How athletics is still scarred by the reign of the chemical sisters

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UPDATED:

21:38 GMT, 6 August 2012

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The narrative of these Olympic Games has been punctuated by inspirational performances from female athletes. But, as the focus shifts to the athletics stadium, it is difficult to avoid a curious and troubling statistical conundrum.

When you compare the times being run in 2012 with those that appear on your television screen as the current world records, it might look as if there has been a drop in standards among the women competing in London.

In the 100 metres on Saturday, Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce did not threaten Florence Griffith-Joyner’s mark. At 10.75, she was more than a quarter of a second down. In the 400m on Sunday, the best part of two seconds separated the winning time from the ‘WR’. Tirunesh Dibaba’s winning time for the 10,000m this year was almost a minute off world record pace, even if she was faster in Beijing in 2008.

Gold run: Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce wins the women's 100m, but her time of 10.75secs was slower than the Florence Griffith-Joyner's world record of 10.49 secs

Some of the world records are there to be broken and others — in particular many of the women’s athletics records — look like they could be there for ever.

‘They are eternal,’ German doping expert Professor Werner Franke told Sportsmail. ‘Just too good.’

These are records set when East was competing against West; when athletes emerged from the Eastern Bloc and China to produce the most extraordinary performances.

From the 100m to the 1500m (barring the 400m hurdles), a women’s world record has not been broken since 1993. The same goes for the 3,000m and the 10,000m. There have, however, been records broken in the relatively new Olympic events of 5,000m and the steeplechase.

Most of the records date back to the 1980s. It is much the same in the field events — the high jump, long jump, shot put and discus records were set in that decade.

Controversial: Florence Griffith-Joyner always denied she took drugs

The 100m and 200m records were run in
1988 by Griffith-Joyner. The American’s times of 10.49sec and 21.34sec
have so far proved impossible for the sprinters of today to match. The
closest since the turn of the century in the 100m 10.64. And in the
200m 21.69. Even with modern training methods and the natural evolution
of sporting performance, nobody has yet come close to beating Flo-Jo.

She never failed a drugs test and protested her innocence of doping until the day she died, 14 years ago, aged 38. But the Flo-Jo of 1987 was vastly different to the Flo-Jo of 1988, and it was not just a massive improvement in her performances.

Her physique had changed. She was far more muscular. Her voice had changed, too. Something that became evident when a comparison was made between a BBC interview she gave in 1984 and one four years later.

In his autobiography, Carl Lewis reflected on Flo-Jo’s performances at the US trials, and then at the Seoul Olympics that followed, as ‘a change that came too quickly for the imagination’.

‘Her physical appearance alone, muscles popping everywhere, made a lot of people wonder,’ Lewis wrote. ‘Then there was the voice, much deeper than it had been.’

Before Flo-Jo came Marita Koch, whose 400m world record is perhaps the most staggering of all. On October 6, 1985 the East German obliterated a field in Canberra, crossing the line in 47.6. Sanya Richards-Ross took gold in 49.55 on Sunday, with Britain’s Christine Ohuruogu second in 49.70.

To this day, Koch denies using performance-enhancing drugs, but East German secret police files from the time tell a different story.

There was a letter from Koch complaining that Barbel Wockel, a European champion over 200m, was being given stronger doses of steroids because her uncle was president of the pharmaceutical company that provided drugs to the East German athletics authorities.

Tarnished: Marita Koch carries the baton in Moscow

This appeared in a book, entitled Doping Dokumente and published in 1991, that Franke wrote with his wife, Brigitte Berendonk. Franke, a professor of cell and molecular biology at the German Cancer Research Centre in Heidelberg, was asked by all parties of the German parliament to study the Stasi documents and produce a report on doping in East German sport. With his wife he uncovered a list of annual dosages of oral turinabol administered to Koch and the other leading athletes.

‘They were giving more to the women than they were the men,’ Franke said. ‘Very high dosages. The case of Heidi Krieger was very disturbing.’

From the age of 16, Franke discovered, Krieger was unknowingly given dosages way in excess of those taken by Ben Johnson before he won gold in the 1988 Games. /08/06/article-0-037AB0050000044D-957_306x423.jpg” width=”306″ height=”423″ alt=”Sex change: Heidi Krieger became Andreas Krieger in 1997″ class=”blkBorder” />

Sex change: Heidi Krieger became Andreas Krieger in 1997

‘We know why some of those records have not been broken,’ said Franke. ‘But the fact the times are much slower now points to a significantly cleaner sport.’

The test for human growth hormone was not introduced until 1985. Two years earlier, the Czechoslovakian Jarmila Kratochvilova set an 800m record that still stands. It was 1:53.28, and is almost three seconds quicker than the best Kelly Holmes managed to run.

Kratochvilova never failed a drugs test and continues to insist she was clean. But her masculine, muscular physique shocked the sporting world, as did the fact that she set her record in her first appearance at the distance — at the age of 32. Her world record is the longest standing in athletics.

Turtle blood: Ma

In the early Nineties a new breed of
athletes appeared, this time from China. Ma Junren coached to incredible
times a group of distance runners who became known as Ma’s Army. Set in
1993, Qu Yunxia’s 1500m world record of 3:50.96 still stands — and it
looks safe for years to come. The fastest time since 2000 is 3:55.33,
with double Olympic champion Holmes running 3:57.9 at her best.

At
the time, Ma claimed his athletes’ performances were being boosted by
the consumption of turtle blood. But shortly before the 2000 Olympics,
China withdrew 27 athletes from their Olympic team, including six
runners trained by Ma who had tested positive for erythropoietin, the
banned blood doping drug better known as EPO. Ma was also fired from the
Chinese coaching staff.

Wang Junxia was another Ma athlete and her 1993 3,000m and 10,000m records stand, while the high jump, long jump, discus and shot put records that date back to the Eighties are also held by athletes from Eastern Bloc countries.

How have the records survived when some athletes will still be cheating Well, it may be because the drugs being used in the 1980s were more powerful than those taken by modern-day athletes.

The scientific advances made in testing have made it impossible for female athletes to use male hormone drugs. Disgraced American sprinter Marion Jones used the designer steroid known as ‘the clear’ — tetrahydrogestrinone — but it was not powerful enough to propel her close to Flo-Jo’s times.

Christina Boxer finished fourth for Great Britain in the 1500m at the 1988 Olympics. Ahead of her, in third, came Tetyana Dorovskikh, the then Soviet runner who also won gold in the 3,000m in Seoul only to then fail a drugs test in 1993.

‘If you take a male hormone it’s going to have a far greater effect on a female athlete,’ Boxer told Sportsmail. ‘I ran against athletes I was sure were on drugs; athletes who could not get near their best times once the Berlin Wall came down.’

Victor Conte, the founder of the California-based BALCO laboratory that provided Dwain Chambers with his drugs, estimated that drugs can help a sprinter lower his best by 0.2sec, while a woman can shave 0.4sec off her time.

The German Athletics Federation actually wanted to mark the millennium by erasing some of their records if the IAAF, the world governing body, agreed to do the same. However, all those records stand.

Veronica Campbell-Brown, in London to defend her Olympic 200m title, once complained of the extra attention her male counterparts receive in her native Jamaica.

‘It’s based on the fact the world record in the 100m and 200m for men is reachable,’ she said. ‘It is hard for me to think about the world record.’

Her best time At 21.74 she is exactly 0.4sec slower than Flo-Jo.