Functional Path Training

Lessons I have learned Earning An Advanced Degree From School of Hard Knocks

The following are some lessons that have learned in my years of coaching. I was going through some files yesterday and I found this list that I wrote in 2005 after two particularly negative professional experiences in the previous year. I thought it would be worth sharing. Some these were hard lessons to learn and some were quite apparent from the day I started coaching.

Structure and order are essential in order to have any degree of consistent success.

Money and facilities are not the answer, good qualified coaches are more important.

Without a well-defined plan of training and competition there is chaos and inconsistent performance results.

More is not better. This is true if it is training, therapy gaining weight or losing weight.

One size does not fit all. It is important to consider what each athlete brings to the event in all respects.

It is more than physical talent; the athlete must have athletic intelligence and real mental toughness.

You must coach females differently both from a physical and a psycho/ social perspective

Anorexia is not an eating disorder. Eating or not eating is only a manifestation of much deeper psychological problems.

There is no quick fix, nor is there any thing like instant results.

Treating the symptoms rather than the causes does not work both in training and therapy.

If you spend as long in therapy as in training each day then something is seriously wrong with the training.

Progression is essential. Without a clear progression it is usually a process of one step forward and two steps back.

It is impossible to coach by email, phone, letter or fax. Coaching is a daily personal, labor-intensive process.

Objectively judging and assessing talent is essential for success.

Just because a person was a great athlete does not mean they can coach. Most of the time the great athlete only knows how they did it and what they did, which often will not work for anyone else.

Attempting to reproduce past results is an exercise in futility. The past is gone; it is only a reference point to guide future performance.

Never let your limitations as a coach limit your athletes. If you do not know something admit it, don’t try to bluff your way through it. The athlete will figure you out sooner or later that you do not know what you are doing.

There is no immediate cause/effect relationship between workouts and performance. In fact the relationship may be negative if the athlete is operating at the redline constantly during workouts,

Coaching is more than a workout or a drill. The context of the workout is often more important than the workout itself.

There is no place for performance enhancing drugs in sport, amateur or professional. Coaches have to speak out against it. Any coach who is aware that his athletes take a banned substance should be banned from coaching. There is no fine line in regard to drug use. You are either against it or you condone it.

Periodization in Perspective

Matveyev did not invent Periodization. He was one of many who formalized the concept. Because he was Russian, and the Soviet Union was the dominant geopolitical force in the communist bloc, Soviet ideology tended to prevail even in sport. I believe this explains the dominant influence of the Soviets in the literature of training methodology. Certainly others like Harre in the GDR, Nadori in Hungary all made significant contributions. Most of what we see in the literature today, including the work of Tudor Bompa, who has done much to popularize the concept in North America, is basically a rehash of the Soviet literature. Not much has been done to modify, study and change to adapt the concept to the contemporary challenges that exist today. It is a much different sport environment than it was even as short a time as twenty years ago. Previously where the focus was the Olympic games, hence quadrennial cycles, now there are more frequent world championships and high level competitions in many sports. Competition schedules are not as clearly defined. In most sports, especially ate elite level, there is no off-season. None of the literature on Periodization has ever effectively addressed team sports. In addition one would be naïve not to recognize the huge impact systematic doping had on the development of the former eastern bloc sport development systems. In fact much of the Periodization was based on sophisticated manipulation of drug cycles.

Some Lessons from Australia 2011 – Part One

I will start with some points I picked up at the Australian Track and Field Coaches Association Conference.

Nutrition Supplements – Louise Burke, a nutritionist at the AIS made a point I found interesting. Instead of taking a black or white view on supplementation they are now taking a pragmatic approach. They classify the supplements and try their best to advise the athletes as to the benefits/risks of the various supplements. She stated that the good use of supplements plays a role in optimal sports performance program. They work to educate the athletes to use the supplements properly. She stressed that the benefits are isolated to individual situations and individual athletes.

Wolfgang Schmidt – Early in his career he looked up to Al Oerter and later to Jay Sylvester. He stated that an athlete is always better off with a coach rather than being self-coached. He said that it was best to invest in human beings not facilities. He stressed his multi faceted development as a youth and the role the older accomplished throwers in his club serving as his role models. He did ten training sessions a week, averaging 90 minutes a session. When asked about the GDR’s systematic doping program I thought he was a bit dismissive, his comment was we were not the only one’s doing it.

Denis Knowles Coach of Dani Samuels – He stated he is the manager of the team His son does Dani’s strength training. They have used a gymnastic coach and other specialists to enhance her athleticism. They use other sports to enhance athleticism, not to be better at other sports. In terms of competition preparation the goal is to learn to hit the automatic qualifier in three attempts, anywhere and at anytime. Dennis stated that they think “readiness” instead of peaking and the effectiveness of the taper is determined by the entire preparation period. They throw in training under all conditions and their training venue does not have favorable wind conditions. In regard to strength training she is not chasing numbers in the weight room, if anything her program is far from traditional.

Debbie Strange Coach of New Zealand Javelin Thrower Stuart Farquhar – I was very impressed with Debbie's approach. She said that it was reconciling what you think the athlete can do with what they think they can do. She said that to medal it would take 1.7% of season best and to make the final would require the thrower to be within 7% of season best. She does not put much stock in a season ranking list going into competition because those results can be deceptive due to throwers seeking optimal conditions. She stated it was important to seek out tough competition and to learn how to win. She said that training is always a constant process of reconciling current ability with the ideal technical model for her athlete. She did not put a major emphasis on weight training, it is important but one of many factors. She stated that too many throwers create more power than they can handle. A point that really resonated me was that it was not the drills, but the execution of the drills that counted.

Throws Coaches Forum - It always comes back to fundamentals. They all stressed how important it was to “Skill it into them.” Debbie Strange said it well: “Athlete first, thrower second.” Denis Knowles on discus basics (I love the simplicity of this): Back of the Circle – Controlled, Center of the Circle – Balanced, and Finish of the throw – Stable.

Tomorrow I will share some other thoughts and lesson from my trip - my Brumbies visit, Melbourne and Sydney Roosters.

Could Not Agree More

This has been my stance for years.

WADA boss calls for ban on tainted coaches

BY KAYON RAYNOR Senior staff reporter raynork@jamaicaobserver.com

Friday, May 14, 2010

COACHES OF athletes who are found guilty of anti-doping offences should also be banned, says director general of the World Anti-doping Agency (WADA) David Howman.

"Yes! And that's a subject that we feel has to be accentuated to by government," Howman told the Observer in an exclusive interview yesterday.

"You can deal with lawyers who misbehave; you can deal with journalists who misbehave; you can deal with doctors who misbehave (but), how can we deal with coaches?

"You can strip them from representing the country; you can stop them from going to (an) event, but you can't stop them from coaching unless there is a law, so we're looking at ways and means of where that can be encountered," the WADA boss declared.

"The reason for it is that very often the athlete is, I can't say innocent, but is the receptacle of information given of persuasion by people who should know better; older people who they take guidance from who tell them to go and do something which is wrong," Howman added.

"There should be a degree of responsibility... laid at the feet of those people (including) coaches... trainers, agents, doctors, pharmacists, and we think very strongly they've got to be dealt with."

According to the current WADA rules as shown on its web site, www.wada-ama.org, the principle of strict liability only applies to athletes.

"The principle of strict liability is applied in situations where urine/blood samples collected from an athlete have produced adverse analytical results.

"It means that each athlete is strictly liable for the substances found in his or her bodily specimen, and that an anti-doping rule violation occurs whenever a prohibited substance (or its metabolites or markers) is found in bodily specimen, whether or not the athlete intentionally or unintentionally used a prohibited substance or was negligent or otherwise at fault."

Conversely, there are few documented cases where coaches of sanction athletes have been handed coaching bans.

In July 2008, the United States Anti-doping Agency (USADA) slapped Trevor Graham with a lifetime coaching ban for reportedly helping his athletes, which included Marion Jones, Justin Gatlin and Tim Montgomery, to obtain performance-enhancing drugs. Graham has always denied providing performance-enhancers to his athletes.

Athletics Canada also handed Ben Johnson's former coach, the late Charlie Francis, a life-time ban after he told a 1989 inquiry that he had introduced Johnson to steroids.

Johnson tested positive for the steroid stanozolol after winning the 100 metres at the 1988 Seoul Olympics and was stripped of his gold medal.

The WADA boss hinted that until countries put legislation in place to sanction coaches and other athlete representatives, the anti-doping fight will not end.

"They should be subject to at least the same sort of sanctions as the athletes. They should be out of sport for two years or out of sport for four years. There's no reason why not, so I look at it from the angle of being fair to all that might be part of something," he said.

"If you look in society and you say they are five people are involved in a crime, you don't just prosecute one, you get the whole five who are involved in the conspiracy. We should be doing the same in sport," added Howman, who is a lawyer by profession.

WADA, which is headquartered in Montreal, Canada, was established in 1999 to act as an independent international agency to co-ordinate efforts to rid sports of doping. The agency involves government representatives, certain inter-governmental organisations, alongside sporting bodies.

Mark McGuire and the Spindoctors

This guy is well coached. He is playing to peoples base emotions. Bottom line - no matter how much he cries and sobs he is a cheater who made millions off his cheating and now will make more on talk shows, exclusive interviews and yes just wait the book. Mark, this is a message for you and Tony - The P and the E in PED stands for performance enhancing. That extra fifty pounds of muscle helped you. Yea you could hit, but it is simple physics F = M x A. You must have slept through that class at USC. We should not forgive and we should not forget. Oh buy the way, patronizing commissioner Bud Light will not help you get more Hall of Fame votes. Bud Light and his cronies laughed all the way to the bank during the so-called steroid era. They can all pat themselves on the back about how clean baseball is today - My answer to that is three letters HGH! Where are you Joe DiMaggio?

Mark McGuire

Is anyone surprised? I can't believe Tony La Russa's comments. What planet was he on when his whole team was juicing? Once again is is sport or entertainment. people are not going to pay money to watch big guys hit singles. La Russa get paid to win to win games, not police doping in the clubhouse.

"The Outlaws will always be ahead of the law"

"The Outlaws will always be ahead of the law" Frank Dick, Chief Coach of Great Britain at the time, said that to Gary Winckler and myself in the cafeteria in Helsinki at the first World Track & Field Championships in 1983. In my opinion one of the reasons that this is so is reflected in the article below from the New York Times. The naive viewpoint in this article is the same stance that the medical and scientific community has taken sine the 1960's. If reserach says is does not work then obviously it does not work, this is a classsic example of the tyranny of dead ideas . Everybody who has been around elite sport knows that HGH works! These guys can keep denying it but the Victor Conte's of the world prey on and make a killing on this mentallity. I think it was Einstein who said and I am paraphrasing here - that you cannot go to those who have created the problem for the solution. If the medical and scientific community would have admited that anabolic steriods worked and were being used extensively by athletes in the late sixties and early seventies maybe we would not be where we are now.

New York Times - December 20, 2009

H.G.H.’s Conundrum: Does Costly Treatment Enhance Performance?

By IAN AUSTEN

OTTAWA — While human growth hormone has a remarkable ability to generate controversy, exactly what it does for athletes, both good and bad, is as much of a mystery today as when it first found favor as a performance booster during the 1990s.

“That’s uncharted territory,” said Richard J. Auchus, a professor of endocrinology at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School in Dallas. “We just don’t know what happens when people use high doses for long periods of time.”

H.G.H. is among the drugs prescribed by Anthony Galea, a Toronto-based sports medicine physician who was charged by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police last week with, among other things, conspiring to smuggle it into the United States. H.G.H. is legal in Canada but approved in the United States for only a few specific uses that do not include hastening recovery from injuries.

Galea has treated a number of elite athletes, including Tiger Woods, the sprinter Donovan Bailey and the swimmer Dara Torres, and is being investigated by American authorities for supplying performance-enhancing drugs to athletes in the United States. Both Galea and his lawyer have strongly rejected that allegation and dispute the Canadian charges.

Galea told The New York Times before being charged that he had never given an athlete growth hormone. But he acknowledged that he prescribed the drug to some patients at his Toronto clinic who were at least 40 and fatigued. Galea, 50, is such a believer in its restorative powers that he said he had injected the hormone into his body five days a week for the last decade.

But physicians and medical researchers who have studied people with medical conditions that lead to growth hormone overproduction said that available evidence suggested that athletes who cheat by using costly H.G.H. may simply wind up being cheated themselves.

“Ultimately I’d have to say that its main effect is that it makes your wallet a little less heavy,” said Dr. Alan D. Rogol, a professor emeritus of endocrinology at the University of Virginia. Rogol also reviews requests to the United States Anti-Doping Agency from athletes seeking permission to use banned hormones for therapeutic treatments.

Suspicions that athletes may be using growth hormone first surfaced in the 1980s. But at the time, the only source of the hormone was cadavers.

Advances in genetics, however, allowed biotechnology companies to clone and market several hormones, including H.G.H., beginning in the 1990s. Those products swiftly found an illicit following among athletes. H.G.H. is considered a performance-enhancer in sports, and the World Anti-Doping Agency subsequently banned it.

The hormones came with a long list of side effects. For H.G.H., they include cardiovascular problems, an increased risk of diabetes, arthritis, carpal tunnel syndrome, glucose intolerance, colon polyps, skin growths, excessive sweating and serious headaches. Heavy and prolonged growth hormone use can lead to abnormal bone growth in the face, head, hands and feet. It is widely suspected, but not proved, that excessive H.G.H. may promote cancers.

Despite Galea’s practice for older patients, growth hormone injections ultimately leave users fatigued, said Auchus, who acts as the Endocrine Society’s spokesman on hormone abuse. “Rather than being some fountain of youth, the older you are the less you tend to benefit,” Auchus said.

The United States determined that potential harm from H.G.H. is so great that federal law puts it in an unusual category of drugs that doctors cannot prescribe for unapproved, or off-label, uses. (No such ban exists in Canada.) Its approved uses are not conditions common among professional athletes: it can be used in children with severe growth problems, H.I.V. patients may receive it if they have muscle wasting, and it can be prescribed to offset exceptional weight loss in people who have had much of their small intestine surgically removed.

When it came to doping, the new hormones had an attractive feature. Because they are clones of natural hormones, they were invisible to antidoping tests that relied on looking for chemical abnormalities in urine samples. Although a blood test for H.G.H. was subsequently developed, it has not been highly effective. Rogol said that it only worked if the test subject had injected H.G.H. shortly before being asked for a sample.

Some of the cloned hormones unquestionably enhance performance. Erythropoietin, or EPO, boosts red blood cells, offering athletes in endurance sports significant gains in speed and endurance.

The possible gains from H.G.H. use are more varied and far less proven.

Auchus said that it reduces body fat and increases lean muscle mass, which are desirable not just for body building, where growth hormone abuse is believed to be widespread, but in a variety of other sports, including cycling, where leanness boosts results. But, like everything, there is debate about the full extent of that effect.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that some athletes use H.G.H. to increase muscle mass. But Auchus and Rogol said that there was considerable research showing that such gains were modest.

One key difficulty in determining what an individual performance-enhancing drug brings to an athlete, Rogol said, is that few people involved in doping use just a single treatment. That opens up the potential for complex interactions, both beneficial and harmful, between various drugs and treatment methods.

There is speculation that growth hormone may be used in conjunction with platelet-rich plasma injections to swiftly heal injured muscles and tendons. While Galea is a leading proponent of platelet therapy, he said during an interview that he never combined the technique with growth hormone.

But there is considerable doubt about whether injecting H.G.H. directly into injured tissue — with or without platelet therapy — actually achieves anything.

Growth hormone does not act directly. Instead it prompts the body to produce insulin-like growth factor 1, or I.G.F.-1, which then triggers growth.

The overwhelming majority of I.G.F.-1 is produced by the liver and delivered through the blood stream. Evidence shows, however, that growth hormone can prompt local I.G.F.-1 production in other cells of the body. Auchus said that it was not clear if such local production was significant enough to accelerate healing.

Even platelet therapy, widely practiced on injured tissue, is an unproven treatment marked by uncertainties; it is however legal and not banned by the World Anti-Doping Agency.

To create platelet-rich plasma, a small amount of the patient’s blood is put in a centrifuge to separate its red blood cells from the platelets that release proteins and other particles involved in healing. A small amount of the substance is then injected into the damaged area. The belief is that the high concentration of platelets — 3 to 10 times that of normal blood — prompts the growth of new soft-tissue or bone cells.

Scott A. Rodeo, an orthopedic surgeon at the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York and a former United States Olympic team physician, said that when it comes to platelet therapy, “the underlying rationale makes sense but there’s very little underlying research.”

Rodeo, who is also a physician for the New York Giants, said that Galea was far from unique in providing the treatment in North America.

“If you want to do P.R.P. today, there are many places to do it, although it may have been different two years ago,” he said. “But sometimes in sports, a name gets out and gets recycled among athletes.”

1963 San Diego Chargers

This is a link to an article from the ESPN and the Outside the Lines report on ESPN. It is a good introduction to the beginnings of the drug culture that we have today in sport and serves a poignant reminder that those who ignore history are condemned to repeat it. http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/otl/news/story?id=3866837The focus is on two people Sid Gillman, the head coach of the San Diego Chargers and Alvin Roy, the first strength coach in pro football and a person many acknowledge to be the first strength coach in football at LSU in 1958. Both were progressive thinkers and innovators. Unfortunately some of their innovation was centered on giving the players Dianabol to supplement their weight training, a practice I do not condone.  Anabolic steroids were legal at that time. They were very prevalent in the power lifting community and just getting into track & field with the throwers.

I think it is shame that the ESPN reporters did not balance out the story with the innovative training they were doing. Lifting weights was still considered taboo for athletes at the time, but they were lifting in training camp and in season. They had a systematic off season strength training program that would rival many of today’s programs. As football player in the sixties I tried to get my hands on anything Alvin Roy wrote. The lifting methods and his training methodology made sense to me. I certainly was naive about the drug aspect of the training until I began training and competing for the decathlon in 1969. If you have access to a copy of Gilman and Roys book – “The San Diego Chargers Strength Program In and Out of Season” it is worth reading. (It is out of print) I religiously followed one of the programs in the book that helped a player gain 50 pounds of muscle and I lost five pounds! I was missing one ingredient 15 mg a day of Dianabol.  None the less as a young athlete interested in going into coaching the non drug lessons of the methodology were a big influence on my training ideas.

Ostrich Award

I have decided to institute a new award among the numerous awards given in sport. I am sure this sure will soon rival the ESPY’s in prestige. It will not be an annual but will be awarded more frequently to honor those who have buried their heads in the sand as deep as possible to avoid the most obvious of problems. The first winner is George Mitchell, that tireless anti- drug crusader who did his best to expose and eradicate drugs from professional baseball. Eleven months after his commission report here are his words: “There is an awareness of the problem and a focus on dealing with it,”  George you and your friend Bud Selig and all those fat cat owners need to wake up. The problem is there, but there is no problem if the people involved don’t admit there is a problem. Home run balls flying out of the park and 100 mph fastball draw fans. Asses on numbers make money. Get real this is entertainment not sport, right up there with WWF. If baseball was serious why did the club that was the epicenter of the drugs in baseball just rehire the strength and conditioning that was at ground zero during that whole period  and then was personal trainer for one of the biggest abusers? Hypocrisy!

Twenty Years Later

This article resonated with me. I was especially interested in the comments of Andy Higgins and Doug Clement, two coaches that I really respect.  I think this article summarizes the all the issues in a very succinct and concise manner.

Questions continue to surround sprinting

By BEVERLEY SMITH AND JAMES CHRISTIE , From Monday's Globe and Mail

September 21, 2008

Twenty years after Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson's epic drug disqualification at the Seoul Summer Olympics, the sport remains cloaked in skepticism.

Perhaps it's just fatigue after a rash of doping positives in the years since. Or innocence lost after Johnson's dramatic fall from grace.

“I'm not sure there has been an athlete so identified around the world with such glamour – before the positive test,” Canadian track coach Andy Higgins said.

That made the plunge all the more momentous.

Now, Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt could not rouse a crowd at the 2008 Beijing Olympics without a spectre of doubt hanging over the finish line.

Was he really clean? Could anybody so dominant – gold medals in both the men's 100- and 200-metre events, plus the 4x100 relay – really have run like that without chemical help?

It is Johnson's enduring legacy.

“I hate it,” Higgins said. “I'm essentially, by nature, an optimist. I have a positive view. … I am seriously pissed off because [tainted coaches and athletes] have made me to a degree a cynic.”

Higgins watched Bolt drop his arms 20 metres from the finish line during the 100-metre final in Beijing and still run 9.69 seconds.

“He's an immense talent. No discussion,” Higgins said. “He's 6-foot-5 and he comes out of the blocks like he's 5-foot-6. He doesn't get left in the blocks. Then, he runs away from them with that immense stride length and power. And he's completely innocent of whatever can create pressure.

“But all I have are questions.”

The questions surrounding Bolt “are a sad outcome” of the Johnson legacy, said Bruce Kidd, dean of the faculty of physical education and health at the University of Toronto.

“I like to give people the benefit of the doubt. I was electrified by his performance. But it is true that the prevalence of drugs in all aspects of society makes this a question in people's minds.”

Charlie Francis, the architect of Johnson's drug-supported training regime, said last week he believes drugs weren't the reason Bolt ran world-record times in Beijing. Rather, it is the Jamaican practice of training on grass surfaces, which is easier on joints and affects the connective tissue in a positive way.

“Now, it's not my job to speculate who is doing what,” Francis said. “I'm sufficiently satisfied that the playing field is level, enough to enjoy watching races at the highest level.”

Does that mean Francis, once known as Charlie the Chemist, thinks sprinters are clean now? Or that no athlete is lacking of chemical assistance? What does it mean to be on a level playing field now?

Francis said during the federally ordered Dubin inquiry into doping that Johnson had to take steroids to remain on a level playing field with the rest of the athletes. And six of the eight Seoul 100-metre finalists were eventually pegged with drug infractions of some sort, causing experts to call it “the dirtiest race in history.”

“Sick. Shallow,” Higgins said of the drive to get onto “a level playing field.”

Higgins was the only Canadian track coach to show up outside the athletes village in Seoul wearing the team uniform the morning after Johnson's positive test. The rest of them didn't want to deal with the media.

He told the media that Johnson's positive test wasn't a sport issue, but a values issue. Athletes should be directed to learn solid values, Higgins said, so the effort to be your best holds the most meaning and that solid values serve you for the rest of your life.

Johnson didn't learn those values in the race to win at all costs, Higgins said, and he sees Johnson's story as a tragedy.

“He was a young man who was used by a very smart man [Francis] for his own ego purposes, and he'd been taken advantage of,” Higgins said. “That should never have happened.”

One of the resulting tragedies of the Dubin inquiry is that people see Johnson as the bad guy and Francis as the good guy for revealing truths about the drug culture in track, Higgins said. In his mind, however, Francis deserves to be held responsible.

In the end, Johnson has come through with questionable values, like the cult of celebrity. “He has nowhere to go,” Higgins said.

He said Johnson's demise has affected sport twofold in the two decades since:

*It has cost the sport in Canada immensely in terms of financial support and limited the opportunities for track athletes that followed.

*It has cost the sport credibility and turned people into cynics.

But it wasn't just Johnson's positive test that caused it, Higgins said. It was the ensuing Dubin inquiry, which featured Francis's revelations.

“Charles Dubin became fascinated by Charlie's bright mind,” Higgins said. “And the man is very bright. He has strong opinions, tons of them related to justifying what he did. And that kept getting aired. It was an amazing public seminar on doping. … It gave Charlie a forum.”

After the hearings, the doping hotlines in Canada and the United States lit up, with athletes asking for confirmation of what they had heard – so they could use the information for themselves.

“It added to the justification in a lot of people's minds that the only way to the top was to take drugs,” Higgins said. “It missed the entire point, which was … that it was cheating.”

Only he and fellow coach Doug Clement used the word “cheating” in their testimonies, Higgins said. “It didn't get clearly defined, because the justifiers have all kinds of other words.”

He says he has not seen a huge positive impact from the Dubin inquiry in Canada. The World Anti-Doping Agency wasn't born for another 10 years, until after the Festina cycling scandal, when a manager was found with large quantities of doping products in a team car on the France-Belgium border.

Kidd thinks that, with the efforts of WADA, drug use is less prevalent today in sport, although during the years after the Johnson positive, other countries were “just sweeping doping under the carpet.” Now, he says, there is a very strong worldwide consensus that doping is “antithetical to the value of sport and should be strongly policed.”

Higgins is not so sure track and field is as tough as it should be on the doping issue.

“There's too much money to be made on world records,” he said.

He questions the move by the governing International Association of Athletics Federations on tagging seven female middle-distance runners with doping infractions just before the Beijing Games, to send a message to any Olympic competitor considering cheating.

But why not target sprinters, who are the major marketing attraction at any event?

“Would it be smart for a huge sport to go in and create a scandal, and destroy illusions one more time?” he pointed out.

In the 20 years after Seoul, it's become clear not all infractions were made public.

Former Canadian high-jumper Milt Ottey says Johnson was used “as a scapegoat” for a dirty track scene “and the IAAF knew it at the time.”

“My suspicion was that a lot of Americans were caught but that was squashed,” Ottey said. “[The IAAF] had a chance to make a real statement, but they let it be believed it was a single event … it was Ben. Now, anyone who does anything great is suspected. That's sad.”

Asked if anything has changed, Ottey says people are now more tolerant of performance enhancement. “I think the public is more understanding of the Ben Johnson incident, though, and they think it's time to forget and go on.”

Angella Issajenko, Canada's fastest female sprinter who never tested positive but admitted to drug use at the Dubin inquiry, has always said Johnson's treatment following the doping scandal was unfair.

“He didn't sodomize somebody's child, come on, he took … stanazolol a few days a week; big deal,” she said.

Kidd said sport never had innocence, embedded in society as a whole.

“Sport is always thought to create a high moral standard,” he said, adding Johnson's positive test was a reminder that it didn't.

Higgins said Johnson blasted an illusion of innocence. In reality, coaches and athletes knew about rampant doping in the days and years before the infamous test result.

“You knew that the Eastern Bloc was into it,” he said. “You knew what you were competing against.”

Now, Higgins says, there are more than a few people performing at the highest levels that are starting “to get very nervous,” but what remains of the former Eastern Bloc hasn't changed. However, he still sees too many suspicious things.

“The human physiology just cannot do the work needed to perform at the highest levels and stay there week after week through an unbelievably long season,” he said. “It's not possible.”

Sadly, the Ben Johnson-born cynicism is just one more aspect of a huge all-pervasive cynicism about almost anything, Higgins says.