaranch gets his glamorous swansong and declares Sydney 'the greatest games ever.'