Sport will pass this test

Why should they believe in a sport which, two months ago, offered us the fastest woman on the planet, Kelli White, at the world championships and then found she had taken a performance enhancer she claimed was treatment for an illness, narcolepsy, which nobody knew she had?

Why should they believe in a sport in which another American, Jerome Young, wins the Paris 400m title before it's revealed that he was the mystery American Olympic gold medallist whose positive drugs test, given before the Sydney Olympics, was covered up by US officials?

Why should we have any faith in a sport that may tell us over the next few weeks, following retests of hundreds of samples given at the world and US championships, that two dozen, maybe more, international stars may have also failed tests in what may yet prove sport's widest doping scandal?

The answer is that we must have faith. We must still believe it is possible-for athletes to run faster, jump higher and throw further than anyone else without recourse to the laboratory. Out there, we have to believe, are performers who will never give up trying to beat the world without drugs.

Of course, the cynicism surrounding the sprint world is hardest to dispel. The sport changed the moment Ben Johnson's world 100m record at the Seoul Olympics in 1988 was revealed to be chemically assisted. Nothing has had the power to shock in the same way since.

It has often been bandied around that sprinters must take drugs just to compete on a level playing field, yet watching Kim Collins, a whippet-thin man from the island of St Kitts, racing to the world 100m title recently appeared to give a lie to that. His diet, he said, was little training, no vitamins, no weights and plenty of idling. There was no reason to doubt his assertion that it was all down to natural talent.

Just as there has never been any reason to doubt that someone like Jonathan Edwards, the greatest triple jumper ever, was clean. For Edwards, you can read a host of British athletes who have delivered success while being consistently tested.

Athletics is going to be dragged through the mud again for the latest find. It always is. Its image has probably sunk lower than it has ever done.

Yet, while the sport does not always get it right, it never stops trying to unearth the cheats. It has found, belatedly, a way of devising a test for THG, to catch up with those who thought they were a step ahead, and it ought to be congratulated for that.

What other sport, for instance, possesses a figure like our own Paula Radcliffe, perhaps the greatest distance runner in history, who actually leads a campaign to drive out the cheats, who has stood at the side of the track highlighting the injustice of a runner who shouldn't have been competing because she'd failed a test for EPO?

Radcliffe has had to put up with utterly unfounded rumours from France about her own improvement being due to more than hard work and she has volunteered to be tested anywhere, any time.

If you believe that it is not possible to beat the world without drugs, you must look at Paula. She remains the sport's guiding light. If she ever tested positive, it would be time to give up on the sport forever.

Yet as long as there are athletes like her around - and there are - we still have to believe.