Tom Mangold must have suffered from a bit of an identity crisis after his appearance on Network Two's Sporting Press Gang last Monday night. Introduced by Tom McGurk as the "distinguished BBC Panorama reporter," he was later dismissed by Dr Joe Comiskey, chief medical officer of the Olympic Council of Ireland, as a "publicity seeking opportunist".
Mangold laughed and shook his head wearily on hearing the latter description. He's got used to it ever since his feather-ruffling Panorama programme - which claimed that the performances of 70 to 80 per cent of the competitors in the Atlanta Olympic Games would be drug-enhanced - was aired in July of last year.
While that estimate (provided by a Canadian commission set up to investigate drugs in athletics after the Ben Johnson affair) is fiercely disputed by the powers-that-be, it proved more difficult to deny another of the Panorama allegations, that the results of nine finalists from the Los Angeles' Olympic Games, who had tested positive for drugs, had gone "missing" - that information came from one of the scientists involved in the testing.
"They went to the chairman of the medical commission, he put the results in his hotel safe and by some mysterious magic they vanished and no action was ever taken - what message is a sportsman to take away from that," asked Mangold on Monday. (Conspiracy theorists were shot down with the explanation that it was all the fault of the hotel cleaners. Drug-test-results-robbing-hotel-cleaners? Right). But it's the message being spread by Mangold - and the other `begrudgers' and big, nasty `spoilsports' - that appears to most concern the people who run our sports, rather than the fact that the existing drug-testing methods are quite simply incapable of catching the cheats.
"Before every major sporting event publicity seeking opportunists do programmes or write articles in order to get notice and they come up with figures like 65 per cent, 75 per cent or even higher," said Dr Comiskey, when asked by McGurk for his reaction to the Panorama revelations.
"In the last seven years 400,000 tests have been carried out by IOC-approved laboratories - in 1992 they were four per cent positive, in 1996 they were two per cent positive, that is the actual figure," he insisted.
Now figures like that are music to the ears of us simple sports fans who desperately want to believe in the purity of the athletic performances we are seeing on our television screens. But then the likes of big, bad Tom Mangold get us all worried again. "What Dr Comiskey is not telling us is that the tests prove absolutely nothing," he said. "You have anabolic steroids which, if you stop taking in time, will leave the urine clean - so the urine tests can be and usually are a waste of time.["]
"You have EPO, which is a blood drug, and you have a growth hormone which cannot be detected even by the latest machinery that was used in Atlanta, so the figures given by the IOC are absolutely meaningless and anybody in sport knows that."
Ah, but he's a `publicity seeking opportunist', right? We can dismiss him. What about Phil Jakeman, Professor of Sports and Exercise Science at the University of Limerick, another of the guests on The Sporting Press Gang? "As Tom has rightly said the testing now for things like human growth hormones is as yet in its infancy. The problem we have as scientists is to keep up with the detecting methods - human growth hormones are extremely difficult to detect," he said. "Can cheats get away with it," asked McGurk. "I would say there are mechanisms available not to get caught, yes," Jakeman replied.
So is Professor Phil Jakeman ANOTHER `publicity seeking opportunist'? Reassure us Dr Comiskey. "What is so terrible is to hear people second guessing a body (the IOC) that is representative of 200 countries, who have regular meetings . . ." he offered. Oh dear. One generation is taught Papal infallibility, the next IOC infallibility.
Just as the debate was getting interesting it was "time to leave it there". Isn't that always the way? Meanwhile us sports fans go on wondering and worrying. `Innocent till proven guilty' is a fine principle but when our heads are filled with reasonable cause for doubt, we need PROOF of innocence. If the means are there to provide it, why not make more of an effort to use them? Then we'd all be happy, wouldn't we? And then big, bad Tom Mangold could seek publicity elsewhere.
After the events of last Wednesday night, one section of the sporting community that should now be exempted from the drugs ban is the Irish football supporter. If hallucinogenic drugs had been prescribed before the match against Lithuania, we might even have seen the ball hit the back of the net.
"Ireland could have played for another 10 minutes and not have scored, you get nights like that," said Johnny Giles at full-time. Ten minutes? Janie, Johnny, add a few noughts to that. "Like ducks in a gallery, wasn't it," said a gloomy Bill O'Herlihy as he and Johnny studied endless clips of Irish players perfecting the art of missing clear chances.
The man who deserved most sympathy on the night was Peter Collins, who had the less than enviable task of asking Mick McCarthy where it had all gone wrong. Sometimes Peter wears that deer-caught-in-the-headlights look when he finds himself in such a post-match situation but, on Wednesday, he succeeded in getting McCarthy to be brutally frank in his assessment of the evening's action. "I didn't think we needed to do anything else other than put the ball in the net," he said. "Indeed," Irish fans everywhere could be heard to agree.
Bill signed off on a similar theme. Fair play to him, he never fails to sense the mood of the nation and, in times of need, he always provides that `little-pick-me-up'. "Let's take some solace out of John Giles' view that it was a most encouraging performance by Ireland and most of the time, the kind of chances they had, we'd have taken," he said. Thanks Bill, feeling better already.
