Athletics: McColgan: 'Drugs in high places': Norman Fox reports on a former champion's outburst over drug cheats

BRITISH athletics, already low on credibility after this summer's succession of positive dope tests, was yesterday dealt another blow when, on the eve of her first serious race for 17 months, Liz McColgan, the former world 10,000m champion, claimed that 'a lot' of Britain's athletes were taking drugs. She accused the sport's administration of making scapegoats out of 'little people' while not tackling those 'who may have friends in high places'.

After a long struggle against injury, McColgan this morning runs in the BUPA Great Midland 10km race in Coventry, but while delighted to be making a comeback, she fears that the sport at top level is prey to cheats. 'The drugs problem has been bad for the sport, but I'm really glad some people have been caught. But there are a lot more that are doing it, and everybody just turns a blind eye. I think it's about time that the authorities didn't just take one little person and say 'there's an example' but cleaned out the sport completely. If that means taking a drugs test every day, I would do it because the people who have been taking drugs should be wiped off the face of the earth.

'A lot of people say you've got to take drugs but it's not true. People like me who are clean and have done a lot of work are now doubted and that's not right. I'd like to see blood tests; get the sport clean completely so that nobody can pull the wool over our eyes.' McColgan added that the problem in Britain was 'much more serious' than people realised and was so bad all over the world that there might just as well be two Olympic athletics competitions - 'one for clean and one for druggies'.

McColgan is far from convinced that British athletics' claim to be a victim of its own honesty over drugs is valid. 'I don't think we've been as honest as we should have been. I don't believe we are leading the way as a lot of people tend to think we are. But at least we're getting results and we are not scared to say who has done what. But I still think it's a long way from what it should be.'

Although McColgan herself has been tested only once in seven years (which she considers insufficient), she tends to think that among the leading athletes it is 'only people who are clean that get tested and you know there are people who are doing it but they never seem to get caught. Friends in high places or whatever, but they're getting away with it.'

McColgan is deeply suspicious of the past year's sudden extraordinary performances by Chinese athletes. Although the president of the International Olympic Committee, Juan Antonio Samaranch, said recently that he believed the Chinese were 'clean', McColgan is not only sceptical, but dismisses their times as being too exceptional to be achieved unaided by stimulants. Her own best time for the 10,000m distance on the track would now leave her about a lap behind the best Chinese, but she says, 'I don't look to their results at all because to me they are not reality; they shouldn't be considered as world leaders, they are turning the sport into a farce. There will be an improvement in the clean athletes' performances but they will never ever run 29 minutes for 10,000m as the Chinese have done.'

So, if she is so disillusioned, why is she attempting to return at the age of 30 to top-class competition with the aim of Olympic marathon gold in two years' time? 'I just believe that I have never achieved all that I'm capable of achieving,' she says. Her most recent knee and toe injuries have been the latest in a series of setbacks that prompted an American surgeon to advise that she should never run again. What she now accepts is that the knee problem also gave her a chance 'to get healthy again'. Her punishing training regime from her teenage years eventually caught up with her, but for a long time she would not admit it. Yesterday she confessed: 'I just trained harder and harder and had been very lucky with injuries but eventually the body breaks down when you go overboard, and that's what I did.'

Her ambition today is simply to finish ('there's no way I'm going to drop out') but a time of less than 33 minutes would please her enormously and set her back on course after reducing her training mileage to 90 to 100 miles a week. That reduced mileage may allow her to fulfil her Olympic marathon ambition without further injuries, but for today she will simply enjoy the edge of real competition after months of lonely training.

She welcomes the fact that the women in the Coventry race compete alongside the men, who include the Kenyan former London Marathon winner Douglas Wakiihuri and the fastest Briton over 10km this season, Paul Evans.

(Photograph omitted)