The legacy of the world swimming championships, which concluded in Australia yesterday, is one of deceit and disgrace. The championships, which should have been the showcase of a once great international sport, turned into a mire of drugs seizures and revelations as the Chinese team flouted the basic integrity of sport and destroyed the last vestiges of belief that swimming is above reproach in dealing with doping, the scourge of modern day sport.
As the best swimmers in the world began to assemble in Perth two weeks ago, many believed that the 1998 championships would be a definitive test for the sport. Recent revelations from Stasi files about systematic doping of swimmers as young as 11 in former East Germany, had undermined any confidence that the world championships would be free of doping scandals. However, even the most gloomy pessimists could not have predicted the scale of the drugs shame to follow.
Before the championships got under way, the German team chief was stripped of his accreditation because of his involvement in the East German abuse. This controversy had barely subsided when the first of the major scandals emerged with the discovery at Sydney Airport of 13 phials of human growth hormones in the luggage of one the Chinese team. That was followed by four of the Chinese swimmers testing positive for using a drug-masking agent.
As swimming reeled from one crisis to another, its ruling body, FINA, seemed almost impotent in dealing with the problem. Long-held suspicions about the level of drugs in swimming - consistently denied by the governing body - had been confirmed finally by the Chinese despite their insistence that these were individual rather than state-approved abuses.
The Chinese may have avoided expulsion from the world championships but it seems likely that their disdain for both their critics and their athletes may come at a heavy price. The most powerful man in sport, Juan Antonio Samaranch, president of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), has hinted that the fallout from Perth may have irreparably damaged any Beijing bid to host the Olympics in 2008.
However, Samaranch's remarks have a hollow ring as the IOC is certainly not without blame in failing to address the greatest challenge to sport. The most influential body in world sport should be at the forefront of the battle against drugs rather than ceaselessly extolling the commercial success of the modern day Olympic movement. A starting point in that battle would be for Samaranch and his elite committee to demand that their major Olympic sponsors finance and promote a state of the art drug detection system and, much more important, to square up to the only effective way of catching the drug cheats - the compulsory introduction of blood testing in all Olympic sports.