LOCKER ROOM/Tom Humphries: I watched Karen Shinkins on The Late Late Show with Pat Kenny the other night. All good looks and happy smiles. You had to wonder, though, what it must be like to be Karen Shinkins, to excel at a discipline so thoroughly discredited as sprinting is.
It was a moment like those you see in horror movies when the actress walks into the haunted house and you are peeping out from behind your fingers saying "go back girl, go back".
The bronze medal which she brought home from Vienna recently was probably inevitable when you look back over a career path of steady progress. She just missed a medal of the same colour in the World Student Games, ran a little slower in the world semi-finals the following summer in Seville and finished fourth at the last European Indoor Championships at Ghent. The girl's got something.
So you are Karen Shinkins coming into the prime of your life as a 400-metre sprinter and wondering how you can take it all to the next stage. It can't have escaped your attention that few people today believe the sprint events to be anything more than a fast-moving parade of pharmacological floats, that the science of testing has fallen into such disrepute that a clean sprinter just has to hope for the trust of the audience because in this business there is no absolute proof any more.
You have to have noticed the muscles you rub shoulders with on starting lines, have to have heard the rumours, have to remember Marie Jo Perec damning the history of this very event by announcing that she reckoned herself to be the first to run under 49 seconds without biological assistance.
It must hurt to stand there and survey the country around and the country ahead. Karen Shinkins seems up for the challenge and good luck to her but it takes her into a world of whispers and doubt and malevolence. You look at Karen Shinkins on The Late Late Show and just hope she comes out the other end as the same person she was when she discovered running as a kid in Kildare.
It's about a year now since Dr Jacques Rogge came to Kildare to pow-wow with the Irish sports nabobs on his way to becoming president of the International Olympic Committee. He gave a dull speech complete with slides and diagrams on the topic of Olympic organisation but otherwise he was perfectly charming. Those who met him came away impressed by his sincerity, not just on the issue of Olympism generally but on the specifics of how Olympism was to be cleaned up. He wasn't exactly Elliot Ness, but he vowed to clean up Sports City.
Furthermore, when he spoke about the issue of drugs he spoke with a confidence and knowledge that his predecessor, Juan Antonio Samaranch, had never exhibited. Samaranch didn't want to know the details, he just wanted detection figures saying whatever the Olympic marketeers wanted them to say. More detections meant the IOC was winning the war but fewer detections meant that the IOC was winning the war.
Rogge's first Olympiad, that just passed in Salt Lake City, was a mixed business. The report card will show that he chickened out on the ice-skating scandal. Instead of merely allowing the International Skating Union (ISU) to remove the marks of the suspect French judge from the overall marks, a move which would have been logical and which would have left the result unaltered (indeed the French judge's deviation from the mean was less than that of the Canadian judge in favour of his countryfolk) Rogge brought the ISU by the ear to press conferences and beamed broadly when it was announced with undue haste that there would be another gold medal for the Canadians.
By the end of the second week of the Games Rogge was up to his ears in drug scandals. This was to his credit. Among those busted were several good news stories. The Spanish hunger for success was such that they had been prepared to overlook the fact that their triple gold medallist Johann Muhlegg was a German who could barely slip on a bar of soap in three previous Olympics. Britain's Alain Baxter was another good news story, as was multi-medalling Russian Larissa Lazutina.
Here was where Rogge has showed the spine which was lacking in the skating controversy. He permitted Dr Don Catlin, perhaps the world's leading drugs policeman, to develop a test for darbepoeitin, a new drug used to legitimately treat anemia - a drug so new that it only received approval in the US last September. Catlin and Rogge decided not to announce that they had developed the new test. This was a significant departure from previous Olympiads, wherein Samaranch would announce for months and months like a warning bell that a new test had been devised.
The success in detecting three cases in the Winter Olympics means that darbepoeitin will probably have a short shelf life as the drug of choice among the cheating community. What impresses about the whole affair is how quickly the detection scientists closed the gap this time. Sports laboratories worked with the manufacturers of the drug over the past two years establishing the specific profile of darbepoeitin and when the drug found its way onto the market they were ready with a test.
That sort of co-operation has to be the future for drug testing. We still await the time when major Olympic and sport sponsors will devote a fraction of the money they spend on promoting stars and products to funding drugs research thus ensuring the sort of clean and inspirational sport which we see only in their advertisements. In the meantime a chain of detection right back to the pharmaceutical companies will be an immense help. The quicker the window of opportunity shuts the sooner the drug involved is returned to its legitimate usage. Would you like to be sidling up to Tour de France cyclists next summer hustling darbepoeitin? Nope.
We will always be catching up on the cheats, but there is hope. If Rogge stays sincere about detection and begins to strip away more than just the medal won in the specific event we will be on our way to better sport. Rogge has shown the appetite.
Perhaps there is a chance that Karen Shinkins's story won't end in a mire of cynicism and disappointment.
